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Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

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Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#31

We 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.

Not the op but I use Butler Bot (which is different from their powerup). It's been awesome--I use it automate moving tasks around on my lists based on conditions (like cards due today are pushed to the top), for creating recurring tasks or posting reminder comments. It can basically be programmed to do almost anything for you.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#32
post #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 a…

I’m curious about the financial modeling bit - would you mind expanding on that?

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#33
I work for a fortune 500 company.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#34
I work at a social media platform for everything related to tattoos, and here is a list of the most important automation tools that we use and for what:

* 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

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#35
1. Google Calendar. Not really "automating", but I got a big boost in productivity from assigning themes to different days, so I'm not thrashing back and forth, and I can batch up similar tasks. Of course, there are fires that screw things up, but it's generally much smoother.

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".)

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#37
post #34

I work at a social media platform for everything related to tattoos, and here is a list of the most important automation tools that we use and for what: * 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. Main…

Can you explain how you use Terraform to automate google calendars?

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#38
I would love to know how to deal with all the various electronic invoices I receive from different services (periodically and one-off, but especially the periodic).

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.

Re: Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business?

#40
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. What do you use for your SOP? Can you give more details?

It’s just a doc that I printed out. The hardest part was actually coming up with it, and then narrowing it down to just the most important things so that the whole thing fits on one page. It’s partially inspired by Ray Dalio’s “Principles” book. Examples: - If not "hell yes" then "no." - Everything can survive one hour. - If it's $100 decide by Friday. - No calls on Fridays.

Ray Dalio's Principles is such an amazing book. I use his 5-step process every single day. Here's a great summary for anyone interested. https://inside.bwater.com/publications/principles_excerpt
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