WEBVTT NOTE This file was generated by Descript 00:00:00.500 --> 00:00:01.220 Hey folks. 00:00:01.280 --> 00:00:06.529 And welcome back to the small tech podcast by Ephemere Creative. 00:00:06.590 --> 00:00:12.110 I'm your host Raph and today we're going to be talking about automation. 00:00:12.980 --> 00:00:16.400 So specifically, I want to talk about. 00:00:16.880 --> 00:00:20.030 Sort of internal process automation. 00:00:20.390 --> 00:00:24.530 And the tools that you can use for that, why you should, why you shouldn't. 00:00:24.929 --> 00:00:26.069 Pros and cons. 00:00:26.129 --> 00:00:31.349 Um, and we'll dive into some of the specific tools that we've used. 00:00:31.709 --> 00:00:37.559 Of course all of this in the context of small tech building a small tech business. 00:00:38.069 --> 00:00:42.059 And yeah, let's, uh, let's get right into it. 00:00:42.559 --> 00:00:49.269 So why would you want to use any automation tools for your business? 00:00:49.629 --> 00:00:51.219 It seems pretty obvious. 00:00:51.309 --> 00:00:56.050 You want to reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks. 00:00:56.050 --> 00:01:02.659 You want to, give people more time back to do creative work or other types of work. 00:01:02.739 --> 00:01:05.859 Specifically in the context of a small tech business. 00:01:06.189 --> 00:01:10.969 I think there's a lot of work that we do across different tools, across 00:01:10.999 --> 00:01:17.269 databases and spreadsheets and documents and email and I don't 00:01:17.269 --> 00:01:18.769 know all kinds of other things. 00:01:18.859 --> 00:01:23.309 Um, maybe your accounting tool or your, payment processor. 00:01:23.969 --> 00:01:29.850 And when you moved back and forth between all of these tools, I think there is some 00:01:29.850 --> 00:01:32.409 mental overhead, that's required for that. 00:01:32.719 --> 00:01:36.350 This sort of context switching between one app and another, And 00:01:36.350 --> 00:01:41.270 it just takes time to like manually move stuff around and computers are 00:01:41.270 --> 00:01:44.450 really good at moving bits of data. 00:01:45.200 --> 00:01:45.920 Around. 00:01:46.410 --> 00:01:51.420 So why not use the computers to do that type of work? 00:01:51.790 --> 00:01:57.080 There's a specific example in my mind of taking certain types of transactions 00:01:57.350 --> 00:01:59.690 in a payment processor like Stripe. 00:02:00.180 --> 00:02:07.470 Moving that into a CRM, making sure that a given user is properly tagged. 00:02:07.740 --> 00:02:14.360 Based off of that maybe moving that information into a marketing automation 00:02:14.360 --> 00:02:17.060 tool to automate some communications. 00:02:17.429 --> 00:02:21.149 So that type of process where you're just saying oh yeah, this type of 00:02:21.149 --> 00:02:24.479 transaction came through and we want to make sure that we have a record of 00:02:24.479 --> 00:02:26.999 that in other tools that we're using. 00:02:27.049 --> 00:02:30.560 To make sure that that triggers some other workflows or that the right 00:02:30.560 --> 00:02:33.530 people are aware of that context. 00:02:34.100 --> 00:02:37.780 That's the type of work that I'm talking about with, these 00:02:37.780 --> 00:02:39.760 types of automation tools. 00:02:40.060 --> 00:02:44.140 So that was the why, and the context of what you might do with them. 00:02:44.450 --> 00:02:46.910 But why might you not want to use them? 00:02:46.910 --> 00:02:50.070 Because they're not always, the right choice. 00:02:50.100 --> 00:02:54.840 Sometimes it's better to have a human do these things even if a computer 00:02:54.840 --> 00:02:56.130 could do them more efficiently. 00:02:56.820 --> 00:03:01.530 In my experience, there's basically two reasons that you would want to 00:03:01.530 --> 00:03:03.720 avoid automating this type of work. 00:03:03.990 --> 00:03:09.480 The first is there is some overhead to setting up the automation, even 00:03:09.480 --> 00:03:11.730 with the most user-friendly tools. 00:03:12.210 --> 00:03:14.370 There's some debugging that you have to do. 00:03:14.680 --> 00:03:19.390 There's just things that you want to make sure that you've got down properly. 00:03:19.450 --> 00:03:21.970 If you're going to depend on this automation. 00:03:22.570 --> 00:03:27.260 And the time required to make sure that all of that is working nicely if 00:03:27.320 --> 00:03:33.260 that effort is not worth the time that it saves you, then don't do it. 00:03:33.560 --> 00:03:37.070 Uh, if there's a task that takes you five minutes, once a week. 00:03:37.340 --> 00:03:42.050 You probably don't want to spend a whole lot of time managing the automation 00:03:42.080 --> 00:03:45.110 and specifically also the cost. 00:03:45.190 --> 00:03:50.470 And yeah, maybe the dollars spent are just not worth it on those types of tasks. 00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:56.540 The other side of it is once you start, depending on automations. 00:03:57.530 --> 00:04:02.880 You are to some extent locking in, that process. 00:04:03.570 --> 00:04:06.810 Of course you can make changes to the automation, but there's 00:04:06.810 --> 00:04:09.390 a lot more friction in changing. 00:04:09.630 --> 00:04:11.970 How different tools are connected. 00:04:12.630 --> 00:04:15.210 Over changing just a humans. 00:04:15.660 --> 00:04:16.830 Sort of behavior. 00:04:16.880 --> 00:04:20.450 So if you just tell someone like, oh, actually we're going to stop doing that. 00:04:20.540 --> 00:04:25.070 Uh, we're going to move this thing to this other tool instead. 00:04:25.440 --> 00:04:28.470 Then you just tell them that and you're good to go. 00:04:28.680 --> 00:04:33.540 Whereas if you were depending on these automations, Then you 00:04:33.540 --> 00:04:36.600 have to either rebuild them or. 00:04:37.270 --> 00:04:41.110 Re configure your tools to make sure that they aren't, 00:04:41.140 --> 00:04:43.450 depending on this data coming in. 00:04:43.900 --> 00:04:48.910 Um, so I feel like that wasn't a really great way of explaining what I mean, 00:04:48.970 --> 00:04:53.590 but essentially, yeah, you, once you automate things, you are putting. 00:04:54.130 --> 00:04:55.720 A process in place. 00:04:56.230 --> 00:05:02.830 And moving away from that in a technical sense can often be harder than moving 00:05:02.830 --> 00:05:05.770 away from that in a human sense. 00:05:06.490 --> 00:05:07.450 That's basically it. 00:05:08.410 --> 00:05:12.370 So yeah, let's talk about a couple of the tools that we have used, and 00:05:12.370 --> 00:05:16.420 I'm going to break these down into sort of third-party automation tools. 00:05:16.720 --> 00:05:18.790 And then I'm going to give you some examples of some 00:05:18.790 --> 00:05:20.440 internal automation tools. 00:05:20.860 --> 00:05:24.670 Um, Which will make more sense in a second. 00:05:25.090 --> 00:05:29.830 Um, so the biggest name out there, uh, that it feels like 00:05:29.830 --> 00:05:32.190 everyone knows about is a Zapier. 00:05:32.460 --> 00:05:39.690 So Zapier is I think the one that just seems to have the most integrations. 00:05:39.900 --> 00:05:44.250 So if you're looking to integrate tool X with tool, Y. 00:05:44.969 --> 00:05:51.450 They probably have a marketing page that is very well SEO, optimized, uh, 00:05:51.480 --> 00:05:56.190 that you will find when you search for how to integrate tool X with tool. 00:05:56.190 --> 00:05:56.550 Y. 00:05:57.039 --> 00:06:00.969 They seem to cover a lot of the tools that we have come across. 00:06:01.510 --> 00:06:07.870 They make it quite easy to build workflows to automate all kinds of stuff. 00:06:08.299 --> 00:06:12.750 Yeah, they are very, very, user-friendly lots of integrations. 00:06:12.810 --> 00:06:13.470 Nice tool. 00:06:13.890 --> 00:06:15.000 A little pricey. 00:06:15.420 --> 00:06:20.430 Uh, I find, uh, and I've found that our clients have found. 00:06:21.420 --> 00:06:24.810 Uh, that it gets a pricey faster than they would expect. 00:06:25.500 --> 00:06:30.120 Another one that I have tried is called pipe dream. 00:06:30.420 --> 00:06:33.689 This one is very developer focused. 00:06:33.720 --> 00:06:39.619 They used to have a pricing system that I liked more than Zapier. 00:06:39.649 --> 00:06:41.929 Now it looks a lot more similar. 00:06:42.329 --> 00:06:48.569 Though, yeah, I think their free tier is perhaps still a little more generous. 00:06:49.109 --> 00:06:53.639 And it's very focused on developers. 00:06:53.819 --> 00:07:01.709 So you build your workflows in a very similar way that you might in Zapier. 00:07:02.189 --> 00:07:06.150 But a lot of it is using text and code. 00:07:06.549 --> 00:07:10.269 Even if you have sort of a visual builder within it, you're kind of 00:07:10.269 --> 00:07:13.869 interacting with code and you can actually just write straight up code 00:07:14.239 --> 00:07:18.260 quite nicely in there, which to be fair, you can also do in Zapier. 00:07:18.599 --> 00:07:26.849 But I feel like the pipe dream experience is a little better optimized for, for 00:07:26.879 --> 00:07:29.709 coding then, the Zapier code blocks. 00:07:30.279 --> 00:07:30.519 Yeah. 00:07:30.519 --> 00:07:33.879 So that's another interesting one, especially if you're familiar with code. 00:07:34.339 --> 00:07:40.609 The third I want to talk about is called Make and it used to be called Integromat. 00:07:41.569 --> 00:07:44.029 It costs a lot less than the previous two. 00:07:44.309 --> 00:07:48.839 So if you are looking for something and you are on a tighter budget, I 00:07:48.839 --> 00:07:50.999 would definitely look at that first. 00:07:51.659 --> 00:07:55.529 I haven't used it in a few years, but one of the things I 00:07:55.529 --> 00:07:57.509 remember being really interesting. 00:07:58.499 --> 00:08:04.139 Is I think it, it fit nicely between a pipe dream and Zapier. 00:08:04.679 --> 00:08:11.489 In that it had sort of, that user-friendly feel of Zapier while also giving you 00:08:11.489 --> 00:08:15.749 some of the flexibility and tooling that you might want as a developer. 00:08:16.109 --> 00:08:22.559 So for those developers out there who are listening to this, you could, for example, 00:08:22.609 --> 00:08:29.829 integrate with arbitrary applications, kind of using OAuth and specifying, the, 00:08:29.879 --> 00:08:31.589 the end points that you wanted to hit. 00:08:31.649 --> 00:08:37.729 And, uh, yeah, you could, you could build pretty custom workflows using their tools. 00:08:38.230 --> 00:08:45.150 They also had a really neat system to organize your, branching workflows. 00:08:45.430 --> 00:08:50.980 At the time Zapier did not really have a great way of doing sort of conditionals 00:08:50.980 --> 00:08:53.500 and moving down one branch of a tree. 00:08:53.840 --> 00:08:55.190 It was all very linear. 00:08:55.640 --> 00:08:59.120 Now Zapier has a bit of a better user experience in terms 00:08:59.120 --> 00:09:00.770 of creating branch workflows. 00:09:01.340 --> 00:09:08.580 Integromat now Make, has a really nice visual tree that you can, where 00:09:08.580 --> 00:09:12.850 you can see how data flows through the tree and you can branch out 00:09:12.850 --> 00:09:14.380 or bring things back together. 00:09:14.660 --> 00:09:18.140 They also have ways to store data between tasks. 00:09:18.770 --> 00:09:21.980 And move things around also between runs. 00:09:22.010 --> 00:09:25.130 So if you just need to, I don't know, half a counter to say, how 00:09:25.130 --> 00:09:26.810 many times does this automation run? 00:09:27.350 --> 00:09:28.460 You can do that. 00:09:28.490 --> 00:09:32.840 You can have a number that starts at zero and just increment it every time 00:09:32.840 --> 00:09:34.920 it runs, stuff along those lines. 00:09:35.580 --> 00:09:38.700 I mean, you can get a lot more creative than a simple counter 00:09:38.700 --> 00:09:41.750 example, but, yeah, there's a lot of neat stuff you can do there. 00:09:42.110 --> 00:09:45.230 So those are the third-party ones and essentially they all allow 00:09:45.230 --> 00:09:47.840 you to connect to your tools. 00:09:47.870 --> 00:09:53.760 So when a Stripe transaction comes in, move something into Pipedrive the CRM, 00:09:53.790 --> 00:09:57.180 and maybe add a record in a spreadsheet. 00:09:57.660 --> 00:10:02.220 And I don't know, maybe do something else and only do it on the condition 00:10:02.220 --> 00:10:10.220 that that Stripe transaction, uh, is, uh, from an email ending in domain X, Y, Z. 00:10:10.770 --> 00:10:14.990 So you can do that sort of stuff with all of these, tools, but there's 00:10:14.990 --> 00:10:19.640 also internal automation systems that I think are worth exploring 00:10:19.640 --> 00:10:21.650 and discussing in this same context. 00:10:22.130 --> 00:10:25.220 And so a lot of project management tools like Assana and ClickUp, I'm 00:10:25.220 --> 00:10:30.340 sure many of the others as well, have automations built into their systems. 00:10:30.790 --> 00:10:34.780 And so with ClickUp, we have a couple automations that we use. 00:10:35.030 --> 00:10:41.090 But you might say that, if you have a form for a ticket for a product that 00:10:41.090 --> 00:10:46.890 you're building, that you want to move that into a particular list and you 00:10:46.890 --> 00:10:52.030 want to tag it a certain way based off of something that the user submitted. 00:10:52.690 --> 00:10:57.170 And, make sure that a particular, team member is notified. 00:10:57.440 --> 00:11:01.170 You can do that sort of stuff with the automation tools built in to ClickUp. 00:11:01.230 --> 00:11:04.020 Asana has something very similar, so. 00:11:04.680 --> 00:11:10.980 I don't know if you change the value of a custom field to X, then move 00:11:10.980 --> 00:11:14.360 it to list Y that sort of thing. 00:11:14.410 --> 00:11:21.840 But even tools as simple as Gmail, I would consider, filtering and forwarding rules 00:11:21.890 --> 00:11:24.170 to be automations that can save time. 00:11:24.500 --> 00:11:28.940 So I use a, an app called a Reader. 00:11:29.360 --> 00:11:34.160 Uh, Readwise Reader to go through newsletters and stuff like that. 00:11:34.730 --> 00:11:39.440 And so I have a forwarding rule, for certain newsletters 00:11:39.470 --> 00:11:41.030 that just sends them there. 00:11:41.480 --> 00:11:42.740 And that saves me time. 00:11:42.930 --> 00:11:46.590 And I think there's a lot of neat ways you can use. 00:11:47.250 --> 00:11:53.030 Tools within Gmail or other, just standard work apps that you might not 00:11:53.030 --> 00:11:58.490 think of as apps that have automations, but oftentimes they do have simple systems 00:11:58.490 --> 00:12:00.560 to just make your life a little easier. 00:12:00.590 --> 00:12:05.180 And I think that is worth thinking about in the context of automation. 00:12:05.780 --> 00:12:07.750 So, yeah, that's basically it. 00:12:07.750 --> 00:12:10.720 I think there's a lot of stuff you can do to save time and be 00:12:10.720 --> 00:12:12.250 more efficient with automations. 00:12:12.560 --> 00:12:15.860 There are some cases where you might not want to do that. 00:12:16.170 --> 00:12:19.410 But there's yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff to explore. 00:12:19.980 --> 00:12:24.750 So, if you want to hear more about this stuff, make sure to give us a 00:12:24.750 --> 00:12:29.070 rating in your podcast app of choice, like, and subscribe on YouTube 00:12:29.070 --> 00:12:31.050 and all of that other fun stuff. 00:12:31.440 --> 00:12:35.640 And remember, we all want to do something good in the world. 00:12:35.640 --> 00:12:38.100 So go out there and build something. 00:12:38.100 --> 00:12:39.270 Good friends. 00:12:39.660 --> 00:12:40.100 See ya.