Barista Studio is a home-espresso coach on Instagram who runs a 40-seat latte-art workshop every quarter. For the October batch, one Zorcha form took 122 applications in September, flagged which emails were real, routed the Bengaluru applicants to the team's sheet, and produced the shortlist in an afternoon. Here is the exact setup, screen by screen.
Barista Studio is the example account we run on Zorcha to show how features behave with real volume. The people and numbers are illustrative, but every screen below is the actual product and the form is live on the account.
The problem it solves
Previous batches were filled over DMs. Someone commented "workshop?", the coach replied with the dates, asked for a name, a number, a city, how much coffee they make, and whether they had a machine at home. Five questions, five round trips, and half the answers ended up in screenshots. By the time 40 seats were confirmed, two weekends had gone.
The goal for October was simple: ask everything once, in one place, and only talk to people who were actually coming.
The form
Latte Art Workshop, October batch has nine questions, built in the form editor in about twenty minutes:
Full name (Text, required)
Email (Email, required, with Email Verification on)
WhatsApp number (Phone)
Which city are you in? (Dropdown: Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, plus an Other option)
Experience (Dropdown: Never steamed milk, Home machine, Work in a café)
Which days work? (Checkbox: Saturday, Sunday)
Cups a day (Number, 0 to 20)
Rate your last class (Rating, smiley, optional)
Show us your best pour (Upload, images only)
The cover is a photo of three pours, the description says what the workshop is and that the team will WhatsApp the dates and fee, and the button reads Apply for a seat.
Under Settings, Redirect on completion points at the studio's WhatsApp link, so the thank-you screen hands people straight to the channel where the follow-up happens.
How each field type behaves is in Choose the right field type. Cover, description and button text are in Customise your form.
How people reached it
The form link went in three places, and the same link works in all of them:
A comment-to-DM automation. A keyword automation on the announcement Reel listens for WORKSHOP. Anyone who comments it gets a DM with a short message and a Share details link that opens the form. This is where most applications came from.
A Link in Bio button titled "Apply for the October workshop".
The Story link sticker, used twice: on launch day and for a last-seats reminder.
The Reel went out on 12 September. Over that day and the next, 37 applications came in, against a baseline of two to four a day for the rest of the month. The steps for the DM automation are in Share a form from an Instagram automation.
What Email Verification did
With Email Verification on, each applicant gets a 6-digit code by email after submitting and has to enter it on the form. The submission is saved either way, but the Submissions list marks the ones that completed the code with a green icon, and Submission Details shows Verified.
Of the 122 applications, 92 were verified and 30 never entered the code. Those 30 were mostly typos and throwaway addresses, and they were simply not shortlisted. Nobody on the team had to chase a bounced email. The toggle is in the Email field's settings in the form editor.
The flow behind the form
The workshop is in Bengaluru, so the coach wanted local applications in front of the team immediately and everyone else kept for an online batch later. That is one Flow Builder automation:
Trigger: Submits a Form, with the workshop form selected.
Condition on a form field: Which city are you in? is one of Bengaluru.
On the Yes branch, Add row to Google Sheets writes the application into the team's sheet, one row per submission with a column per question.
Out-of-town applications take the No branch and stay on the form's Submissions tab, where they are exported later for the online batch. Building this is covered in Use Form Submit as a Flow Builder trigger and Add rows to Google Sheets from Flow Builder.
Building the shortlist
Forms has no analytics screen. What the team used was the Submissions column on the Forms list, the Submissions tab, and the CSV from Export List.
The CSV has one column per question plus Submitted At, so the shortlist is three filters in a spreadsheet:
City is Bengaluru: 59 applications.
Email Verified: 47 of those.
Which days work? includes Saturday, because the batch runs on two Saturdays: 38.
Those 38 got the first invites on WhatsApp, in the order they applied. The last 2 seats went to verified Bengaluru applicants who had ticked only Sunday and could switch. The remaining 7 went on a waitlist. Total time from export to the last invite: one afternoon.
A few other things the answers told the coach, with no extra work:
Experience: 59 had a home machine, 38 had never steamed milk, 25 worked in a café. The batch was split into two groups on that column.
Cups a day averaged 3.8, which settled how much milk to order.
28 people attached a photo of a pour. The best three went on the studio's Story the week before the workshop, with permission.
Steal this setup
Create the form with one required Email field and turn on Email Verification. Make the rest optional unless you need it to decide.
Use a Dropdown for anything you will filter on later, such as city or experience. Free-text answers are harder to sort.
Add a Checkbox for dates so that scheduling comes from the data, not from follow-up messages.
Share one link everywhere: a comment-to-DM automation, a Link in Bio button and the Story sticker.
If one answer decides who sees the submission, add a Submits a Form flow with a Condition on that question.
When applications close, click Export List and filter.
Start with Create and publish a form.