The data model, gently
You don’t need to be technical to use MsgBuddy. But understanding how the pieces link together makes everything else click — especially why, say, a contact can have several conversations, or why a campaign “uses” a template. Here’s the map, in pictures.
The core relationships
How to read that diagram
- The
||--o{symbol means “one has many.” So one Workspace has many Contacts; one Conversation contains many Messages. - A Contact can have more than one Conversation — one per channel (today that’s WhatsApp; Telegram/Email/SMS can be added). Each conversation holds its own message thread.
- Every Message knows three things: which Contact it’s with, which number (Channel Account) carried it, and whether it went in or out.
Why “one conversation per channel”? So your WhatsApp thread with a customer stays separate from, say, an SMS thread with the same person. Same human, different doorways — each gets its own tidy conversation.
How the “sending” tools attach
Templates and campaigns hang off the same spine. Here’s how a bulk send is organised:
Reading it: a Template provides the words; a Campaign decides who gets it (a Segment) and when; when you press Start, the campaign creates a Run, which breaks the audience into small Jobs (one per contact), and each job finally produces a real Message. Every message that goes out is still just a message on the same spine as your inbox chats — which is why delivery tracking works the same everywhere.
You’ll never edit these tables by hand — MsgBuddy manages all of it. The reason to know the shape is that it explains the language of the app: “3,000 recipients, 2,940 sent, 41 failed, 19 skipped” is really “one run, 3,000 jobs, and here’s how each job ended.”
Two things called “Product” (don’t get them confused)
One quirk worth flagging early, because it confuses people:
| “Product” in… | Means | Lives in |
|---|---|---|
| Commerce | An item in your Meta catalog, shown inside chats | Commerce |
| Subscriptions | An item in a recurring plan (e.g. “1 litre milk”) | Subscriptions |
They are completely separate features that happen to share a word. We remind you again in those chapters.
Next: roll up your sleeves — Getting Started → walks you from sign-up to a connected WhatsApp number.