I'm curious to know what tools you use to automate your business operations (if any).
For example, https://zapier.com is one such automation tool.
If you don't use any tools, do you use any frameworks or systems you've made yourself?
If you don't automate any parts of your business, why not? (I'm interested in the reasons why, not disputing the choice)
Our automation workflow is build on as many standard tools as we can find, because inventing it here costs a lot of money and we're not experts at it. So it looks smart to use what exists as smart as we can. We take vendor ISOs from microsoft, linux, et cetera and use Packer/Vagrant to build them up inside a vSphere cluster. Packer is starting to get really good support for ESX 6.5, which means we can build right off a datastore and flip the template directly into our orchestration suite for "purchase". Our process is executed in Jenkins Multibranch Pipeline. Our sysadmin-turning-developers are learning a lot this year, and the Jenkins Pipeline is a great way to shield them from details they are free to know but don't have the time for.
The core of our build environment is some reflective shell script that becomes aware of its environment as it is loaded. We're able to abstract across environments, datacenters, et al just by some clever situational awareness. The basics always end up being the most valuable, and our little ecosystem orbiting around a pile of terse, self-documenting shell scripts that any sysadmin can understand has been a successful gambit.
I have a few basic zaps, like sending myself an email reminder every Monday to review goals.
FreshBooks for automating recurring invoices and payment reminders.
This one has saved me a lot of time: Calendly to let people schedule meetings on my calendar. I’ve set a very narrow availability window so that meetings are grouped into one afternoon.
aText app to create shortcuts for long strings that I use often, like my Zoom and Calendly URLs.
I also developed Standard Operating Procedures for my business to “automate” certain decisions or protocols.
I try to eliminate before I automate. Does the thing really need doing, or can I find a way or reason to never have to do it again? For example, instead of routing Slack messages (I am in ~5 Slack orgs at any time) to my phone or email, I just set the expectation early that I will not check Slack frequently so if they need to reach me they should use email.
Examples:
- If not "hell yes" then "no."
- Everything can survive one hour.
- If it's <$100 and benefits well being, productivity, or revenue: Buy it. If >$100 decide by Friday.
- No calls on Fridays.
In my previous company, we were heavy users of Zapier. Literally, the easiest way to automate most SaaS companies' internal business processes.
It worked so great for us that we thought to automate some flows also for our customers (onboarding, retentions).
Ie.
- Send a Slack message when a user is stuck with your product and send him some helpful emails
- When there's new `signup fail` event, send a Slack alert to your Customer Success team AND to my engineering team.
- Send a Slack alert and an email signed by your Product Manager when a longtime paying customer reply to your NPS survey with less than 6
Zapier deals well with internal data but not so well with customer data (ie. events or interactions performed by the end customers).
So, I've created a product that does just that. A few public interactive examples here (no need to signup to play with it)
- https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-send-tailored-onb...
- https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-slack-notificatio...
Curious to hear your thoughts.
[Explain]
[Shameless plug]
I approve.
just kidding. UI looks great. Does this go in the Intercom direction?
Curiously a few people companies to use this product to supply the missing IF-THEN branches in Zapier (triggering them via Webhooks)
> Does this go in the Intercom direction?
No.
No, it looks usable.
Just make it scale up so its no 25% of the page on mobile
This, in the `HEAD` tag, might do it
`<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1">`
My best automating stuff story, though, is automating complaint letters to UK banks. We were pushing the limits of what the UK's Direct Debit system can handle, and as a result were seeing all the edge cases where banks got it wrong. One common one was banks accidentally charging back a payment twice, and each bank had their own, totally bespoke complaints procedure for getting in touch when that happened.
A couple of engineers and me spent a couple of days integrating with Lob and a fax provider whose name I forget to automatically write complaint letters every time the banks screwed up. Some of these were being sent to named individuals for all Direct Debit complaints related to RBS, for example.
Needless to say, the banks fixed the problems that were causing us to need to complain soon enough. :-)
To others, check out Dependabot!
For example, I write many simple programs, often just shell scripts, and I have a go-to set of popular libraries and system tools for most integration purposes. I use many types of triggers to start those activities, including scheduled jobs, hooks from local programs like Git, webhooks from online services, and various other things.
I also customise software UIs extensively. My text editor, graphics and other creative programs, browsers, and other software that I use regularly are all full of macros, templates, presets and the like, and often have reconfigured keyboard shortcuts, menus/toolbars, or event triggers set up to access them quickly or perform tasks automatically at appropriate times.
As for why I don’t use a lot of the modern, dedicated automation tools, it’s not that I have anything in particular against them, but after building software for the first few decades, I find it is almost always faster and more reliable for me personally to do things the “old-fashioned” way. These modern, pretty tools are all communicating with the services they automate using APIs behind the scenes anyway, and accessing those is usually straightforward from just about any decent shell or programming language if you need to.
Could you give some examples?
Sure. In fact, Zapier have a good example right on their home page, showing a connection between someone submitting a form to Wufoo and adding their email address to a MailChimp mailing list.
For automation purposes, Wufoo can trigger a webhook when a form is submitted and MailChimp have a REST API that can be used to manage mailing lists. So, if I wanted to automate that sort of task, I’d probably just set up an endpoint on a server to receive those webhooks and then write a few lines of Python to extract the required form fields and send them off to MailChimp, instead of introducing the additional dependency and potentially cost of an intermediary service like Zapier.
I've automated this via Apps Script: An employee just fills out the form, and everything else is done automatically. (and even more: the script also sends an invoice to the client, creates a calendar event for the employee and adds the order to an internal spreadsheet)
* Xero: Accounting (I'm working to move to ledger). Automates sending of monthly invoices, CC import, etc.
* Lob: Letters and checks. I have python scripts that auto-generate a lot of the content to be sent.
* Python Scripts: Payroll, current financial health checking (expected income, what's in back, upcoming bills), text alerts for critical issues, etc.
* LibreNMS: Network health
* Mattermost: Internal communication
* Gitlab: Internal configs, wiki, script backups
* Amazon S3: Backups
* GSuite: Email/Docs/Sheets
* Zammad: Automated ticket and support site. We have templates replies for 80% of our support requests.
* Stripe: Automatic CC Invoicing, financial CRM
* Bench.co: Looking at setting this up to automate book keeping.
* Airtable: Customer signups, customer data filtering, pseudo CRM
2. Eliminating tasks that don't need to be done, or that I've over-engineered. I have an accountability partner, and while that has a lot to do with setting and meeting commitments, it probably has at least as much to do with eliminating pointless tasks. ("If you're trying to do X, what if you just did Y for now, and eliminated P, Q, R, S, etc?")
3. Self-serving/dog-fooding, but my own software tells me when prospects are interacting with lead magnets and proposals, and it automates most of the proposal process, so I can have more real conversations with people with fewer dials and less stress.
4. OmniFocus is great for getting tasks out of my head, showing me what I need to do, handling recurring tasks, etc. I'm not really using all the functionality to the max, and I should really do a more rigorous job with reviews, but it's super helpful. (I imagine other task managers have similar features, although this seems to work best for me.)
5. Automating customer support-- there are some customer support functions that require human intervention on the back end. If something comes up repeatedly, I write a script to automate it. Not a huge time savings, but instead of 5 minutes and a series of commands, it can be 30 seconds and something you can do from your phone. Not perfect, but helpful.
6. Delegation. Some things can't be eliminated or automated, but they can delegated. For a while, the biggest pain in my life was audio editing for my podcast. So I outsourced it. This is a form of "automation" that we often overlook, but it's been great. (I asked @gk1 more about Standard Operating Procedures on this thread, because this is where I see a lot of opportunities for more "automation".)
- Monday: Finances - Tuesday: Operations - Wednesday: Research & Development - Thursday: Marketing - Friday: Sales
This allowed me to focus ON the business vs. IN the business.
Monday is strategy, ops & finance. (A lot of Mondays don't require that much in this area, so there's extra time for other high priority tasks.)
Tuesday is sales.
Wednesday is R&D.
Thursday is marketing.
Friday is catch-up. This is actually the most important part, I've found. I used to over(schedule) everything, so my week would look really productive on Monday morning, but come next Monday morning, most things were in a state of "not quite done". In many cases, getting 80-90% of the way there has the same result as doing nothing. It was very frustrating. (Add in having kids, with days off school, random illnesses, etc, and the chance of having your week go exactly according to plan drop close to 0.)
This lets me catch up on the "big rock" items that I'm behind on. It's not perfect, but the idea is that every week I'm moving things forward. If I get done "early", there are plenty of other important things to start on (my "upcoming list"), or maybe I just go work out or research something a bit out of the ordinary that doesn't fit in my normal schedule.
It's not a perfect plan or a perfect implementation, but it feels much better than what I did before, which was too much context switching.
Then, you use Zapier to do almost anything with that data: send it to a google sheet, use that info to trigger an email to your customer, etc... The possibilities are endless.
My favorite use case was to use it for tracking emails sent out to our customers. We would have fedex-generated emails from our 3PL sent to a @mailparser address, which strips relevant info from the email, sends it to our Sendgrid account, re-skins the email in our format and sends it along to the customer as us. Won't bore you with the details, but we had a unique challenge that required something like this.
I thought I should mention that we also launched a sister-product called https://docparser.com two years. Docparser is basically like Mailparser, but for documents (PDFs or scanned documents).
- Python/PHP/Geektool. Another 5 or so processes running that automate analysis and reporting of sales, competitor and economic data.
- Google App Scripting. Inbox cleaning & recirculation scripts running.
- Xero API & Python. Internal financial modeling and reporting.
If I had more time I'd automate it all and never step foot into the office again.
I have a Rasperry Pi sitting at home, which is running Chrome headless to scrap some webpages on a 2/3 hours interval between 8am and 11pm, stores the data scraped on a Redis instance on the same machine, then with a PHP script I push these data in another interval straight on a FB page via IFTTT because I'm to lazy to implement the FB auth myself or use more than a POST request.
But it’s a business, yes :-)
I have it linked to Evernote, so that anything that I scan in (receipts from dining out, etc.) is waiting for me in Evernote by the time I make it home.
* Terraform to automate infrastructure such as github accounts, email accounts and AWS infrastructure and google calendars etc.
* Ansible for all provision and configuration management.
* Codeship as CI/CD for automatic packaging and deployment of docker images. Mainly using official base images with little to no repacking, only reconfiguration.
* StylyCI to correct codestyling
* AWS Autoscale groups for autoscaling.
* Makefiles for automating local environment setup and "nice-to-have" operations
As a growing business, we needed all the help for running our business smoothly. Here is an exhaustive list of all the best tools we needed:
1. For scheduling appointments- A calendar app like Google Calendar 2. For lead generation - A lead prospector tool like Agile CRM to generate leads through social media. 3. For project management - Trello 4. For cloud-based mobile communication - RingCentral 5. For email marketing - Mailchimp 6. For building landing pages - Unbounce 7. For social listening, scheduling - Hootsuite 8. For help desk support - Clickdesk 9. For SEO - Ahref, Moz 10. For competitor research - SEMRush 11. For automatically checking your grammar even while sending your emails - Grammarly 12. Google Analytics to observe website traffic. 13. For building websites - wiz Interestingly, Agile CRM covers most of the above necessary (the first 8 out of the 13 given) features on a single platform. So, when we came across this CRM, we thought we would start using this free tool to manage our customer relationships as well.
And instead of using 8 different tools It is the only comprehensive, end-to-end CRM that delivers sales, marketing and support automation to help small and medium businesses manage all parts of the customer journey, from a single platform, in order to drive sustainable, scalable growth.
No affiliation, just a happy user.
I use Trello a lot with my team, but am not quite sure how we should be using Butler.
When trying to keep up with a dozen active domains/companies and associated services, I end up spending half of my time managing logins, searching for invoices (at quarterly tax time), etc. It's really at the point where I'd have better quality of life making less money and doing less paid work.
Hubdoc collects monthly invoices from a lot of services. (You have to login with them, but for less important services this is fine)
Receiptbank accepts invoices by email or scan. For other services which send by email I created autoforward rules. For others like amazon which have some personal and some business I filter into a folder and process periodically.
For paper invoices, you scan a photo and receipt bank extracts the relevant data. (It extracts this data with emailed documents too)
Xero puts it all together, and also autocalculates things like foreign exchange.
The best solution is probably a service like Bench though if it's available in your area: a cloud bookeeper.
Having one has greatly improved my life.
We also use https://sweep.cards/ which is from Amy Hoy, who many of you may know of. It's basically for things that don't go in a calendar but which are recurring in some fashion, such as doing payroll each month, weekly reviews, or even minor daily tasks you need to remember to do. It has group workflow for this stuff as well if there are multiple people who need to do a single piece of a recurring task.
We do have a Slackbot already.
Not yet, we're still very new! Being able to interact easily wherever you are is a high priority for us, however, so it's high on the list. We do have a Slackbot already.
The business is a marketplace addon.
Lambda functions handle the webhooks to add, upgrade or remove the addon.
Step functions handle guiding new users through onboarding, by sending email reminders automatically re-configuring the service based on customer actions.
Budgets make sure a customer is not using more resources than they are paying for, and send email alerts to me and customers at various usage amounts.
I have extracted a lot of my AWS and Lambda software into an open source boilerplate app:
https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas
It's amazing how little code and operations this business requires!
Some things we use them for:
* automate the bank payments to our suppliers (exporting the table format in SEPA XML format)
* tweet some of our evergreen blog posts every day (note these scripts run in the cloud, the spreadsheets do not even need to be open)
* assist in the formatting of our newsletters (we write sections in Markdown, the script formats and uploads images to our blog, uploads the finished article and schedules)
We also use Zapier extensively. One particular automation I'm really proud of is accounting: we use Zapier to collect invoice PDFs sent by email, later on I wrote some scripts using Selenium to also log in and download invoices from websites that do not send the PDF over email. This saved me tons of time. Then a small script downloads the bank statements and puts each line in an Asana task, this way I can do reconciliation: I find the PDF invoice for every entry in the bank and put them together. It is very easy to find out which invoices you didn't download yet, if an invoice still needs payment or if you were sent an unexpected invoice. Lately I have refined this further and automated some of the matchmaking too, using Apache PDFBox to read the content of the invoices.
I have nearly always recommended Nanobox [0]. Their service helped completely automate our infrastructure, no matter what tech we were using. They handle any project in any language. Whether it was a small startup, or medium sized, it felt like we had just hired a 5-10 person DevOps team to handle everything for us.
After we implement it, it's a night and day difference. Teams start shipping updates multiple times per day, their auto-scaling handles all of our traffic patterns, and we're free to bounce around from provider to provider to use up their free credits and get the best deals. I've recommended it to all of the previous 3 companies I've worked at now, and they are all still using it and very happy.
My main work (non-dev) tools are Asana and Gmail. Asana is standalone for us (looking into adding it's Timeline which seem solid). Gmail have a couple of filters.
We use a finance setup where I just forward or email my receipts and have an accountant go through it and correct all the numbers, so this is automated for our part already (we pay about $200/mo for a personal accountant to go through it).
The one thing I think we spend too much time on is support issues. Customers will mail me personally, or my colleague, and it's hard to keep track of everything. We have a small team of students doing work on this and will soon have a custom web app solution built.
So what we did, was on the new projects we started using DeployBot, which was very nice especially for the development team. Then we started to see what can we do on the legacy projects and once we have more time from other projects we tackle one older project at a time where we automate at least parts of it.
It can be a very annoying process especially if you have people in your team who where used at a certain style of the process, but I think in the long run it was worth it.
Automation is something that I believe to be a must-have for many areas of business. ETL work, data entry, data collection, testing, etc., can (mostly) be automated as they're all very replicable. This frees your hands to work on the more important aspects of your business/job.
1. From your description, I hadn't realized what this does. I run a website for my business, so I may be in the market for this. On my first read though, I skimmed and thought "very technical dev programming tool". On the second read I saw it was relevant. 2. Lack of pricing implies the price is extremely high. If the price is not extremely high, then you should add a pricing page somewhere. Doesn't have to be front page (some people will just sign up for the free trial), but adding it somewhere would probably increase free trial signups.
* say who it's for. Maybe "a tool that lets business owners automatically test their websites" or "site admins" or whoever is the target. That's to grab attention and let the prospect see "ah yes, I am in this category". Then you can discuss specifics. * pricing off the homepage is fine. It just should be available somewhere. Free trial usually involves signing up for an account, so I didn't even click. I'd want to be able to estimate the annual cost for my team before signup
Your site is similar to Pingdom, but more specialized in checking site funtionality, right? You could check out their messaging for ideas.
Edit: your page is actually pretty good btw. It was your Hacker News comment that I skipped past. Only hesitation on the site was not knowing pricing. Beyond that, I guess also knowing whether I need it, but I probably do.
Google Cloud and K8 for orchestration. Autoscaling with kubectl in a single command.
Twilio SMS API is also great. Not quite at the point where I can send a text to a machine in human language and have it launch services. But pinging from phone, receiving health reports, alerts, etc. Very reliable and secure.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-auto...
They can claim ownership directly in Slack or assign it to someone else (who in turn gets notified in DM by the bot). It has cut response time in half across the board.
We want to automate everything but we fight against the odds. In fact, I work with people that "don't believe in automation". I don't even understand the sentence.
BTW: Docker, Ansible, an in-house tool somewhat similar to OpenStack, Go and Python.
If you’re all in on Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc., there’s so much you can do with GAS. I’ve used it for creating automated emails with charts pulled from Sheets, scraping websites, analyzing my emails, rall sorts of stuff.
I've considered making it into a SaaS product (sell your by-products!), but I keep dragging my heels.
Invoices and late payment reminders I've automated with my invoicing system (Crunch)
Full discloseure, I work for ProcessPlan.