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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?

#101

Post by graeme »

k1ns wrote: post #87
graeme wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two points of feedback: 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. D…

I appreciate the feedback! Messaging has been one of my biggest challenges by far. I've unfairly hurt the project because of my lack of expertise in communicating its value. Not adding pricing to the home page was a decision I made due to the home page being much more cluttered than I like (probably due to my aforementioned inability to communicate effectively). I figured, if people are interested they'll head on ove…

I saw your email, will reply later. But, here, briefly:

* 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.

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

#102

Post by mk4p »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #77

I automate extensively, but I don't use many modern/specialised tools just for automation. I tend to rely on general purpose scripting tools, templates, and programming with relevant APIs instead. 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, includ…

> 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?

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

#103

Post by johnx123-up »

anacleto wrote: post #63

Longtime fan and users of Zapier. 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 fa…

Mine: Restyaboard + Zapier + batch scripts

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

#104

Post by indescions_2018 »

Great thread! There's $$$ of value in here. One could easily scrape this page an build an automation resource site ;)

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://www.twilio.com/sms

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

#106

Post by matt_the_bass »

rrggrr wrote: 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…

Can you share what type of Mailchimp tasks you are automating?

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

#107

Post by napolux »

orf wrote: post #99
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this process relate to your business automation?

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

Wrong, but thanks for trying :-)

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

#108

Post by Chris_Newton »

mk4p wrote: post #102
Chris_Newton wrote: post #77

I automate extensively, but I don't use many modern/specialised tools just for automation. I tend to rely on general purpose scripting tools, templates, and programming with relevant APIs instead. 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, includ…

> 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?

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.

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

#109

Post by nexxer »

WhiteOwlLion wrote: post #60
tosbourn wrote: post #5

I use TextExpander for support / service emails and to pull up information quickly (VAT details, addresses, etc) Invoices and late payment reminders I've automated with my invoicing system (Crunch)

I use PhraseExpress (free version available) for answer e-mails as well. Gmail has boilerplate responses, but you can script PhraseExpress to retrieve data locally. So, if a customer is asking for an order, I can pull up details in the e-mail by doing a query locally.

I'm using PhraseExpress (free) too. I have a few macros set up for commonly used phrases, but thanks to its prefix matching and popup of multiple results, I also use it as a quick lookup tool for various strings so that I don't have to remember them.

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

#110

Post by asar »

jpster wrote: post #98
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.

Sorry for the late response, but yes definitely done for our marketing insights. Our whole team is very data driven and Slack gives us a perfect opportunity to be transparent.
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