What should I automate next?
Sup everyone 👋,
I want to launch a TON of micro-SaaS projects this winter.
But first, I'm taking a serious look at my workflow and trying to automate all the sources of friction.
I want to be able to go from idea to MVP in PROD in a day, if not faster.
The first step was to automate my domain purchasing to deployed application workflow, which usually takes me anywhere from 2-3+ hours normally. I got it down to 30 seconds. 😏
Check it out:
What should I automate next?
That's very cool. Especially that you're encrypting it immediately as well. What about automatic deployment of customer feedback such as chat/Zendesk?
The collection of tools you're building would be valuable by themselves.
Thanks for the comment!
Automating customer chat/Zendesk tools is definitely on the list, as well as other must have services nowadays (email, stripe, etc.) I'll probably make these optional via a config flag in the command line.
Interesting idea about the tools themselves being valuable. 🤔
Right now I see it as me having an ideas list with 150+ items in it and If I want to start chipping away at that list, I need to be launching projects as fast as possible!
Automate invoices using invoiless (https://invoiless.com).
Automate book-keeping by pulling numbers from different sources?
Do you mean bookkeeping of all the services you pay for in order to run your side projects?
No, book-keeping for the income. Daily sales entry that consolidates income from different sources, converts currency if necessary, and passes a journal entry.
I can't be the only one who has this pain point?
Ah, interesting. I don't have that problem as I don't have any income outside of my day job! 😅
What are all the income sources you would want aggregated?
Maybe my case is more unique, but I feel others run into this issue as well. I get income from a plugin marketplace, from a payment gateway 2CheckOut, and two different Stripe accounts.
I did actually manage to automate it by writing a script that pulls info from all these sources and uses QB's weird api to make entries.
Interesting. Do these sources have APIs or do they send you emails, does the info just live in their web dashboard, or something else?
I'll mock something up and send it over to you!
Wow, that’s insane haha. How many ideas do you have that you want to put into PROD over the winter?
I’m going to launch 3 micro SaaS products by the end of the year. Nothing big, just useful tools that can save people time/money. Maybe they can make me a little MRR while I’m at it.
My ideas list is at least 150 items long. I’m not saying they’re all good ideas, though!
Would it be interesting if I shared my ideas list and the process on how I decided which ideas to work on this winter?
Yea, I’d definitely love to see that!
Sweet, I’ll send you draft post when it’s written! 😀
Did you ever publish this, happy to review it with you and see if I can help sort by what is salable quickly.
Looking forward to it!
Good luck!
Thanks!
I would like to see automation for putting invoices into a spreadsheet.
Are you talking about the invoices that a side project may receive from all the services it uses?
Well yes, you could put it like that. I have a small income from a business and I spend a few minutes renaming files and adding them as a reference in a spreadsheet. I also include the prices from the invoices in this spreadsheet.
Interesting. I’ve thought of an automation like this but it’s really way down the list of things to build.
My idea was more so a running ticker on how much it’s costing me a month to run each side project and then a breakdown of those expenses and services.
Do you receive all the invoices via email? What do you do for the expenses without invoices?
"Do you receive all the invoices via email? What do you do for the expenses without invoices?" --> I receive everything through email.
"My idea was more so a running ticker on how much it’s costing me a month to run each side project and then a breakdown of those expenses and services."
--> do you mean hours for each project?
Nah, I meant the actual services I’m paying for.
Regarding email, I’ll build a quick prototype this weekend and send it over to you!
Ah interesting. I've got a very similar script for automating the setup for letsencrypt when I launch a new project. I also wrote it in Ruby and it was very painless since you can just throw a shell command between backticks and Ruby passes it to the system. Better yet, you can interpolate variables in them.
It's a joy compared to the scripting experience of other languages I've worked with, like Python or Go.
It only took me dozens of side projects and wasted hours before I realized “I should automate this” lol.
And yes, Ruby for scripting is so fun.
What else have you automated?
Quite a bit... I recorded a whole podcast on it. One easily sharable one is I automated checking and recording my YT, Twitter and traffic stats.
That's so cool!
May I ask how you're automating it?
Thanks!
Currently everything is in a little Ruby script. I make API calls to my DNS Registrar (DNS Simple) as well as GitHub and heroku.
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