There's a saying: "The cobbler's children have no shoes." Over years of working in the software industry, I've seen how true this is countless times. While building great systems for other companies, we were still running our own business with Excel spreadsheets and sticky notes. Until one day something embarrassing happened.
The Embarrassing Beginning
Last year, we received an email from a potential customer. They had filled out our contact form requesting information about automation solutions. Between the time they filled out the form and when we saw it, three full days had passed. Three days. As an automation company.
Even Worse
That moment forced us to look in the mirror. As a company that automates other businesses' processes, our own processes were completely disorganized:
- Customer inquiries were getting lost in the inbox
- Proposals were being written from scratch every time
- We sometimes forgot to send project updates to customers
First Step: Drinking Our Own Medicine
We made our decision. We would test the solutions we offer to our customers on ourselves first. We would understand them better, and this embarrassing situation would never happen again.
The reason we chose n8n was simple: it's open-source, flexible, and we could run it on our own servers. Knowing where our customer data is located was important to us.
To Be Honest
First Automation: Contact Form
Our first project seemed simple: Get an automatic notification when someone fills out the contact form and save the lead to a spreadsheet.
In theory, a 30-minute job. In practice? We struggled for three days.
- First, we set up the webhook wrong
- Then Turkish characters in Slack notifications were garbled
- Then the Google Sheets connection only worked at night for some reason
Every problem we solved revealed a new one. Just when we were about to say "this isn't going to work," at the end of the third day, everything started working.
The feeling at that moment was indescribable. A Slack notification popped up on my phone: "New lead: Mr. Mehmet wants automation for his e-commerce site." At the same time, when I looked at Google Sheets, the record was there. The automatic response email had already been sent.
Proposals and Invoices: Minutes Instead of Hours
Our second project was the proposal preparation process. Previously, we wrote every proposal from scratch. Even the simplest proposal took 45 minutes.
Now the process works like this: We enter basic information into the customer card in Notion. With one button press, n8n grabs the template, fills in the information, creates a PDF, and automatically sends it to the customer.
Result
Project Updates: Customers Know Without Asking
The most common message we used to get from customers was "What's the project status?"
Now an automatic weekly report goes out every Friday at 10:00 AM. It pulls the project status from Notion, lists what was completed this week and what's planned for next week, and creates a personalized email for the customer.
Thanks to these reports, I can give my boss information without having to ask.
— One of Our Customers
Hearing this sentence made all our efforts worth it.
What We Learned
First: Perfect is the enemy of good
Our first automations were basic. But they worked. Starting with something that works is more important than waiting for perfection.
Second: Every automation reveals another need
This is an endless journey, but the nice part is: with every step, things get a little easier.
Third: People are still at the center
Automation takes over repetitive tasks, leaving time for creative work.
Your Turn
If you're reading this, you probably have repetitive tasks that are overwhelming you too.
I'm curious: What's your most time-consuming, repetitive task? Which process would make your life easier if you automated it?