I’m a web developer, no, an actual web developer (I literally do 100% of all of the code for my platform, from scratch). So I’m highly technical. I’m here learning Manychat to help a client. I’ve learned two critical things I think most people should know when first starting out.

First - Manychat is not setup to be a single-automation to fulfill all of your needs. Each automation gets a single THEN connection. So in order to allow people to type “contact”, “human”, “appointment" etc a any point I had to create a dedicated automation for contact. Then everywhere there is an existing flow I can always call that automation. So forcing multiple parts in to a single automation simply does not work. Once you figure this out it makes Manychat much less clunky. Though I do not recall seeing anyone clarify that.

Secondly - When using Google Sheets integration never use INSERT! I do raw database work and you can’t UPDATE a record that doesn’t exist. If someone keeps filling out the same form it will result in a bunch of odd/half/mostly empty rows. You might have 50 contacts but 200 rows in some odd examples. With Manychat you should always use UPDATE which will automatically (internally) INSERT a new row if it doesn’t find the row but still UPDATE it if it does find the specified row. So don’t use INSERT for Google Sheets!

It took me most of the week to get the basics down but I’m starting to get the hang of it. Hopefully someone will find my post helpful.