

Ask HN: Quick wins for your business? - patio11

I thought, hey, since there are a bunch of smart people here, we might be able to share some little minor practices or projects we found were effective.  Sure, most things are business specific, but I'm betting we can all benefit a lot from some generally applicable tips.<p>My contribution:<p>I used to spend an unhealthy amount of time doing metrics navelgazing -- go to Google Analytics, go to payment processor logs, go to email, etc.  A good deal of it was just a nervous habit -- wonder how many sales I made today, wonder whether this month will be better than last month, etc.  And it always turned out to be the same four or five metrics.<p>So I build myself a dashboard on my site, which used APIs and data I already had, and put all those metrics on /private/dashboard, behind a HTTP basic password prompt.  This took me an hour and has saved me dozens.  Every time I find myself doing repetitive processes (looking up customer keys, etc), that process gets added to the sidebar on the dashboard.<p>Thus its one click access to a quick business health-check and two clicks to get to essentially anything I do more than once a month.  The ROI on time is impressive -- now instead of spending 5 minutes logging into my payment processor, clicking "access transaction log", and typing in parameters to answer the question "What are sales like this month as compared to last month?", its something I can catch out of the corner of my eye as I do productive work.
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moe
Welcome to the world of automation. This is also how many underdogs manage to
grab a slice from the "big players". You'd be surprised how many large
companies that could easily afford to optimize their processes just don't do
it.

You find dedicated people (or even departments) doing nothing but strictly
repetitive tasks. Things like filing invoices, keeping a stock of parts
according to a set of rules or even, like you said, aggregating always the
same information and mailing it in always the same format to the execs.

In every company that I have worked so far there were quite a few people who
could have literally been replaced by the proverbial shell-script.

Doing so (when appropiate) always gives you an edge because you'll be faster
and less prone to errors in that area than the meatbag-driven competitor -
plus you free up ressources for more interesting tasks.

~~~
pasbesoin
I've seen this / experienced this myself. It may sound cynical, but it is so,
so true.

Addendum: On the other hand, many of the people in those roles were quite nice
and willing to help, if you treated them like a human being. If you made your
case well, layers of bureaucracy could sometimes "jump" right out of the way.
Not always, but sometimes. Often, there was another layer of interaction
unofficially built in. Something to be aware of, when you automate. There may
be more going on than you realize, some of it offering real business value,
perhaps even making the overall workflow practical where it would otherwise
flounder and die.

Nothing, I guess, that hasn't been said before. I hate to see people labeled
"redundant". Often enough, they've been the ones effectively working around a
broken formal process, as best they could given the constraints applied.

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DenisM
In the same direction:

    
    
      -wrote a script to download daily sales data from iTunes and upload to google docs for charting
      -use http://www.moopf.com/appstorereviews/ to keep track of my reviews on iTunes
      -automated IIS6 deployment from empty machine
      -wrote an admin panel for the web site users
      -outsorced hosting 
        (I was tinking about buying a server to host my ASP.NET app at first).
    

I think this is all basic stuff. Interested to find what others have.

~~~
patio11
Does your language of choice have a Google Chart integration? Rails has a
couple options, and I have never found anything that gets "quick and dirty
chart" done as fast or easily. I currently use it for most of my dashboard
charts. While it has some annoying limitations it frees you from server-side
dependencies on image modification libraries and the resulting charts (static
images) can be accessed from a cell phone. (Some of the Javascript and Flash
solutions I've used don't handle that so well.)

This lets you ignore the whole annoying step of logging into Google Docs to
review the data -- just spit the URL for the chart directly into an image tag
on your panel, problem solved. It also greatly simplifies any sort of
"manipulate Google Docs' interface" step you might have, since you can just
write arbitrary parsing code in your language of choice and then spit the
numbers into the chart.

For additional sexy you can add any lightbox script you want and then have,
essentially, a Javascript zoom button for any of them in about 4 marginal
lines of code.

~~~
jreposa
Not for RoR, but for PHP I've had great success with
<http://pchart.sourceforge.net/>

Check out one of my quick and dirty graphs:
<http://yowzas.com/charts/view/0316017922.gif>

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aristus
When comparing technology vendors in a mature area I think it's good to pick a
new, smart entrant who's somewhat proven but still hungry. They are the ones
who get customers by competing on quality and features. Don't always go with
the default or the sexy choice.

"somewhat proven" is key. Don't shoot yourself by piloting something
experimental without the ability to fix it yourself or replace it in a hurry.

Know the technology well. Build the quick+dirty version yourself, then shop
around for mature software that does what you now know you need.

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brandnewlow
Every morning I wake up and read all the latest Chicago news, looking for
stuff to submit to my social news site or pass along to other users to check
out.

This was taking a long time and wasn't very fun.

So I created my own private alltop/tinyURLs for every mainstream media RSS
feed, local blog and the search results for "Chicago" for all the big social
media sites.

It's saved me great big gads of time. At some point I will possibly open this
up to others.

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skmurphy
Patrick, you've also mentioned this dashboard on JBoS. I would be interested
in licensing the script(s) from you. Contact info in my profile.

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izak30
Read non-important news once a week.

Check your e-mail when you're not working..not all day.

