How to automate parts of your business to save time with operations

What is it:

Scribly.io is a content marketing agency offering scalable content marketing services for every business type.

What did I learn:

1. Product Strategy: Start with the simplest and fastest way to build something. Validation does not exist until you ship the thing you want to make. Until someone does an action or pays you money you don't really know.

Dani shared what product development strategy helped her get to where she is now:

“They're a patchwork,” Bell admits. But overall, it's “good enough, and usually good enough is perfectly OK.” In the long run, she might get big enough to hire a coder to make a custom system. But, for now, it works.

The principle I have learned here is learn from what you need then, what gaps or features are missing in the experience you can validate to see if you really need those by getting feedback from your users. By shortening the feedback loop you don't have to guess at what to do you can figure that out based on the feedback.

That is the key to lean building. And the key to this database, is finding out how others started small, but using the column "skill level" to see what comparable type of product has already been built using a "starter stack". So that you can spend more time building something people love.

2. No-code stack feature: Webflow>Forms>Airtable>Google Doc - How does it work? When to use automation to deliver a fast response. Customer quotes.
When a user submits a quote, the user fills out a native Webflow form. Then this form feeds to Airtable base. From there Dani can add business logic by filling in the text and information from the quote into a pre-built quote framework.

It's a bit like Mad-libs. Have you ever tried one of those as a kid. That's the exact idea here behind how to automate this process.

Then what Dani can do is use Zapier to send a draft of her template built in Airtable and merge in/fill in the text from the client into a Google Doc. Then from there she has an already pre-built draft. Huge time saver!

Now she can add customizations to the draft, add in special touches and print to PDF, and email to the client in under 24 hours.

Because she is not spending any needless time around building the draft, she can leverage that to researching the client. The more time she can research the client, the outsized value that she can offer the client and increase her chances at winning the bid.

No-code helps her give outsized value.

3. No-code tool feature: Book a call - Using Hubspot. Dani uses Hubspot as a way to book a call to chat about a potential project. Hubspot is a marketing, sales and service software CRM all in one.

Hubspot is expensive. If you are just starting out with a service I would recommend using Calendly to create a professional way to book a call. Calendly also has an integration with Stripe so that you can take payment for booking a call if that fits your model.

Dani is driving a business here that is established so using Hubspot makes sense.