PeopleDB Zapier integrationAutomate PeopleDB with Zapier.
The PeopleDB Zapier integration comes with 0 triggers, 0 actions and 1 search. It cannot start a Zap: it sits inside one, takes a LinkedIn or GitHub identifier you already have, and hands back the person's contact details to the next step.
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What PeopleDB brings to a prospecting Zap
PeopleDB is a contact data service: from a professional identifier, it finds how to reach the person. On Zapier it offers a single search, Find Person, that you place in the middle of a Zap so the steps after it receive emails, phone numbers and social profiles you did not have.
A prospect list that fills its own gaps. Each time a LinkedIn profile lands in your sheet, Find Person looks it up and the next step writes the contact details back into the row.
Developer outreach from GitHub. The same search accepts a GitHub username or numeric ID, which suits teams who recruit or sell to engineers and start from their public code accounts.
CRM records worth calling. Put the search between a form or a list tool and your CRM, and the contact arrives with an email and a phone number instead of a bare profile link.
Once the Zap is published, nobody copies anything by hand: the lookup runs inside each run and the next step gets the result directly.
What Zapier does not do here: PeopleDB has no trigger and no action on Zapier. It cannot start a Zap, and it cannot save or change anything. Another app always opens the Zap and another app receives the result.
To place Zapier among the alternatives, see Make vs Zapier and n8n vs Zapier.
Zapier terms, in plain English
Seven words carry this page. Here is each of them, once.
- Zap
- The automation you build on Zapier: one trigger, then one or more steps that run every time the trigger event happens.
- Trigger
- The event in an app that starts the Zap. PeopleDB has none, so the Zap always opens on another app.
- Action
- What the Zap does once started: the step that writes, sends or moves something, such as filling a row with the details found.
- Task
- The unit Zapier bills: one action your Zap completes successfully. Your plan's count is a count of those.
- Search step
- A step that looks up something that already exists and passes what it found to the steps after it. Find Person is one.
- Filter
- A step that lets the Zap go on only when what arrived meets your condition, and stops it otherwise.
- Multi-step Zap
- Any Zap beyond one trigger and one action. A search or a filter makes one, and it then needs a paid plan.
What a PeopleDB Zap costs
PeopleDB is not a premium app on Zapier. What drives the cost is the shape of the Zap: a search step always makes it multi-step.
- Trigger0 tasks
- Each successful action1 task
- Free plan100 tasks a month, two-step Zaps
- Zap with a searchMulti-step, paid plan
The free plan gives 100 tasks a month and builds two-step Zaps only, one trigger and one action. A Zap that uses Find Person therefore needs a paid plan. Each action that succeeds counts as one task, one that fails does not, and a few apps or actions take more than one task. The trigger never costs anything. The grid below applies to the trigger of the app that opens the Zap, when it is a polling one.
Connect PeopleDB to Zapier
- 01
Go to your connections
Open the Apps page of your Zapier account and click + Add connection. A connection is your PeopleDB account linked once, then reused by every step that calls PeopleDB.
- 02
Select PeopleDB
Search for PeopleDB in the dialog, pick it and click Add connection. You need an existing PeopleDB account; the connection does not open one for you.
- 03
Sign in and allow access
Sign in to PeopleDB in the tab that opens, then grant Zapier access to the account. Find Person can then use this connection in any Zap you build, with no further setup.
Your first Zap: complete each new prospect row
GoalEach new row with a LinkedIn slug in your prospect sheet is looked up in PeopleDB, then the same row receives the contact details found.
- 01
Choose what starts the Zap
Create a Zap and pick the spreadsheet app with its new-row event as the trigger. PeopleDB cannot start a Zap, so this first step always belongs to another app.
- 02
Test the trigger
Run the test: Zapier brings back the three most recent rows of the sheet. Pick a real one that carries a profile slug, so the lookup can be tested on actual data.
- 03
Add Find Person
Add a step, choose PeopleDB and Find Person. Set Look Up By to the LinkedIn public identifier and map the slug column into Identifier.
- 04
Write the result back
Add the spreadsheet's update action, point it at the same row and map the email and phone returned by the search into their columns. That action counts as one task.
- 05
Test and publish
Test each step once and read what came back, then publish the Zap to switch it on. For a guided tour of the editor, there is the Zapier training.
The PeopleDB search
1 search step looks for data that already exists in PeopleDB, so a later step can use it.
Find Person is a search step. In the editor it sits at the bottom of the action-event list, under the SEARCH heading. How exact the identifier has to be is decided by PeopleDB, not by Zapier. Three settings decide what happens when the lookup does not return a single clean result.
Find Person
SearchIn Zapier“Looks up contact information (email addresses, phone numbers, and social profiles) for a person using a professional profile identifier.”
Give it a professional identifier and it returns how to reach that person: email addresses, phone numbers and social profiles. You choose the kind of identifier in Look Up By, between LinkedIn slug, LinkedIn numeric ID, GitHub username and GitHub numeric ID.
The three settings every search exposes
- Successful if no search results are found?Left on its default, a search that finds nothing stops the Zap there and the steps that relied on it are skipped. Switched on, the Zap carries on without contact details.
- Create X if it doesn't exist yet?This box turns a search into a find-or-create. PeopleDB offers no find-or-create variant on Zapier: Find Person only reads, it never creates a record.
- If multiple search results are found?Three ways out when several items match: keep the first one (the default), stop the Zap, or pass all of them on at once.
When a PeopleDB Zap breaks
Zapier attaches no help article to PeopleDB, so the cases below come from the search's own fields and from the general traps of a search-based Zap.
Most failures start with what is mapped into Identifier, not with PeopleDB itself. When a run goes wrong and you need a method, the Zapier troubleshooting page walks through one.
A full link in the Identifier field
For LinkedIn, the field wants only the slug at the end of the profile address. A complete URL mapped from your sheet gives the search nothing it can match.No match ends the run
On its default setting, a search that finds nothing stops the Zap, so the row is never updated. Turn the setting on if the next steps should run anyway.Look Up By and the value disagree
If Look Up By says GitHub username and the column holds a LinkedIn slug, the search looks in the wrong place. Keep each Zap on one kind of identifier.Rows added earlier stay empty
A Zap only reacts to what happens after it is switched on. Prospects already in the sheet are not looked up; completing them is a separate job.
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