[Introduction thread] Please introduce yourself and tell us how you use Text Blaze

[Dan_Barak1]

Hi everyone!
The Text Blaze community is growing fast and it would be great to know a little more about the people behind the profile picture

Please take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself and tell us about how you use Text Blaze. Feel free to use the following questions as prompts (but anything goes):

1. Tell us a little about yourself

• What's your name?
• Where are you located?
• What do you do for work?
• Interesting fact about yourself
• If you like us to follow you on social media, please feel free to share links.

2. How do you use Text Blaze?

• What type of messages do you write using Text Blaze?
• In which tools / apps do you typically use it?
• Do you collaborate with others?
• What commands do you use often?

(Optional) If you have an interesting snippet to share with the community, please add one as well.
To do that:

1. Make sure that there's no sensitive information in the snippet (or create a sanitized version of it)
2. Share a copy of the snippet publicly (for instructions, see the animation below)
3. Add the link of the public snippet to your post

[Dan_Barak1]

I'll go first

My name is Dan. I live in Sunnyvale, California with my wife, two kids, and a dog (Simba) (picture below).
I'm Text Blaze's co-founder and CEO.

To follow Text Blaze (or me) on social media:

Channel	Text Blaze		Personal
Twitter	@text_blaze		@dan_barak
Facebook	textblaze		dan.barak
LinkedIn	text-blaze		barakdan
YouTube	Text Blaze
Email	support@blaze.today		dan@blaze.today

Instagram and TikTok coming soon

How I use Text Blaze
I use Text Blaze in a wide range of activities - support (e.g., to respond to common questions), recruiting (for personalized outreach at scale), account management, and sales. I mostly use it in Gmail and LinkedIn.

At Text Blaze, we collaborate on some of our snippets, especially those that are used to communicate with users at scale, but most of the snippets that I use on daily basis tend to be personal. I will sometimes share my personal snippets with @scott and the rest of the team to get their thoughts and feedback.

In addition to our new Gmail and LinkedIn command packs, I tend to use form fields (text boxes, dropdowns, and toggles) to create templates that I can personalize in real-time. This recruiting email is a good example (click on the link to see a preview):

Copy of Snippet "email full-stack engineer"

Text Blaze recruiting email {formtext: name=first name} - Be a Full Stack Engineer @ Text Blaze (YC W'21){key: tab}Hi {formtext: name=first name},  My name is Dan and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Text Blaze. {formparagraph: name=personal message; default=I wanted to reach out in person because you seem like the perfect fit for Text Blaze.; cols=40; rows=2}. Based on your {note}{formmenu: name=profile; multiple=yes; LinkedIn; AngelList; default=Work@Startup; Hacker News; GitHub}{endnote}{=join…

Sometimes I get fancy and create more complex snippets to address my needs, but then I typically get excited and share them here...

Here's Simba:

Dan

[Diego_Suancha]

Hey Text Blaze community.

I am Diego and I live in Bogota, Colombia. Currently I work for customer service industry and I have to send tons of emails and chats every day.

An interesting fact about myself is that Text Blaze is always remembering me that I can only have 40 folders active at each time jajaja

How I use Text Blaze

I use Text Blaze to craft the emails and chats in Salesforce, also I have some snippets that help me tracking my numbers over the day since our own tool is a little bit messy. (I am going to share one example of snippet that I use for one email).

In fact the tracking snippet that I made is the one that our team uses to keep an eye on all teams productivity.

I love to mix commands, over all the {site} + {clipboard} + {if} and {Regex} commands.

Here is a snippet that depending on your clipboard contents, select the posible outcome for each case, please have the info with the square brackets copied in your Clipboard before checking the snippet.

1. To see the first case: ["$100", "Pepe", "Friday", "Complete", "basic"]
2. To see the second case: ["$100", "Pepe", "Friday", "Waiting", "basic"]
3. To see the third case: ["$100", "Pepe", "Friday", "Waiting", "VIP"]

Copy of Snippet "Payment Example"

Example of snippet that uses clipboard contents to select possible outcomes. Hi Customer, Diego from support here, it is a pleasure to assist you. I see how important it is for you to get this issue resolved and I am more than happy to look into this for you. {if:{clipboard}[4] == "Complete"}After taking a look into your account, I can confirm that this {={clipboard}[1]} payment was successfully sent to {={clipboard}[2]} on {={clipboard}[3]}. To help me cancel the payment to, I need the foll…

I hope that I can help you here and feel free to reach me out if you have any issue.

Regards,
Diego.

[Brad_Hedinger]

Hello Blazers!

My name is Brad Hedinger. I live and work in the Orlando, FL area for Full Sail University. October 2021 will be my 14th year with Full Sail, although I have been involved with Full Sail in various other ways since about the age of 17. My wife Dana and I have a 7 yr old daughter, Ashlyn, and 2 puppies, Smoky & Taffy. My passion is playing bass guitar and I have been at it for 30 years now! Wow does that make me feel old (42)! I play all genres of music but have quite the affinity for funk and alternative. Aside from playing bass, I have a gift of impressions and love doing impressions of friends, family, co-workers, and some celebrities.

On the business front, my official title is "Online Student Liaison". However, over the past several years I have taken on a full time concentration in digital communications with our students, specifically leveraging technology to more efficiently connect with out students to support them. I also spend the majority of my time managing internal SharePoint knowledgebases and enhancing our processes to put people first. That's my mantra, "People over process". It's the little things like within internal communications, NEVER referring to a student as "the student", but rather using their actual name. I believe it starts there. Over the past couple years, Text Blaze has an essential tool in how my team serves students. It started with my mission to unify our teams messaging and voice so as to bring consistency to how we serve students and colleagues. Along with revamping our internal tools in effort to remove the same info residing in multiple places, we have used Text Blaze to automate processes within Salesforce. We use it to ensure case subjects and descriptions are updated with consistent formatting, correct drop-down menu selections and comment templates, etc.

In Addition to Text Blaze, Salesforce and a few proprietary platforms, I also use Slack and Microsoft 365 products such as Power Automate, SharePoint, Excel, Word, Planner, Stream, Lists, Outlook, etc. There is a lot of collaboration in my work world; it is absolutely essential. At the same time, I am given a tremendous amount of autonomy in managing my workflow, projects, etc.

Specifically regarding how I use Text Blaze, I have really focused almost exclusively on leveraging the AutoPilot features combined with inserting text templates and time calculations within the snippet commands. It may seem rather simple, but that's okay; the most important thing is using a tool the right way for the needs of the user(s). I think all too often, tools are deployed because the features are cool, although those features may not be fully in line with the needs. At this point, we are using Text Blaze exactly how we need to use it. Don't get me wrong though - there is a lot more potential for how we can use it in our workflows, but we'll get there!

So there is a little glimpse into my world - I hope that helps! Feel welcome to message me anytime within Text Blaze, email, phone or social media. Here's my info.

Text Blaze Profile: https://community.blaze.today/u/brad_hedinger
Email: bhedinger@fullsail.edu
Phone/SMS: 407.618.3399
Facebook: https://facebook.com/bradhedinger
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/bradhedinger

Happy Blazing!
-Brad (and Smoky & Taffy )

[martinhgps]

Hi, Thank you for inviting me to this group.
My name is Martin Hogg from Argentina. I´m 53 years old. Live with my spouse and 5 children.
I´m in the Preventive Medicine market (sales)

I use TB to fill my customer data base, mails, linkedin and so on.
I´m trying to improve my skills using TB to grab data from potencial clients in webpages (List of doctors, etc etc)

Whatsapp /Phone +5491164167544 / +1305 600 2494
Hope to be helpfull to the group
Blessings

[Peter_Monterubio]

Hello everyone!

My name is Peter Monterubio. I live in St. Louis, Missouri with my one kiddo and partner and our lazy old dog Robert. I work for the Customer Operations side of Cash App for Square. Across our Org we use TextBlaze in a variety of ways, but on Customer Operations we utilize it more heavily than any other division. Our frontline advocates use it to format internal escalations to provide formatting and quality control. Our higher level support tiers use it’s advanced form features and urlload capabilities to retrieve data and provide clearance checks and pre-fill custom responses.

We have a great crew of creative people that like to push it to the limits and I’m super excited to see what comes in the future of TextBlaze!

Robert with a friend of his:

[Cedric_Debono_Blaze]

Hey everyone!

My name is Cedric and I'm reponsible for Support and Community in Text Blaze. I also produce and voice most of the tutorial videos you see on our channel.

I live on a tiny island called Malta (south of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea) with my wife, son and two cats.

I'm also a bass player and enjoy a number of other hobbies.

I first found Text Blaze when I was looking for a tool to templatize copywriting deliverables (I'm actually a SaaS copywriter by profession). Within 30mins of discovering Text Blaze, I became completely obsessed with it and upgraded to Pro.

Soon after, I began communicating on a regular basis with @scott, pestering him with all sorts of questions on how to do stuff with Text Blaze. Some time later, I joined the team and here we are

Text Blaze has saved me an incalculable amount of time and frustration, which is why you see me so enthusiastic about it. I want our community to get that same feeling of relief that I get from ridding myself of tedious and repetitive stuff, especially when I have a deadline breathing down my neck.

I've used Text Blaze for all sorts of stuff, from producing 24-page documents with different variations of copy deliverables, to calculating time zones, to breaking up audio scripts into Youtube subtitles, and even creating a snippet that simulates human typing for when I shoot videos — which is what I'd lilke to share with you. Here it is:

{note: preview=no}
{content=extractregexall({clipboard}, "[\w\s\W]")}

{endnote}{repeat: for i in (seq(1, count(content)))}{wait: delay={random-number: min=0.01; max=0.05; rounded=no}s}{=content[i]}{endrepeat}

[malachi.schafer]

Hello everyone!

My name is Malachi Schafer and I am from Southern California! I currently work for DoorDash as a Dasher Support Labs Agent, and TextBlaze has been a huge help at my job.

I use snippets for the chats I get to give quick and clean responses to our Dashers. I also use snippets to provide notes on my chats, as well as quick look ups for links and resources. We mainly use TextBlaze in Salesforce, but we also sometimes use them in Documents. I am still learning many ways TextBlaze can make my day to day life at work better!

I cannot wait to see what is in store for the future of TextBlaze and how it will make my work life easier!

Thank you,
Malachi Schafer

[Sean_P_O_MacCath-Mor]

Greetings Gang!

My name is Sean Patrick Ocheese MacCath-Moran, and I live in the most beautiful place on earth, which is of course Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I'm a programmer analyst by trade, focusing on LAMP stack dev, primarily in back-end Drupal these days. As an interesting fact, I'll mention that I'm presently building a boat that will sail, motor, or row, having never attempted any such thing before and having never worked with fiberglass; it's a 10 foot nesting dingy (i.e. it breaks in two and stacks into itself).

I use Text Blaze in three contexts. The primary one is in my online activism, which primarily happens on facebook. I engage conversations on animals rights quite a bit, and have a slew of ready-made responses to common questions, most of which need very little tweaking to fit a given situation. The second in generating invoice reply emails (in gmail) to my local bulk-orders group; my spouse and I organize a bulk foods order from multiple local vendors for our community. The third is at work, where I have a few regular group emails to generate providing details on our weekly server pushes (also in gmail).

I don't collaborate with others yet via text blaze, but I'm considering opening my activism snippets up for public use.

I can't say that I use one particular command more than others per se. The one I enjoy using most is {repeat} though, which I use to good effect by way of taking advantage of its variable scoping rules.

For a snippet, I'll share one that's included in pretty much all of my snippets; it attempts to auto detect what format to use based on the current domain, and failing that provides a dropdown to select the format to use. This is included in other snippets, which then output different content based on the format.

Copy of Snippet "Blaze Format"

Attempts to auto detect format to use based on domain, and failing that provides a dropdown to select the format to use. This is included in other snippets that then output different content based on the format. {note}{if:{site:domain}=="www.reddit.com"}{format="reddit"}{elseif:{site:domain}=="www.facebook.com"}{format="markup"}{else}{formmenu: name=format;default=text;reddit;markup}{endif}{endnote: trim=yes}

[log62000]

Hello everyone! I'm excited to collaborate with everyone and learn more about how best to use Text Blaze. I am currently located in Denver, Colorado and I work for Redfin, the real estate company. I love to play guitar and I try to sing although I'm no Frank Sinatra.

Since I am in a quasi sales role, I use Text Blaze mostly to follow up with my customers. It has saved me loads of time and with the pro version, I've been able to create Text Blazes that allow me to personalize my messages. I also like to use Zapier to automate a lot of my scheduling. I don't really collaborate with anyone although I've shared all of my TBs with my team. I love the paste and date/time commands. I always know when I've followed up with a customer which makes my life super easy. We also take a lot of notes and paste them in different fields in our internal software so needless to say it's been a godsend! I'd say my favorite snippet is one that automatically fills out my Google calendar invitations (Copy of Snippet "CashOffer calendar "RedfinNow Cash Offer"")

Thanks again for the invite and I'm super excited to join the MVP team!

[Cedric_Debono_Blaze]

@log62000

I love to play guitar

Pics of the guitar or we don't believe you

Here are mine

[Santa_Laren]

That dual fret/fretless bass is awesome! I haven't played electric guitar in over a decade. I just fingerpick and strum acoustic guitar mainly now. No pic now, but maybe I'll share one later.

[log62000]

That is a sweeeet bass!

[Cedric_Debono_Blaze]

Cheers @Santa_Laren - It's a co-design between Emmett Chapman (of the Chapman Stick) and Ned Steinberger. It's an absolute pleasure to play it.

[Cedric_Debono_Blaze]

@log62000 - nice!

[Santa_Laren]

I don't have a picture of my acoustic handy. It's a 2003 Blueridge dreadnaught.

Here is a watercolor that I did that I superimposed and alpha blended a picture of the guitars that I had at that time. There is a classical (no idea of the brand) A 1987 Fender Squire Telecaster (Japanese) and my Blueridge. I had to leave the classical and electric behind when I moved from Alaska. My nephew has the electric.

I will get my bio done here soon! Promise..

[Cedric_Debono_Blaze]

@Santa_Laren - gorgeous instruments.

And there you have it—musicians hijacked the thread. Sorry @Dan_Barak1

[Dan_Barak1]

I was just thinking that, based on this thread, we may want to change our name to Guitar Blaze

[Santa_Laren]

[unhijackingpost]
Hi! I am Laren Eggleston. I live in the Salt Lake City Utah area. I am currently working for DoorDash in Dasher Support. ( @malachi.schafer ).
I was born, raised and lived most of my life in Alaska.

I use Text Blaze for work for chats and case notes in Salesforce, messages in Slack. I use it personally for Facebook and FB Messenger.
I collaborate a little with @malachi.schafer as we are in the same team.
I like to create forms and if statements. I'm getting better at some of the other commands. I have found TB to be extremely powerful and useful.

I do have 2 chihuahuas but couldn't find a good picture of them. Instead, here is my Grandpets. Tallahassee (dog) and Memphis. They live in Tennessee with my Daughter Whitney.

[Brad_Hedinger]

Okay - My turn for guitar pics! Well, basses and a couple guitars. Here are my girls!