I've added a couple of small cloud functions for daily statistics that are pushed to our company slack in dedicated reporting channels. Pagespeed reports for our websites, keyword rankings, crawls from Google Bot etc. Definitely reduced the monkey work for our team.
Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
11–20 of 116 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#12I built Dependabot to automate keeping dependencies up-to-date / responding to security vulnerabilities at GoCardless. Spun it out into its own business. https://dependabot.com 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 commo…
Just wanted to say thanks for Dependabot! I'm excited to be trying it out with `friends` (https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends) and I really appreciate the quick turnaround you gave me when I found a small bug the other week.
To others, check out Dependabot!
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#13- Zapier. I have about 30 zaps running that automate mailchimp list management, email processing and other tasks.
- 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.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#14We get a lot of mileage out of Butler for Trello (in combination with Zapier, pipes.digital, Trello mail-in to process App Store notification mails, etc).
No affiliation, just a happy user.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#15I use ScanBot to scan in all of my receipts and other important papers: https://scanbot.io/en/features.html
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.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#16I often think three times before I decide to automate anything. As a dev, and co-founding with another dev, the direct response is always that it should be automated. On second thought, our billable hours are almost always better spent doing client work. This is a very relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1319/
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.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#17I work at a fortune 100 in a department I will vaguely rename as "operating systems"; we have a large number of virtual and physical servers, desktops, and development environments. My department "sells" these systems to other coworkers in other departments. Various orchestration platforms make this incredibly easy. Our automation workflow is build on as many standard tools as we can find, because inventing it here c…
Thanks for sharing, are you running SAP products or similar software on this infrastructure?
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#18Sikuli
I second Sikuli and recommend Sikuli-X. In the end though the company I work for wanted to use a corporate supported solution so I now use UiPath. It is allowing us to automate repetitive tasks in a Win32 application that uses shdocvw.dll as the shell for Silverlight components, and an embedded TTY emulator among other things. Pointing Spy++ at it revealed an almost infinite event model. Automating with Windows handles just wasn't possible, so the OCR of both Sikuli and UiPath came in handy.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#19We get a lot of mileage out of Butler for Trello (in combination with Zapier, pipes.digital, Trello mail-in to process App Store notification mails, etc). https://butlerfortrello.com/ No affiliation, just a happy user.
Mind expanding on your use case for Butler for Trello? Their landing page is a little unclear on specifics.
Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?
#20I have a consulting business.
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.