How we save 400+ hours per month through automation

When you’re running an indie software business, there are SO many things that need to be done. You either have to do them yourself, hire someone, or get software to do it for you.

There’s only one of you. Hiring is difficult and sometimes prohibitively expensive, especially in the early days. That leaves software.

In our business, we save over 400 hours per month with automation. Here's how you can do the same.

Process automation — is it really worth it?

You might be wondering if it’s worth the bother. After all, if you don't have any experience with workflow automation tools, it can be a pretty daunting thing to jump into. Plus, there’s the time you spend setting up automations. If you spend an hour setting up an automation, will you ever get that back?

In my experience, if you automate the right things, the answer is an obvious yes.

Here's an example. Say you have a form set up on your website to capture new leads. You get an email in your inbox with the lead’s contact details, which you then have to manually input into your CRM. That might take a minute to do. That’s pretty fast. Why bother automating it?

If it takes you an hour to create that automation, you’ll get your initial hour back after it’s processed 60 leads. If you’re doing 5 leads a day, that’s 12 days. And after that, you’ve got a free 5 minutes every day. Doesn’t sound like much, but the more processes you automate, the more they add up.

At the time of writing, our business automates around 50,000 tasks per month. If you assume 30 seconds per task, that’s 416 hours per month. A fulltime employee is around 170 hours/month.

It’s so much more than just time, though. Other benefits include:

• No human error - automations don’t make typos, copy data to the wrong fields, or miss a character or two when copying and pasting.
• Scalability - as your business grows, the automations just run more often. You don’t need to add people.
• Headspace - when you don’t have to switch tasks all the time, you’re more productive. Plus, there’s a nice feeling that comes with knowing things are always ticking along without you actually doing any work.

What should I automate?

The most basic automation typically follows the formula: When this happens, do that. You can also add multiple actions or conditions.

An example that includes each of the elements would be: When someone fills out my screening questionnaire, post a message in Slack, and if they said their budget was more than $20000, send me an SMS to call them immediately.

If you’re anything like me, your mind will be buzzing now with all the processes you could potentially automate. But this raises an important question: What exactly should l automate?

A great place to look for inspiration is by simply exploring the Zapier or Make websites, looking at the automations and templates they have there, and seeing what looks useful.

Once you get into the mindset, you’ll notice more and more processes that are ripe for automation. To keep track of these ideas, I recommend keeping an automation wishlist — a simple spreadsheet or Google doc that you add ideas to as they come up.

To help you get started, I'll break down the types of things that should be automated, then I'll give specific examples.

What types of tasks to automate

• Repetitive tasks: Everything from manual data entry to onboarding new clients and scheduling social media posts. A typical example is sending the same or similar emails
• Double-handling: Moving data from one place to another, especially multiple times. Like when a new client comes in and you have to add them to your CRM, invoicing, project management, and more. Double-handing and repetitive tasks typically go hand-in-hand
• Inbox cloggers: Instead of getting bogged down with emails, you can automate support handling or get notifications on a slack channel.
• Tasks that you forget: It’s hard to keep on top of everything when you’re running a business. Automation helps you get the information you need without having to go digging, or it can just remind you to do things that you might forget while you’re buried in other tasks.

​​### Specific examples for SaaS
Hopefully you already have plenty of ideas on what to automate. But if you’re looking for more, here are some examples specifically for the SaaS founders out there.

Onboarding & Customer Success

• Flag new ideal leads: When someone signs up for a trial, use Lead Score by Zapier to find how big their company is. If they are large, create a task to reach out to them.
• Add customers on LinkedIn: For anyone that matches criteria, generate a LinkedIn search URL and send it to yourself in Slack. That makes it very easy to add them.
• Incentivized feedback: When someone fills out a feedback form, extend their trial. We use this to encourage people to tell us where they heard about us for an extra 7 days of trial.
• Party channel: Add new paid signups to a channel in your Slack. It’s like a little celebration every time.
• Demo tracking: When someone books a demo, tag them in your CRM to make it easy to follow up.
• Monitor usage: One week after signup, generate a report of customer activity and attach it to the customer record in your CRM. We use Mixpanel for this.
• Identify Power Users: Each month, calculate a "health score" for every customer based on their usage. If they're above a threshold, tag them in your CRM.

Support

• Quick actions: If you're using Intercom, create "Quick Links" that send information to a Zapier or Make webhook. We use this for common actions like extending a trial, or for quick access to their billing profile, CRM profile, etc.
• Start conversations for feedback: If someone fills out a feedback form or NPS score, create a new conversation automatically and request they leave a review. Use canned replies with personalization.
• Start conversations for cancellations and downgrades: Likewise, start a conversation when someone cancels. Write a personalized message requesting feedback.
• Keep your team in touch with customers: Post NPS, comments, feedback, and cancellation reasons to a feedback Slack channel.

Contact Sync

Having the right information in all your systems enables better, more personlised communication. It's not sexy, but it's important. A bulk of our automations fit into this category.

• Basic sync: When customer information changes, update them in your other systems. It helps to have a "single source of truth" that you use as your master list, and update your other systems from there.

• Plan updates: When a customer changes their plan or adds a credit card, update your CRM and support system.

• Sync unsubscribes: If you have more than one system that sends email, sync unubscribes between them.

  Marketing

  • Blog post promotion: When a new blog post goes live, create tasks to promote it. Also add them to a spreadsheet so you have a record of all your content. Same goes with support articles, case studies, and any other content you create.
  • Newsletter creation: Use the Zapier Chrome Extension to flag good content and add it to upcoming newsletters. You could also feed in any new blog posts, support articles, or YouTube videos.
  • Blog post planning: Use the OpenAI API to create a draft brief for any posts you want to create, and automatically save it as a Google Document. We use AirTable for this, and the Google Drive link is added back to the record once generated.

Other

• Keep tabs on your business: Post a summary of project management system activity to yourself each day or week.

Just remember: Don’t try to take on too much at once, as it leads to overwhelm. Pick something small to start and don’t think you have to do everything on this list by tomorrow.

Zapier vs Make — which one should I use?

Zapier and Make are the most popular tools for automation. I recommend learning both, but Zapier is perhaps the best place to start if you are new to process automation.

To keep things simple, let’s look at a brief overview of the two tools.

Zapier

• Relatively simple to use
• Ideal for newbies
• Tons of ready-made automations
• Limited options for building complex workflows
• A free option, with paid plans starting at $19.99 per month

Make

• More complicated to use
• Easier to create complex automations
• Better suited to those with prior experience or a programming background
• A free option, with paid plans starting at $9 per month

In reality, there are tons of intricate differences between these two platforms — too many to cover in this article. So for a deeper dive, check out my video: Zapier vs Integromat (Make) — a detailed comparison.

How to get started with Zapier?

Zapier is relatively easy to use and has loads of integrations you can use out of the box.

You can tap into their ever-growing library of ready-made integrations, or you can create custom Zaps that allow you to automate more complex or niche tasks. Either way, it’s a relatively simple process.

As I mentioned earlier, perhaps the best place to start is by looking at the apps that Zapier already integrates with. Chances are, you’ll find tons of ready-made connections to some of your favourite tools. Personally, I rarely use these templates, but they are great for coming up with ideas, and learning what’s possible.

Go to the Zapier website, then navigate to Product, and then App integrations. You’ll see a page like this:

![Zapier](https://i.ibb.co/TB6DcnQ/1.jpg "Zapier)

Click on one of the apps, and you’ll see some of the integrations Zapier offers. The below example is Gmail. Use the search box to search for another app you’re using, or just click one of the ones shown to get an idea of integrations that you can set up between the two.

If you scroll down farther, you’ll see a list of automation templates for Gmail with other apps. Again, this is just a great way to generate ideas. But you can always click the “Try It” button to load this workflow into the Zap editor and begin playing around. Here are some examples.

Scroll down even farther and you’ll see the triggers and actions supported by the app.

This is my favourite section. If you understand the Triggers and Actions supported by the apps you use, you can start joining the dots. In the below example, just looking at the list might inspire you to add Slack messages to a Google Sheet by adding a reaction to the message

How to get started with Make?

With Make, you can connect as many apps as you want, with as many steps as you need. Make calls these workflows “scenarios.” In practice, this allows you to create highly complex automations that transform all sorts of business processes.

Make also offers a lot of ready-made automations, although not as many as Zapier. To explore what you can do, head to Make’s website and navigate to Platform, and then Apps & services. Like the Zapier website, you’ll find here all the apps you can connect together.

If you click on an app, you can see a list of triggers, actions, and searches. You can then use and combine these to create bespoke workflows. Here are some examples for Google Sheets.

By navigating to Solution and then Templates, you can see and search for ready-made automations that you can deploy quickly and easily. Here are some examples.

If you see one you like, simply follow the steps and give it a try.