RPA for Me (and probably some others indie-hackers)

Hey hackers.

I own a small HR-tech chatbot consulting biz with only 3 people in it. It's doing OK, but as a technical CEO, I faced a ton of different tasks in different contexts - from sales to emailing to occasional development, like all of us I presume!

When I look at these tasks with my developer's mind I can see patterns and algorithms which repeat itself again and again. Sadly I am extremely bad in properly documenting these patterns - until recently when I realized that I can document them (and execute them) in code.

So I made a simple program to read my mail and on every email request:

• notify me in my telegram bot
• get a slot from my calendar
• ask for details and send a templated invite to zoom call
• repeat it in 2 and 5 days
• if any answer - stop.

The next step will be to add meetings to my calendar (with calendly or more likely - by code directly).

This piece of ingenuity solves several pains for me:

1. It describes the process in easy to understand way
2. It lifts some routine work off me
3. It allows changing and experimenting on the process with source control

With some refactoring and abstraction this could be packed in a nice package to simplify automating of different tasks (what is also known as robotic process automation) which will allow anyone with basic programming knowledge to automate routine in their own daily workflows.

I started to wonder is it valuable and could it help some other indie-hackers to drop some pressure from their day-to-day operations? Maybe the ones who think that Zapier is a UI mess and UIPath way too expensive?

Some basic assumtions

• on start, there will be two message events: Gmail, Gmail calendar, and two output message events: telegram bots and email; couple basic tasks - email extractor, phone extractor, and CRON-based timer event.
• It will be based on .net core because I am .net fanboi (also I can use Roslyn to build my own "plain English" syntax and translate it to proper c#)
• It will be open-source because I will never have the time to add all possible integrations
• It will be loosely based on BPMN because I need some foundation in it
• If it ever will be monetized it will be ghost.org model: OSS + paid cloud hosting

Some doubts I don't have answers to

• you can do everything in Zapier without any code
• you can do everything in IFTTT without any code
• you can do everything in Zoho Creator with a little code
• you can do most things in AWS Lambda / Azure Functions with a little code
• you can achieve the same with several Python-based Robot Frameworks
• no indie-hacker will use C# or .net

So, should I go with it or should I take it behind the barn and shoot it?