I thought building the AI workflow would be the hard part. I was wrong.
The idea sounded straightforward: monitor Reddit, use an LLM to identify potential client opportunities for freelancers, generate a draft reply, and save everything to Airtable.
I expected to spend most of my time tweaking prompts.
Instead, I spent hours on things I hadn't really considered.
One malformed JSON response from the LLM could break the workflow.
A duplicate RSS item could create duplicate records.
A small configuration mistake could make the whole automation feel "broken" for someone installing it for the first time.
That changed how I think about selling automation products.
People aren't buying a workflow because it's clever.
They're buying confidence that they can import it, follow a guide, and have it work without spending their evening debugging nodes.
So over the last few days, I've actually written more documentation, added more safeguards, cleaned up more nodes, and tested more edge cases than I've added new features.
Ironically, the product became much better after I stopped chasing features.
I'm still polishing everything before launch, but this project has already changed the way I think about productizing automations.
For those of you who have sold developer tools, templates, or automation products:
What was the biggest lesson you learned only after your first users started using your product?
I can relate to this. While building WorkflowAI, I realized that making the automation work was only part of the job. Turning it into something another person can actually import and use required documentation, a Quick Start Guide, licensing, testing, and thinking about the setup from the buyer’s perspective. Productizing an automation is definitely a different challenge from simply building one.