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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?

#91

Post by lastairnomad »

I have been at quite a few different companies and startups, and whenever I come on it seems like the company is having crippling DevOps problems. Engineers are getting code written and services built, and it's not getting deployed because the process is so complicated. Even when they do get it up, it falls over.

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.

[0] https://nanobox.io/

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

#92

Post by ahoyhere »

graeme wrote: post #85
petercooper wrote: post #21

Other than Zapier, Slack reminders are a huge help to us. We have reminders set up for all sorts of things, both recurring and adhoc. If you use Slack and don't use reminders, look into how it works, they are fantastic. 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 payrol…

Does Sweep have an app or good mobile view for management? Looks very interesting.

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.

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

#93

Post by psteinweber »

RandomBookmarks wrote: post #88

Web browser macros! ...to automate logins plus some daily and weekly reporting and repetitive "check something" tasks. Once set up, macros are a huge time and typing saver. Formerly I used iMacros for this, and now the open-source Kantu extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-auto...

That sounds interesting. However despite being generally aware of repetitive tasks, I can't imagine many use cases. Would you mind sharing some more detailed examples what you're using it for?

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

#94

Post by petercooper »

graeme wrote: post #85
petercooper wrote: post #21

Other than Zapier, Slack reminders are a huge help to us. We have reminders set up for all sorts of things, both recurring and adhoc. If you use Slack and don't use reminders, look into how it works, they are fantastic. 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 payrol…

Does Sweep have an app or good mobile view for management? Looks very interesting.

Unfortunately I think she might be shadowbanned as her comment was immediately "dead", so I'll repaste just in case:

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.

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

#96

Post by graeme »

petercooper wrote: post #94
graeme wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Sweep have an app or good mobile view for management? Looks very interesting.

Unfortunately I think she might be shadowbanned as her comment was immediately "dead", so I'll repaste just in case: 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.

You're right, she is. Thanks!

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

#97

Post by kalid »

Kluny wrote: post #76

I'm importing furniture from Europe via container. There are several variables to consider. Tax rate, shipping rate, shipping insurance, sales markup, initial cost of the stock, cost of trucks and warehouses to move and store things, cost of plane tickets when I have to go there in person, currency exchange. I had an elaborate spreadsheet that got more and more cumbersome until I was just confusing myself, so I wrote…

As a side project, I made "pastebin for calculators" for these back of the envelope questions. Here's one for your scenario:

https://instacalc.com/51462

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

#98

Post by jpster »

asar wrote: post #11

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.

This sounds really cool. Is this being done primarily for the benefit of your marketing team? I’m always curious about automating marketing reporting or operations.

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

#99

Post by orf »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #43
napolux wrote: post #41

Time to shine. :-) 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.

How does this process relate to your business automation?

Scraping Twitter or Reddit for content and then reposting it to Facebook. Likely without attribution.
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