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🚀 Get Started🎓 Step-by-Step Tutorials1. Your First Workflow

1. Quickstart: Your First Workflow

About five minutes. By the end of this page you will have built an automation, all inside Glow. It runs on a schedule, asks AI to write something, and shows you what it wrote.

You need nothing but a Glow account. No apps to connect, no command line, no code.

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What you will learn

  • How a workflow is put together: a trigger and the steps that follow it
  • How to place a step and open its settings
  • How to run a workflow and read what it produced
  • How steps are numbered, and why that matters

Some of those words may mean nothing to you yet. That is fine. Each one is explained where you first need it, and the Glossary has the rest.

The idea in three sentences

A workflow is a sequence that starts when something happens and then does things in order.

The thing that starts it is a trigger: a schedule, an incoming message, a new row in a spreadsheet. Everything after it is a step. Each step can use whatever the steps before it produced.

That is the whole model. Everything else in Glow is a variation on it.

Step 1: Create the workflow

In the sidebar open Automations and click Create new, the yellow button above your workflows. (The Create new in the workspace menu makes a new workspace, which is not what you want here.) If you have not been in the app before, Navigating the Dashboard shows where these are. A new canvas opens, ready for a trigger and a first action.

The Workflow Assistant opens along the right-hand side. It can build workflows from a description, and Tutorial 3 uses it. For now close it with the X in its top right, so you have the whole canvas to work with.

Everything you place lands on the canvas. You find things to place in the row of buttons along the bottom: Apps, Tools, AI, Subflows, Search. That row is called the dock.

Step 2: Add the trigger

You will use Scheduler, which starts the workflow at a time you choose. It is the one trigger that needs nothing set up: no account, no address, no incoming message.

Open the trigger placeholder

Click the grey Click to Add Trigger placeholder on the canvas. The catalogue opens over it.

Choose Scheduler

Under Start, click Scheduler. It takes the placeholder’s spot, already wired to the action placeholder beside it, and its settings open on the right.

Look at the schedule

Schedule mode is set to AI Assistant, and Schedule description already reads Run everyday at 8:00 AM. Leave both alone: that is a perfectly good schedule, and you will not wait for 8am to test it.

There is a Manual Cron mode beside it for people who already know cron expressions. You will not need it today: describing the schedule in plain words does the same job. Next runs shows you the times it worked out, so you can check it means what you meant before you rely on it.

Step 3: Add the AI step

Open the action placeholder

Click the grey Click to Add Action placeholder, and in the catalogue that opens pick the AI section.

Choose AI Prompt

The top group is Glow AI, marked no API keys required, zero token costs. Click AI Prompt there. It takes the placeholder’s spot, wired to your Scheduler.

The providers listed below it (OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest) each need an API key of your own. You do not need one today.

Write the instruction

The Instructions field arrives with a sample in it. Replace it with:

Write a two-sentence motivational note to start the working day.

Instructions is the whole of the step. Whatever you write there is what the AI is asked to do. Vague instructions produce vague results, which is the single most common reason an AI step disappoints.

Step 4: Notice the step numbers

Look at the number on each step. They may well not be 1 and 2.

That surprises everybody the first time. A step’s number is fixed when the step is created and stays with it: it is the step’s name, not its position in the run. Numbers are not handed out again once used, so gaps are normal and the first step is not always 1.

This matters because steps refer to each other by number. To use the AI step’s answer somewhere later, you would write {{ 4.result }}, where 4 is whatever number is actually on the step.

Read the number off the step rather than assuming it. Pointing at a step number that does not exist stops the run, and the reason is recorded on the step: “Placeholder 99.nothing didn’t find data”. Copying the number from the step avoids it, as does the data icon beside every field, which lists earlier steps’ output to pick from (Tutorial 2 uses it).

Step 5: Run it

Click Run at the left of the dock. Glow runs the workflow once, immediately, without waiting for 8am.

Each step picks up a small counter showing how many times it has run.

Step 6: Read what it wrote

This is the part everybody gets stuck on, so it is worth being precise.

Open the step

Click the AI Prompt step to open its settings.

Switch to Executions

Click the Executions tab. You will see one row per run: a relative time like “a few seconds ago” and a long identifier.

Expand the run

Click the small arrow at the left of the row. The row expands to show what the step produced:

result: Embrace this new day with renewed energy, knowing that your
unique skills and dedication make a real difference…

That is the moment. A model you never configured and never gave a key to wrote that, inside a workflow you built in about five minutes.

Note the word result. That is the name the answer is stored under, which is why a later step would reach it as {{ 4.result }}. Every AI step in Glow returns its answer the same way.

Run it a second time and expand the new row. The note is different: same instruction, new wording. If you want it shorter, or warmer, or signed off in your name, edit the Instructions and run it again. Getting a prompt right by iterating on it is most of the work in any AI step.

What you just built

A trigger that fires on a schedule, and a step that produces something new each time. Every workflow in Glow is that shape, with more steps in between.

Three things are worth carrying forward:

  • You never left the browser. No terminal, no connected accounts, no API keys.
  • Steps are referenced by number, and the number comes off the step itself rather than from counting.
  • A run’s output lives in Executions, behind the arrow on the row.

Making it real

Right now this workflow writes something and stops, and it only runs when you click Run. Two changes make it live:

  • Set it to Live. A new workflow starts in Draft: the schedule is off and it runs only when you run it yourself. Click the status control next to the workflow’s name (it currently reads Draft) and switch it to Live. The trigger starts firing on its own.
  • Send the result somewhere. A note nobody reads is not much use. Add a step after the AI one that posts to Slack or sends an email, and reference the answer as {{ 4.result }}.

That second change needs a connected account, which is exactly what the next tutorial covers.

What’s Next?

👉 Continue to Tutorial 2: Build It Yourself → to connect a real app and pass data between steps.

What Is Glow?2. Build It Yourself