Flowland Seed Co.
Practice shop
Start here
Learn FlowRunner by automating a shop.
You are here to learn FlowRunner, where you build flows — its word for an automation that runs on its own. Flowland Seed Co. is what you practice on: a small seed shop, invented from top to bottom, so every lesson has a real job to do instead of a hello world.
The course is laid out as a training map across seven courses, showing which ones to take first. Pick one, build the flow in FlowRunner, point it at the shop, and see what comes back. Check it off and take the next.
Not opened FlowRunner yet? Start there and keep it in another tab. You will work across both: build the flow in FlowRunner, set it off from a page here. Flowland shows what it sent and what came back; FlowRunner shows what happened inside the run.
FlowRunner
Where you build
Your flows live here. This is the thing the course teaches.
Flowland
What you build against
A shop that gives your flows something to do, and answers when they ask.
How a lesson goes
The same rhythm every time, whichever lesson you are on.
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Pick a lesson on the map
It says what to build and which Flowland page to use. Nothing is locked and nothing is graded — checking a lesson off is a note to yourself, kept in this browser.
Open the training map -
Build the flow in FlowRunner
The lesson walks through it. You finish with a trigger — the starting point of a flow, which has its own web address.
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Connect it
Open Tutorial Assets on that page — the tab on the right edge — paste the address in and press Save. Once per exercise.
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Set it off
Use the page the way a customer or a colleague would: send the form, place the order, ship the parcel. Flowland does the rest and calls your flow.
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Read what came back
Flowland shows what it sent and what the flow answered. FlowRunner shows what happened inside the run — which is where you look when the answer is not the one you wanted.
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Fix it and send again
Activity, at the bottom of that same panel, keeps every exchange with a button to repeat one — so a one-line change does not mean filling the form in again. Then check the lesson off and take the next.
One panel, on every exercise page
Tutorial Assets sits on the right edge of every page you do a lesson on, always in the same place and always with these sections in this order, so there is only one place to learn. A section a page has nothing for is not shown.
- Connect your flow
- Where the trigger address goes.
- Your flow will receive
- Exactly what Flowland will send, before anything runs.
- Copy into your flow
- Text a lesson asks you to paste into a block, exact and ready to copy.
- APIs your flow can call
- What the flow can ask the shop for, and in which lessons.
- Exceptions simulator rules
- What sort of day the shop is having.
- Activity
- Every message, both ways, with a button to resend.
Not on this page — there is no exercise here. You will meet it on the first lesson page you open.
Where everything is
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Training map
The course itself: every lesson, and which ones to take first.
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Contact form
A customer writes in. The first lesson, and the simplest.
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Submit purchase order
A wholesale buyer orders by the case — and your flow is called directly, with no trigger.
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The shop
Forty seed varieties, browsable as a customer would.
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The API
Orders, payments, customers and more, for flows to read. No keys needed.
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Checkout
A cart, and a flow that works out the shipping.
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Back office
A morning of real orders to work through.
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Order Replayer
Eight fixed orders to send at a flow, again and again, until it copes.
Worth knowing
- None of it is real. There are no accounts, nothing is ever charged, and no email is ever sent.
- Nothing is graded or locked. The map remembers what has been checked off, in this browser, and that is all.
- Some of the shop records disagree with each other, exactly as they do in a real business. Sorting that out is a lesson later on.
The map is the course. Everything else here exists to give its lessons something real to work on.
Open the training map