Hi r/Entrepreneur! I used to post on this sub a few years ago but then I got busy and couldn't recover my old reddit account. Now that I have some free time I really wanted to talk about Automation again and decided to try this post!Many years back i made my first post on automation ( If you're not using automation you're wasting your time and money) and got a fantastic response (And, full disclosure, a few customers too). Today I'd like to talk about my favorite automation story.Disclosure: Together with my father I run three small businesses and also work as a freelance automation developer . Both of my businesses are highly automated and I've helped over 30 clients save more than a combined 100+ hours every day.If you'd like to read some of my past posts, please check them out here:If you're not using automation you're wasting your time and moneyAutomation #5: How one client made themselves unemployedWhy Automation Matters #3: How i achieved a temporary monopoly overnightExample #1: Saving 30 hours a week pulling dataA client came to me with a very common problem: They had a spreadsheet filled with data they were manually entering from various different websites. In this case, it was a huge spreadsheet with about 5,000 rows. Every row had a ZIP code, and a human would be manually opening a few websites, entering the ZIP code, captcha, downloading pricing data from each website. Rinse and repeat 5,000 times.Due to the accuracy required the client had hired not one but two VAs for the same task. Later they would compare both results to find any errors in the data.The cost? $2 an hour for 30 hours a week, times two. $120 a week, $480 a month. The script? $800. Time taken? 10 minutes. Every Monday at 10 AM the client gets an E-Mail with the data. No training VAs, no time spent trying to find & rectify errors.Example #2: 1 hour a day checking stockIn another example a client had an interesting problem. They had an Excel sheet of products listed on E-Bay & Amazon (Not their own listings). They wanted to know when any of these went out of stock.For this a VA would spend an hour a day, checking each listing & letting the client know which had gone out of stock. But more than just the money spent, this had another problem: The task was time-sensitive and often by the time the VA had notified the client it was already too late.The script here was one that could check all the rows in only a few minutes. And repeat that every 10 minutes throughout the day. As soon as a product went out of stock, an E-Mail notification was shot off in a matter of minutes. The cost? $500.Example #3: Automatically purchasing gift cardsA client needed to purchase undervalued gift cards on an Indian gift-card exchange. Instead of a simple algorithm however, they want to approve each purchase manually.In this case, a script automatically checked the website for new entries every 10 minutes. It'd create a Google sheet containing all such entries and E-Mail it to the client. If the client wanted to buy any of these, they would mark it on the Google sheet. The script would automatically purchase all marked gift cards on behalf of the client.Time saved? Unknown, as the venture wouldn't have been profitable without automation at all. Cost? $700.ConclusionWith each of my posts i try to describe a different way of utilizing automation. Automation is complicated, a lot of things that seem easy might be impossible and a lot of things that seem impossible might be trivial. Through these posts I'm hoping I'll be able to communicate a clear picture of the many things that can be automated.If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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