The thing that resonated in this article was “how happy it made people” to help them automate stuff.
A friend runs an email/CRM agency in the entertainment industry. She does the creative stuff - story telling, crafting nicely put together emails to keep fans updated and sell tickets and merch etc.
She was talking to me about how much time she spend pulling together reports for clients - how many people received, opened, clicked, the revenue the campaign generated. She does this on a 24 hour, 72 hour, 7 day, 14 day and 30 day reporting window. So each campaign needs five reports creating. It was ruining her life - “I set timers so that I don’t miss the crucial 24 window but sometimes that means getting up at 6am to grab the data”.
She was doing this MANUALLY. I showed her how she could use an automation tool to create a dashboard in a Google sheet, do a little bit of data wrangling, automatically update on the reporting cycle, create a PDF and automatically email the client the dashboard link and PDF.
She’s a smart woman, she’s got a successful business. But she didn’t even realise any of this was possible.
It took me two hours to walk her through how to set things up. She has since built a bunch of other automations herself.
The problem was she had no idea it was possible and even if she had she wouldn’t have known where to get started because the terminology around the automation tools is obscure and knowing which parts of which API to query requires understanding API documentation.
Once she grasped the basics and lost her fear of the tools she realised how much stuff was possible using automation.
I wrote her a little python script that would do the same thing but she prefers the automation tool - because she can do it herself and debug when things go wrong.
A friend runs an email/CRM agency in the entertainment industry. She does the creative stuff - story telling, crafting nicely put together emails to keep fans updated and sell tickets and merch etc.
She was talking to me about how much time she spend pulling together reports for clients - how many people received, opened, clicked, the revenue the campaign generated. She does this on a 24 hour, 72 hour, 7 day, 14 day and 30 day reporting window. So each campaign needs five reports creating. It was ruining her life - “I set timers so that I don’t miss the crucial 24 window but sometimes that means getting up at 6am to grab the data”.
She was doing this MANUALLY. I showed her how she could use an automation tool to create a dashboard in a Google sheet, do a little bit of data wrangling, automatically update on the reporting cycle, create a PDF and automatically email the client the dashboard link and PDF.
She’s a smart woman, she’s got a successful business. But she didn’t even realise any of this was possible.
It took me two hours to walk her through how to set things up. She has since built a bunch of other automations herself.
The problem was she had no idea it was possible and even if she had she wouldn’t have known where to get started because the terminology around the automation tools is obscure and knowing which parts of which API to query requires understanding API documentation.
Once she grasped the basics and lost her fear of the tools she realised how much stuff was possible using automation.
I wrote her a little python script that would do the same thing but she prefers the automation tool - because she can do it herself and debug when things go wrong.