I stopped trying to automate every part of my business
For a while, whenever I found something repetitive, my first thought was:
"Can I automate this?"
That sounds reasonable.
I'm building an automation system, after all.
So I kept connecting things.
Payhip to Make.
Make to Telegram.
Notion for tracking.
MailerLite for follow-ups.
Some of these workflows have been genuinely useful.
But I've also built things that probably didn't need to exist.
The funny part is that the automation itself wasn't difficult.
The difficult part was deciding whether the task was worth automating in the first place.
If something happens once a month, I can probably just do it.
If something happens every day and follows the same steps, that's different.
And if I'm still learning how customers behave, keeping part of the process manual can actually be useful.
I've started thinking about automation differently now.
I don't ask:
"Can I automate this?"
I ask:
"Will automating this actually remove work?"
Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes the answer is:
"Just do it manually."
I'm still finding the right balance while building NomadOS.
Curious how other indie hackers handle this.
Do you automate as soon as you can, or wait until the manual process becomes painful?
I wait until the manual process becomes painful and stable.
Early on I automated “check competitor pages,” and mostly taught myself to ignore a noisy inbox. What worked better: keep the weekly skim manual for a few weeks, write down which signals I’d actually act on (pricing, What’s New, hiring), then automate only that short list. Automating the learning loop too early just freezes a bad process.
Rule of thumb I use now: if I can’t describe the decision the automation should enable in one sentence, I leave it manual.
well for me i hate repetitive task, when i do the same task the second time am already thinking of automating it
This is great work — reminds me of some of the calls I've had to make building Xstream4K. What would you do differently if you started over?