
Ask HN: What tools do you use to automate your business? - yaseer
I imagine the HN readership loves to automate things.<p>I&#x27;m curious to know what tools you use to automate your business operations (if any).<p>For example, https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zapier.com is one such automation tool.<p>If you don&#x27;t use any tools, do you use any frameworks or systems you&#x27;ve made yourself?<p>If you don&#x27;t automate any parts of your business, why not? (I&#x27;m interested in the reasons why, not disputing the choice)
======
digitalsushi
I 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 costs a lot of money and we're not experts at it. So
it looks smart to use what exists as smart as we can. We take vendor ISOs from
microsoft, linux, et cetera and use Packer/Vagrant to build them up inside a
vSphere cluster. Packer is starting to get really good support for ESX 6.5,
which means we can build right off a datastore and flip the template directly
into our orchestration suite for "purchase". Our process is executed in
Jenkins Multibranch Pipeline. Our sysadmin-turning-developers are learning a
lot this year, and the Jenkins Pipeline is a great way to shield them from
details they are free to know but don't have the time for.

The core of our build environment is some reflective shell script that becomes
aware of its environment as it is loaded. We're able to abstract across
environments, datacenters, et al just by some clever situational awareness.
The basics always end up being the most valuable, and our little ecosystem
orbiting around a pile of terse, self-documenting shell scripts that any
sysadmin can understand has been a successful gambit.

~~~
Thriptic
I was not familiar with Packer. This looks great, thanks for sharing!

------
gk1
I 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.

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

~~~
gk1
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 and benefits well being, productivity, or revenue: Buy it. If
>$100 decide by Friday.

\- No calls on Fridays.

~~~
jonathanfoster
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](https://inside.bwater.com/publications/principles_excerpt)

------
anacleto
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 fail` event, send a Slack alert to your Customer
Success team AND to my engineering team.

\- Send a Slack alert and an email signed by your Product Manager when a
longtime paying customer reply to your NPS survey with less than 6

Zapier deals well with internal data but not so well with customer data (ie.
events or interactions performed by the end customers).

So, I've created a product that does just that. A few public interactive
examples here (no need to signup to play with it)

\- [https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-send-tailored-
onb...](https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-send-tailored-onboarding-
emails)

\- [https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-slack-
notificatio...](https://app.plainflow.com/workflows/recipe-slack-notification-
for-churn-risk-customers)

Curious to hear your thoughts.

~~~
philfrasty
[Praise]

[Explain]

[Shameless plug]

I approve.

just kidding. UI looks great. Does this go in the Intercom direction?

~~~
anacleto
Praise is fully deserved. We're actually even integrated with Zapier. [0]

Curiously a few people companies to use this product to supply the missing IF-
THEN branches in Zapier (triggering them via Webhooks)

> Does this go in the Intercom direction?

No.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/QigGupS.png](https://i.imgur.com/QigGupS.png)

------
Kluny
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 a simple one-page calculator to
sort the problem out methodically. Just javascript and jquery, looks like shit
on mobile, and it's still pretty crude, but it gives me a back-of-envelope
calculation that's enough for my purposes.

[http://rocketships.ca/srs/shipping/](http://rocketships.ca/srs/shipping/)

~~~
frfl
> looks like shit on mobile

No, it looks usable.

Just make it scale up so its no 25% of the page on mobile

This, in the `HEAD` tag, might do it

`<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1">`

~~~
Kluny
Sure, I'll try it.

------
greysteil
I 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](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 common one was banks accidentally charging back a payment twice,
and each bank had their own, totally bespoke complaints procedure for getting
in touch when that happened.

A couple of engineers and me spent a couple of days integrating with Lob and a
fax provider whose name I forget to automatically write complaint letters
every time the banks screwed up. Some of these were being sent to named
individuals for all Direct Debit complaints related to RBS, for example.

Needless to say, the banks fixed the problems that were causing us to need to
complain soon enough. :-)

~~~
jacobevelyn
Just wanted to say thanks for Dependabot! I'm excited to be trying it out with
`friends`
([https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/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!

------
singletoon
I 've built a custom ERP system, with Laravel & SQlite, to keep track of all
my clients' details, their hosting plans, domain providers and all other piece
of information I need. It sends automated emails when a hosting/domain has to
be renewed, as well as providing valuable info about my servers. There's
definitely space for further improvements, but up to now it gets the work
done, beautifully.

------
Chris_Newton
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, including
scheduled jobs, hooks from local programs like Git, webhooks from online
services, and various other things.

I also customise software UIs extensively. My text editor, graphics and other
creative programs, browsers, and other software that I use regularly are all
full of macros, templates, presets and the like, and often have reconfigured
keyboard shortcuts, menus/toolbars, or event triggers set up to access them
quickly or perform tasks automatically at appropriate times.

As for why I don’t use a lot of the modern, dedicated automation tools, it’s
not that I have anything in particular against them, but after building
software for the first few decades, I find it is almost always faster and more
reliable for me personally to do things the “old-fashioned” way. 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.

~~~
mk4p
> 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?

~~~
Chris_Newton
_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.

~~~
laittg
I used Zapier in about 2 months and had the same conclusion. It is still
easier and to write a few lines of code (Node.js in my case) to expose a REST
API, extract some fields and make a POST request to another service with an
authorization header. The benefits of using Zapier as an intermediary service
makes no sense for me.

------
hknd
I have a old-school fashion company where employees meet with clients and they
need to fill out a form with ~60 fields. Afterwards those form results need to
be transformed and inserted into multiple other templates.

I've automated this via Apps Script: An employee just fills out the form, and
everything else is done automatically. (and even more: the script also sends
an invoice to the client, creates a calendar event for the employee and adds
the order to an internal spreadsheet)

~~~
yaseer
Nice, I wasn't aware of Apps script, thanks! Seems like this should be more
popular than it is

------
client4
# Our business (smaller ISP) stack is:

* Xero: Accounting (I'm working to move to ledger). Automates sending of monthly invoices, CC import, etc.

* Lob: Letters and checks. I have python scripts that auto-generate a lot of the content to be sent.

* Python Scripts: Payroll, current financial health checking (expected income, what's in back, upcoming bills), text alerts for critical issues, etc.

* LibreNMS: Network health

* Mattermost: Internal communication

* Gitlab: Internal configs, wiki, script backups

* Amazon S3: Backups

* GSuite: Email/Docs/Sheets

* Zammad: Automated ticket and support site. We have templates replies for 80% of our support requests.

* Stripe: Automatic CC Invoicing, financial CRM

* Bench.co: Looking at setting this up to automate book keeping.

* Airtable: Customer signups, customer data filtering, pseudo CRM

------
nileshtrivedi
If you'd prefer an open-source equivalent of Zapier, have a look at
[https://github.com/huginn/huginn](https://github.com/huginn/huginn)

~~~
yaseer
This is great, thanks for sharing!

------
reubenswartz
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".)

~~~
suyash
Love your #1. Care to share more perhaps an example what you mean by themes
for different days?

~~~
erjjones
I did something similar to this in my startup days, it was called "FORMS".
This is where you take a particular focus for each day of the week.

\- Monday: Finances \- Tuesday: Operations \- Wednesday: Research &
Development \- Thursday: Marketing \- Friday: Sales

This allowed me to focus ON the business vs. IN the business.

------
mackmcconnell
I've been a loyal user of Mailparser for years. They provide an email address
where you can send any email (tracking, invoice, etc..) and it extracts data
based on pre-defined rules.

Then, you use Zapier to do almost anything with that data: send it to a google
sheet, use that info to trigger an email to your customer, etc... The
possibilities are endless.

My favorite use case was to use it for tracking emails sent out to our
customers. We would have fedex-generated emails from our 3PL sent to a
@mailparser address, which strips relevant info from the email, sends it to
our Sendgrid account, re-skins the email in our format and sends it along to
the customer as us. Won't bore you with the details, but we had a unique
challenge that required something like this.

~~~
chezmo
Great to hear that you like Mailparser and that you are using it since a
couple of years already! I'm the founder of Mailparser and reading your
comment made my day! :-)

I thought I should mention that we also launched a sister-product called
[https://docparser.com](https://docparser.com) two years. Docparser is
basically like Mailparser, but for documents (PDFs or scanned documents).

------
rrggrr
\- 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.

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

------
napolux
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.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
How does this process relate to your business automation?

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

~~~
napolux
Wrong, but thanks for trying :-)

------
dmuth
I use ScanBot to scan in all of my receipts and other important papers:
[https://scanbot.io/en/features.html](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.

~~~
tibu
How is this different from Evernote's scan function?

------
mherrmann
Every month, my Gmail address receives PDF invoices for services I consume. I
set up an IFTTT filter to automatically download the associated attachments
into a folder in my Dropbox. I then only need to go through that folder to
categorise these invoices for accounting, without having to piecemeal download
and process them through Gmail.

------
mewm
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

~~~
pr0tocol_7
Can you explain how you use Terraform to automate google calendars?

------
SakethRasakatla
My team has been using an all-in-one CRM named Agile CRM which has the
capabilities of most of these essential tools given below.

As a growing business, we needed all the help for running our business
smoothly. Here is an exhaustive list of all the best tools we needed:

1\. For scheduling appointments- A calendar app like Google Calendar 2\. For
lead generation - A lead prospector tool like Agile CRM to generate leads
through social media. 3\. For project management - Trello 4\. For cloud-based
mobile communication - RingCentral 5\. For email marketing - Mailchimp 6\. For
building landing pages - Unbounce 7\. For social listening, scheduling -
Hootsuite 8\. For help desk support - Clickdesk 9\. For SEO - Ahref, Moz 10\.
For competitor research - SEMRush 11\. For automatically checking your grammar
even while sending your emails - Grammarly 12\. Google Analytics to observe
website traffic. 13\. For building websites - wiz Interestingly, Agile CRM
covers most of the above necessary (the first 8 out of the 13 given) features
on a single platform. So, when we came across this CRM, we thought we would
start using this free tool to manage our customer relationships as well.

And instead of using 8 different tools It is the only comprehensive, end-to-
end CRM that delivers sales, marketing and support automation to help small
and medium businesses manage all parts of the customer journey, from a single
platform, in order to drive sustainable, scalable growth.

------
haveanupvote
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/](https://butlerfortrello.com/)

No affiliation, just a happy user.

~~~
codemati
Mind expanding on your use case for Butler for Trello? Their landing page is a
little unclear on specifics.

~~~
jameslk
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.

------
blunte
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.

~~~
graeme
With my accountant/bookeeper we use hubdoc, receiptbank, and xero.

Hubdoc collects monthly invoices from a lot of services. (You have to login
with them, but for less important services this is fine)

Receiptbank accepts invoices by email or scan. For other services which send
by email I created autoforward rules. For others like amazon which have some
personal and some business I filter into a folder and process periodically.

For paper invoices, you scan a photo and receipt bank extracts the relevant
data. (It extracts this data with emailed documents too)

Xero puts it all together, and also autocalculates things like foreign
exchange.

The best solution is probably a service like Bench though if it's available in
your area: a cloud bookeeper.

Having one has greatly improved my life.

------
petercooper
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/](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 payroll each
month, weekly reviews, or even minor daily tasks you need to remember to do.
It has group workflow for this stuff as well if there are multiple people who
need to do a single piece of a recurring task.

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

~~~
petercooper
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._

~~~
graeme
You're right, she is. Thanks!

------
nzoschke
AWS, particularly Lambda, step functions and budgets.

The business is a marketplace addon.

Lambda functions handle the webhooks to add, upgrade or remove the addon.

Step functions handle guiding new users through onboarding, by sending email
reminders automatically re-configuring the service based on customer actions.

Budgets make sure a customer is not using more resources than they are paying
for, and send email alerts to me and customers at various usage amounts.

I have extracted a lot of my AWS and Lambda software into an open source
boilerplate app:

[https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas](https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas)

It's amazing how little code and operations this business requires!

~~~
tomcam
Gofaas looks amazing. Thank you.

~~~
nzoschke
You’re welcome! Happy to share what I’ve learned building my own FaaS systems.

------
jgimenez
I automate _everything_ I can! But maybe if I have to recommend one way, I
would recommend Google Spreadsheets scripts. Similar to Visual Basic for
Applications in Excel, Google Spreadsheets support Javascript and you can use
them for infinite things.

Some things we use them for:

* automate the bank payments to our suppliers (exporting the table format in SEPA XML format)

* tweet some of our evergreen blog posts every day (note these scripts run in the cloud, the spreadsheets do not even need to be open)

* assist in the formatting of our newsletters (we write sections in Markdown, the script formats and uploads images to our blog, uploads the finished article and schedules)

We also use Zapier extensively. One particular automation I'm really proud of
is accounting: we use Zapier to collect invoice PDFs sent by email, later on I
wrote some scripts using Selenium to also log in and download invoices from
websites that do not send the PDF over email. This saved me tons of time. Then
a small script downloads the bank statements and puts each line in an Asana
task, this way I can do reconciliation: I find the PDF invoice for every entry
in the bank and put them together. It is very easy to find out which invoices
you didn't download yet, if an invoice still needs payment or if you were sent
an unexpected invoice. Lately I have refined this further and automated some
of the matchmaking too, using Apache PDFBox to read the content of the
invoices.

------
Xt-6
I am building a small tool to try to automate all the nudging around pull
requests. The dream is contact only the relevant people (as opposed to spam),
in an asynchronous fashion to avoid interruption. Example: Asking to fix
tests, remind them to do a review, asking to fix conflict with master, asking
to re-review, etc.

Alpha [http://www.reviewstatus.io](http://www.reviewstatus.io)

------
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/](https://nanobox.io/)

------
antonkm
I 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/](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.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I use Zoho Desk for tracking support tickets. It’s free up to I think 25
users. I deal with the emailed to me case by opening a ticket and copy/pasting
the email into it.

~~~
bensonn
I second Zoho, Zoho everything. I run a 1 person company and love Zoho. I
think their mail is far superior to gmail, their office apps are superior to
gsuite, invoicing is great too. I don't use Desk or many of their other apps,
but they have them, and are integrated with each other. In a way integration
is better than automation. Because it is integrated in one platform it is
available to all applications. I don't know if that counts as less automation
or more automation but I know it means less time spent on it for me. I have no
affiliation with Zoho beyond being a happy customer.

------
CodingAdam
Automation was quite a difficult task for us at first since we had all these
legacy projects that the effort to automate them wasn't worth it.

So what we did, was on the new projects we started using DeployBot, which was
very nice especially for the development team. Then we started to see what can
we do on the legacy projects and once we have more time from other projects we
tackle one older project at a time where we automate at least parts of it.

It can be a very annoying process especially if you have people in your team
who where used at a certain style of the process, but I think in the long run
it was worth it.

------
k1ns
I built a website test automation platform [0] that started out as an
automation challenge for my other side projects. It has proven itself useful
to others so I figured I'd turn it into my next adventure as its own business.

Automation is something that I believe to be a must-have for many areas of
business. ETL work, data entry, data collection, testing, etc., can (mostly)
be automated as they're all very replicable. This frees your hands to work on
the more important aspects of your business/job.

[0] [https://bastions.co](https://bastions.co)

~~~
graeme
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. Doesn't have to be front page (some people will just sign up for
the free trial), but adding it somewhere would probably increase free trial
signups.

~~~
k1ns
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 over to the registration page to see the
pricing. I see your point as far as adding a pricing page, I will do that for
sure.

~~~
graeme
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.

------
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](https://www.twilio.com/sms)

------
RandomBookmarks
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...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kantu-browser-
automation/gcbalfbdmfieckjlnblleoemohcganoc)

~~~
psteinweber
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?

------
alasano
As we get a lot of use out of Slack, I've created a bot which notifies people
of incoming requests in Salesforce through Slack, based on a load score
calculation.

They can claim ownership directly in Slack or assign it to someone else (who
in turn gets notified in DM by the bot). It has cut response time in half
across the board.

------
asar
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.

~~~
jpster
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.

~~~
asar
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.

------
SirLJ
The best tools are the once you build yourself, because they will work 100% to
your own specs... I build AI power robots to trade the market for me, and
would never use "automation" tools, especially hosted by 3rd parties, because
they will steal my ideas...

------
wareotie
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.

------
contingencies
Bank API integration, corporate credit card for partner and travel billing,
custom accounting and supply-chain management systems with automatic machine
translation, supplier shipment tracking, inventory and BOM tracking, github
webhooks, github oauth.

------
paulcole
Google Apps Script.

If you’re all in on Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc., there’s so much you can do with
GAS. I’ve used it for creating automated emails with charts pulled from
Sheets, scraping websites, analyzing my emails, rall sorts of stuff.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
I built a dead-simple inventory/bill of materials database on LAMP for my
small electronics manufacturing business.

I've considered making it into a SaaS product (sell your by-products!), but I
keep dragging my heels.

------
tosbourn
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)

~~~
WhiteOwlLion
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.

~~~
nexxer
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.

------
countryqt30
Trello for freelancer management and Google Docs for tracking campaigns, tests
and evaluating/rating how good our digital content performed

------
dalacv
Sikuli

~~~
voidmain0001
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.

------
CodeWriter23
What is anyone using for Marketing Automation?

------
Reedx
Not seeing much in the way of automating bookkeeping so far. What are folks
using to do that?

~~~
chrisgoman
Xero

~~~
mikejharrison
FreeAgent, it’s awesome.

------
namank
I've been looking at this space for a while. Will likely implement ERPNext
soon.

------
ivthreadp110
AutoIt3 for some windows automation. Python and bash/shell scripts.

------
viyu
Linked Helper & Follow Liker for social media

------
hb3b
Surprised Okta hasn't been mentioned here.

------
ThatHNGuy
IFTT, Jenkins, Docker-compose

------
dqdo
Humans

------
mlane921
ProcessPlan is a tool that allows you to map out any process that is
systematic and repeatable. You can then step through that process like a
decision tree. This video will show you how it works:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_a1TbM380&list=PLpAU9Y6nl6...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_a1TbM380&list=PLpAU9Y6nl6bltFIaGzACndufqltbXN7Az).
ProcessPlan also integrates with Zapier and has a full REST API, so you can
integrate with the tools you already use. Visit
[https://processplan.com/to](https://processplan.com/to) learn more.

Full discloseure, I work for ProcessPlan.

