Recently, I’ve taken on some additional tasks at work. Chief among them has been reaching out to users for interviews—I ask them about pain points and favorite features, record the sessions, and then write up notes.

The start of every one of those sessions, however, is emailing a user to see if they’d be interested in talking to me. It only took sending a few of those (basically identical) emails for me to wonder if I could automate the process—it turns out I can.

I’ve written a bit of Python that takes a first name, last name, email address, and company name for a user. It then substitutes that information into a stock email script, sends the email through Mandrill, and makes a card on a Trello board containing the user’s name and company (to which I’m assigned as a member). It uses Trolly (a Python wrapper for Trello) and Mandrill’s official Python wrapper.

I’ve uploaded a Gist of the script here (you can ever see the script that I use for the emails): interview-request.py. Continue reading →