Hey folks.
And welcome back to the small tech podcast by Ephemere Creative.
I'm your host Raph and today we're going to be talking about automation.
So specifically, I want to talk about.
Sort of internal process automation.
And the tools that you can use for that, why you should, why you shouldn't.
Pros and cons.
Um, and we'll dive into some of the specific tools that we've used.
Of course all of this in the context of small tech building a small tech business.
And yeah, let's, uh, let's get right into it.
So why would you want to use any automation tools for your business?
It seems pretty obvious.
You want to reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks.
You want to, give people more time back to do creative work or other types of work.
Specifically in the context of a small tech business.
I think there's a lot of work that we do across different tools, across
databases and spreadsheets and documents and email and I don't
know all kinds of other things.
Um, maybe your accounting tool or your, payment processor.
And when you moved back and forth between all of these tools, I think there is some
mental overhead, that's required for that.
This sort of context switching between one app and another, And
it just takes time to like manually move stuff around and computers are
really good at moving bits of data.
Around.
So why not use the computers to do that type of work?
There's a specific example in my mind of taking certain types of transactions
in a payment processor like Stripe.
Moving that into a CRM, making sure that a given user is properly tagged.
Based off of that maybe moving that information into a marketing automation
tool to automate some communications.
So that type of process where you're just saying oh yeah, this type of
transaction came through and we want to make sure that we have a record of
that in other tools that we're using.
To make sure that that triggers some other workflows or that the right
people are aware of that context.
That's the type of work that I'm talking about with, these
types of automation tools.
So that was the why, and the context of what you might do with them.
But why might you not want to use them?
Because they're not always, the right choice.
Sometimes it's better to have a human do these things even if a computer
could do them more efficiently.
In my experience, there's basically two reasons that you would want to
avoid automating this type of work.
The first is there is some overhead to setting up the automation, even
with the most user-friendly tools.
There's some debugging that you have to do.
There's just things that you want to make sure that you've got down properly.
If you're going to depend on this automation.
And the time required to make sure that all of that is working nicely if
that effort is not worth the time that it saves you, then don't do it.
Uh, if there's a task that takes you five minutes, once a week.
You probably don't want to spend a whole lot of time managing the automation
and specifically also the cost.
And yeah, maybe the dollars spent are just not worth it on those types of tasks.
The other side of it is once you start, depending on automations.
You are to some extent locking in, that process.
Of course you can make changes to the automation, but there's
a lot more friction in changing.
How different tools are connected.
Over changing just a humans.
Sort of behavior.
So if you just tell someone like, oh, actually we're going to stop doing that.
Uh, we're going to move this thing to this other tool instead.
Then you just tell them that and you're good to go.
Whereas if you were depending on these automations, Then you
have to either rebuild them or.
Re configure your tools to make sure that they aren't,
depending on this data coming in.
Um, so I feel like that wasn't a really great way of explaining what I mean,
but essentially, yeah, you, once you automate things, you are putting.
A process in place.
And moving away from that in a technical sense can often be harder than moving
away from that in a human sense.
That's basically it.
So yeah, let's talk about a couple of the tools that we have used, and
I'm going to break these down into sort of third-party automation tools.
And then I'm going to give you some examples of some
internal automation tools.
Um, Which will make more sense in a second.
Um, so the biggest name out there, uh, that it feels like
everyone knows about is a Zapier.
So Zapier is I think the one that just seems to have the most integrations.
So if you're looking to integrate tool X with tool, Y.
They probably have a marketing page that is very well SEO, optimized, uh,
that you will find when you search for how to integrate tool X with tool.
Y.
They seem to cover a lot of the tools that we have come across.
They make it quite easy to build workflows to automate all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, they are very, very, user-friendly lots of integrations.
Nice tool.
A little pricey.
Uh, I find, uh, and I've found that our clients have found.
Uh, that it gets a pricey faster than they would expect.
Another one that I have tried is called pipe dream.
This one is very developer focused.
They used to have a pricing system that I liked more than Zapier.
Now it looks a lot more similar.
Though, yeah, I think their free tier is perhaps still a little more generous.
And it's very focused on developers.
So you build your workflows in a very similar way that you might in Zapier.
But a lot of it is using text and code.
Even if you have sort of a visual builder within it, you're kind of
interacting with code and you can actually just write straight up code
quite nicely in there, which to be fair, you can also do in Zapier.
But I feel like the pipe dream experience is a little better optimized for, for
coding then, the Zapier code blocks.
Yeah.
So that's another interesting one, especially if you're familiar with code.
The third I want to talk about is called Make and it used to be called Integromat.
It costs a lot less than the previous two.
So if you are looking for something and you are on a tighter budget, I
would definitely look at that first.
I haven't used it in a few years, but one of the things I
remember being really interesting.
Is I think it, it fit nicely between a pipe dream and Zapier.
In that it had sort of, that user-friendly feel of Zapier while also giving you
some of the flexibility and tooling that you might want as a developer.
So for those developers out there who are listening to this, you could, for example,
integrate with arbitrary applications, kind of using OAuth and specifying, the,
the end points that you wanted to hit.
And, uh, yeah, you could, you could build pretty custom workflows using their tools.
They also had a really neat system to organize your, branching workflows.
At the time Zapier did not really have a great way of doing sort of conditionals
and moving down one branch of a tree.
It was all very linear.
Now Zapier has a bit of a better user experience in terms
of creating branch workflows.
Integromat now Make, has a really nice visual tree that you can, where
you can see how data flows through the tree and you can branch out
or bring things back together.
They also have ways to store data between tasks.
And move things around also between runs.
So if you just need to, I don't know, half a counter to say, how
many times does this automation run?
You can do that.
You can have a number that starts at zero and just increment it every time
it runs, stuff along those lines.
I mean, you can get a lot more creative than a simple counter
example, but, yeah, there's a lot of neat stuff you can do there.
So those are the third-party ones and essentially they all allow
you to connect to your tools.
So when a Stripe transaction comes in, move something into Pipedrive the CRM,
and maybe add a record in a spreadsheet.
And I don't know, maybe do something else and only do it on the condition
that that Stripe transaction, uh, is, uh, from an email ending in domain X, Y, Z.
So you can do that sort of stuff with all of these, tools, but there's
also internal automation systems that I think are worth exploring
and discussing in this same context.
And so a lot of project management tools like Assana and ClickUp, I'm
sure many of the others as well, have automations built into their systems.
And so with ClickUp, we have a couple automations that we use.
But you might say that, if you have a form for a ticket for a product that
you're building, that you want to move that into a particular list and you
want to tag it a certain way based off of something that the user submitted.
And, make sure that a particular, team member is notified.
You can do that sort of stuff with the automation tools built in to ClickUp.
Asana has something very similar, so.
I don't know if you change the value of a custom field to X, then move
it to list Y that sort of thing.
But even tools as simple as Gmail, I would consider, filtering and forwarding rules
to be automations that can save time.
So I use a, an app called a Reader.
Uh, Readwise Reader to go through newsletters and stuff like that.
And so I have a forwarding rule, for certain newsletters
that just sends them there.
And that saves me time.
And I think there's a lot of neat ways you can use.
Tools within Gmail or other, just standard work apps that you might not
think of as apps that have automations, but oftentimes they do have simple systems
to just make your life a little easier.
And I think that is worth thinking about in the context of automation.
So, yeah, that's basically it.
I think there's a lot of stuff you can do to save time and be
more efficient with automations.
There are some cases where you might not want to do that.
But there's yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff to explore.
So, if you want to hear more about this stuff, make sure to give us a
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And remember, we all want to do something good in the world.
So go out there and build something.
Good friends.
See ya.