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You started your business for freedom, not to be chained to your desk. I help small business owners grow without burning out through simple, powerful online automations.
On Streamlined Solopreneur you'll get real-world strategies, smarter workflows, and practical tools to help you reclaim your time and actually enjoy the freedom you set out to create.
Your host, Joe Casabona, is a seasoned technologist with over 25 years of experience. He's seen how the right systems can transform a business. But more than that, He's a teacher at heart.
His goal isn’t to overwhelm you with jargon, but to make complex ideas simple and give you an actionable plan you can actually use.
Because your business should support your life—not take it over.
Tune in every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.
One thing I did exactly once in school and never again was diagram sentences.
It never made sense as to why we had to do it to me. And for 99.99% of the population
after school, we never had to do it again. Heck
after fourth grade or whatever it was, we never had to do it again.
And while we never have to think about diagramming sentences,
that's not really the point, is it? The point is to show that you
understand the components
of a sentence and the structure
of a sentence. So even if
we don't explicitly diagram sentences
in our adult life,
heck, in our high school life or middle school life,
we still had to go through this crucial activity to grasp
how to put together a good sentence.
And I am thinking about this a lot as I teach the components of automation,
because you can just open up a Zapier canvas or a make canvas or whatever
and start to put things together.
But that would be a lot like just throwing a bunch of words together and hoping you
build a sentence.
Instead. It's crucial to understand the four components
of an automation, and that is what we are going to talk about today.
But before we get into that, I do want to say if you are unsure of the types of automations
that you can build or
that you should build, I have a new quiz out that will help you go to streamlined
fm slash quiz
and answer four questions based on your answers. I will recommend four automations
that will help you solve your most crucial problem.
And even if you don't use the exact tools that I use in these automations, you can
still see the how and why behind those automations. So again, that is over at streamlined
fm slash quiz to get personalized recommendations for automations based on your struggles.
All right. Hey everybody, let's get into it. The four components of automation. So
the way I'm gonna break this down is I'll give you the two most important, the two
requirements. We'll take a quick break for our sponsor
and then I'll give you the two optional, but very helpful.
And I should say at the beginning here that
I talk a lot about Zapier,
but this is really
any automation. And so I'll give some examples kind of outside of Zapier to help
you visualize or grasp
how exactly all of this comes together.
And then we'll talk through an automation that uses all four of these components.
And every automation starts with a trigger.
That's the first component. Number one, a trigger.
It's some event that kicks off the entire automation.
An automation can't just happen out of nowhere,
so you need something to kick the whole thing off. And it doesn't have to be some
complicated thing.
Most of the time it's not. It's a single action.
It could be someone signs up for your mailing list.
It could be that a file gets uploaded to Google Drive or Dropbox.
It could be that you push a button on your stream deck,
or it just could be a time of day 6:00 PM
All of these things are triggers that could kick off in automation.
And
to bring it back to something concrete that you
likely do yourself
automatic bill pay,
the trigger for that
is day of the month,
right? So if you have to pay your mortgage and you have automatic bill pay
on the first day of the month, the day of the month is the trigger.
So
that's a really simple one, right? Uh, if you have an email autoresponder,
the trigger is someone emails you.
That's the trigger.
So it has to be some event or
some thing,
some occurrence. We'll say
that kicks off the automation. And that is a requirement.
Whether or not it's you pushing a button, which is a more manual, but still an automation,
right? If you think about
autocorrect or text expansion, right? If you
type in some short key combination
and it expands, I do A DDR and it expands to my entire address,
you typing A DDR is the trigger.
So it's some
event that kicks off the entire automation, and that is a requirement.
Number two is actions.
So once an automation is triggered, one or more actions are performed. And here you
can have multiple actions.
When this one thing, this one trigger happens, do all of this stuff.
So if we look at our two examples from earlier, automatic bill pay, right? The trigger
is the day of
the month,
the action
is
the mortgage holder. The bank, I suppose, uh, the bank
takes money out of your account.
So that is the trigger day of the month. The action is
the institution that has the bill takes money out of your account
with an email autoresponder, right? The trigger
is someone emails you,
the action
is your email client sends a response letting people know that you're not in the
office or
for whatever reason, you only check email once a day. That, I mean, that's like a
hot take here. I don't,
I don't think you need to tell people that you only check your email at 3:00 PM I
think it's fine.
Uh, so
th those things are the actions, right?
Time of day, right? Maybe you want your outside lights to turn on at 6:00 PM right?
That's a home automation. The trigger is 6:00 PM
the action
is your outside lights turn on.
And one more. The trigger could be someone signs up for your mailing list.
The action is you send them a PDF
So that is the action.
Once an automation is triggered, one or more actions are performed. This is also
a requirement, right? Because without actions
have nothing you, you have a trigger that does nothing.
So triggers and actions are the two requirements for an automation.
And with that, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.
Okay? So we've covered the first two components of an automation. Those are
the requirements.
The trigger, which is some event that kicks off the entire automation and the action
one or more actions that happen once
an automation is triggered.
These next two are somewhat optional.
First, let's talk about the third component, which is the condition.
You can check for certain conditions to trigger actions as well.
This is what starts to make automations a little bit more complicated because now
you're doing some decision making.
So going back to our earlier examples
with automatic bill pay,
maybe the trigger is the date and the action is take money out of the account.
Maybe a condition is, but only if they have enough to cover the entire bill.
So maybe the condition is if balance is at least equal to the amount of the bill,
right?
This will happen, especially with mortgage holders, right? They're not gonna overdraw
your account. Or some banks have overdraw protection where your account can't get
overdrawn.
So a condition lies there, right?
With email autoresponder,
it could be the trigger is someone emails you, the action is you send a response.
The condition could be only email this person if they're already in my contact book,
right? Or in my contacts,
especially if you're on vacation, you don't wanna signal to any random person
that you're on vacation. They don't need to know that. Who cares, right? So that
could be the condition.
And then if we look at our
time of day,
right?
This is an actual automation for my home that I have
6:00 PM it's actually sunset,
but 6:00 PM is more concrete than sunset, right? It's
6:00 PM
turn my outside lights on,
but only if it's during the Christmas season, right? Because I have the Christmas
lights. So
it's 6:00 PM
between let's say November 20th
and January 10th.
If that's the condition, turn on the Christmas lights.
So those are the conditions. Really simple decision making here.
But it makes your automations even more robust
because now you're not just executing
on every action. 'cause that will require some management, right? And
in Zapier, it can get more complicated. Or in make.com, well make@make.com.
It can get more complicated where you can have these paths, right? Where it's like
if it's condition A, do this. If it's condition B, do this. If it's condition C,
do this.
But for the sake of this
walkthrough,
you trigger actions based on a condition.
And then the fourth component is timing.
So you can choose how often
your automations run.
You can choose to run them immediately
or at specific intervals. So now let's, we'll kind of get away from
our other examples because this is a little bit different.
The timing is essentially polling for
the automation to happen. It's checking at certain times, right? And, and sure,
right? Maybe with the automatic bill pay,
the timing is also the trigger, right? The, the day of the month is the trigger.
The timing is once a month,
with an email autoresponder,
the timing is immediate, right? You want to send that response
when you get the email. So the timing's immediate for that.
So those are the four components,
right? Number one is the trigger. Some event needs to kick off the entire automation.
Number two is the action or actions.
Once an automation is triggered, one or more actions are performed.
Number three is the condition. So you can check for certain conditions to trigger
actions as well.
And number four is the timing. You can run
automations immediately or at specific intervals. One more. I think good example
for timing for me is that I am subscribed to help a reporter out.
They email three times a day looking for requests from reporters.
And I don't wanna have to read through those emails. Sometimes there's a lot of requests
in there.
So I have an automation set up once a day. So the timing is once a day at 7:30 PM
Eastern time
where it will look for any emails from Harrow for that day,
and then look for certain search terms.
And
if it finds emails that match these criteria, it adds it to a spreadsheet for me
to review the next morning.
So that's a really good example of timing. It only happens
once a day. So
those are the four components of automation.
Let's walk through all of them. And I'll have a visual in the show notes for this
over at streamlined FM or
in the player where you're listening to this episode.
But here's an example of an automation where I
include all four components in one.
So the automation is
when a new database item is added to notion
add the email address
to two kit,
but only if they've opted in.
So I have a feedback form, you can see it over@streamlinedfeedback.com,
where for a while I was offering a lead magnet for people who submitted feedback.
And so you'd fill out your name and email address,
and then there was an opt-in to the email list.
So when someone fills out the form, that's
the trigger.
The condition is if they have opted in to join my mailing list,
send their information to kit,
the timing is every two minutes.
And I chose this timing. Maybe Zapier chose it for me
because there's no immediate, right? Some
triggers in Zapier happen immediately.
The service will go out and tell Zapier, Hey, this thing just happened.
the case of notion,
some of these triggers aren't. So Zapier actually has to go out to notion and be
like, Hey, are there new records? Right? Are there new items in the last two minutes?
So I could change the timing to every 30 minutes or every 60 minutes, but
I want near instant gratification here, right? I don't want somebody who signed up
for my mailing list
or who opted into my mailing list to have
to wait
to get the free opt-in.
So I chose every two minutes 'cause that's a
That's a reasonable interval.
So that's all four components. The trigger is new item added to notion
the action is add subscriber to form or add subscriber to kit.
The condition is only if they've opted in.
And the timing is every two minutes.
Now, I will include some visuals here so you can see how everything works. I also
have a video over on my YouTube channel where I walk through all of these
with the visuals, so you can see it over there too.
But that's it for this episode.
We talked about the four components of automation, the two required, and the two
slightly optional ones.
If you want to get personalized ideas for how
you can automate,
you can head over to streamlined fm slash quiz,
take the quiz and I will send you four recommended automations based on the thing
that you are struggling with the most.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode, and until next time,
I hope you find some space in your week.