September 25, 2026
A 95-Step Zap Won Me a Trophy. My Newest Zapier Workflow Has Zero Steps.
Project Phoenix, a 95-step Zap, earned Zapier's 2025 Automation Hero of the Year. This month I built a Zapier workflow with no steps at all: an agent on a schedule, a saved Zapier MCP skill, and four connections that brief me every weekday morning. Both are right. Here is how to tell which one you need.
Zapier gave me an award for the longest Zap anyone will admit to
In September 2025 Zapier named me Automation Hero of the Year at the Zappy Awards, for Project Phoenix. Their customer story walks through it. A salesperson types three things into a form: business name, URL, location. Zapier pulls from Semrush, Ahrefs, Google, and WHOIS. AI reads the prospect's SEO, brand presence, reviews, ads, and even whether the photos on their listings match what they sell. Out comes a Looker Studio report with benchmarks, a competitor breakdown, and recommendations. Ninety-five steps.
The stack inside it: Zapier Tables for memory, Paths for decisions, Code by Zapier for the parts that needed Python, Webhooks, AI by Zapier, ChatGPT, Google Sheets, and Apify for the scraping. Our Director of IT, Jeff Lang, told Zapier that "Phoenix started as a conversation with ChatGPT." Every automation starts as a conversation. Most of them should stay one. This one got 95 steps and a trophy.
The competitor half is the part people underestimate
The prospect report is the part everyone sees. The part that earns the step count is what happens next. Phoenix takes the client's address, gets exact coordinates from Google Maps, searches the top keywords for that industry from that spot, and then runs a Python step that throws out the national directories. Yelp and Angi are not your competitor. They are the parking lot your competitor is standing in.
What survives is the top five local competitors, and each one gets the same deep dive: SEO, PPC, Meta ads, Google Business Profile, reviews. If a competitor outranks the client on SEO, Phoenix drafts a 1,500-word post on the keywords they are winning. If a competitor is running ads that work, it writes ad copy to answer them. Jeff called it "a pre-sales consultant in a box," which is generous to consultants, most of whom do not come with a box.
Zapier's writeup has the outcomes: prep time from hours to minutes, website content three times faster, web development on new projects cut from four weeks to two, and a 282-person company scaling without growing engineering. A long Zap is not a flex. It is every judgment call a good salesperson used to make in their head, written down, in order, done the same way every time. The length is the documentation.
My newest Zapier workflow has zero steps
This week I set up a weekday brief for my agency, Local Howl. At 7 AM Central it reads my calendar, my inbox, the open HubSpot deals, and the website leads sheet, then emails me what matters. There is no Zap. An agent wakes up on a schedule, connects to Zapier MCP, loads a saved Zapier skill that pins exactly which Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, and HubSpot connections to use, and does the reading and the writing itself.
The steps did not disappear. They moved into the model's head. Depending on how you feel about your inbox, that is either progress or the first ten minutes of a horror movie.
The pinned connections are the part I would not skip. The agent gets my business Google account and nothing else, because a brief that helpfully summarizes the wrong inbox is a very efficient way to have an awkward morning.
Steps when it has to be the same every time. Tools when it needs judgment.
Phoenix has to produce the same report, in the same order, for every lead, because salespeople compare them and clients act on them. When something goes wrong you need to point at step 61 and say that one. A path you can draw belongs in a Zap. Paths by Zapier is literally a drawing of a decision.
The morning brief is different every day. Which email matters is a judgment, and a 95-step Zap that tries to decide which of my emails are important would be 95 wrong opinions in a trench coat. A job you have to explain rather than draw belongs to an agent with tools.
The combination is where it gets good. Keep anything that touches money or customers as a Zap the agent calls, so the judgment stays upstream and the execution stays boring. The agent decides. The Zap does. Nobody improvises with the invoice.
Zapier stopped being a pipe and started being a toolbox
Phoenix also runs on scraped data, and that part of the story is in what 283 Apify actors taught me. The version of this lesson with a 40-minute timeout in it is the Make piece.
A year ago the best thing you could build in Zapier was a long, careful Zap. Now it is also a short, careful list of what an agent is allowed to touch. I still build both. I also built a Quake tribute site to Zapier where manual workflows get gibbed, which is not advice. It is just what happens when you give an operator a trophy.