Rise of the Automations

Automations used to be the superpower of big businesses, while the little guy was stuck manually adding new contacts to his rolodex. But with companies like Zapier, automation is available to the masses. Nathan Weill of Flow Digital walks us through automation for dummies:

1. No one is losing their job. Yet, anyway. Automation is a tool that rescues us from those tedious tasks no one wanted to do in the first place.
2. Automations are logic based. So if you’re good at if/then thinking, you can probably set up basic automations on your own.
3. They don’t take long to be up and running, around 5–15 minutes that’ll save you hours in the long run.
4. Look at all the SaaS tools you use (Zoom, Gmail, Slack, Trello, Airtable). If you’re using more than one, you can likely create an automation, so you don’t have to input data or follow up between platforms yourself.
5. If you’re intimidated, you can always outsource the initial setup. There are automation experts out there with big imaginations who can automate things you’ve never thought about.
6. Automation is 99.9% percent foolproof: It never has a bad day, forgets, sleeps, or takes vacation.

Some common automations

1. Connecting a website to an autoresponder to qualify leads
2. Sending reminder/follow-up emails for meeting and sales calls
3. Cross-posting on social media platforms
4. Asking for a review a set number of days after purchase
5. Onboarding new clients or employees
6. Collecting form responses on a spreadsheet

Quote

…a much more problematic question than ‘finding a place to store data’ could actually be ‘finding your data.’

—Cisco Engineer J. Metz discussing future data storage problems and solutions. He makes a good point. Have you looked at your maze of file folders or Google Drive recently? Yep, mine too.

App Ouches

WhatsApp wakes up — WhatsApp has finally added an audio speed increase feature that other messaging apps (like Telegram) have had for a while. While they may be late to the game, at least you’re not wincing as hard when you see the two-minute voice note from your boss that you can now listen to in half the time.