The Automated Startup: Where to Start

Hello Reader,

I’ve been trying to figure out a series to do because I do so many random things but the core of all of it seems to be “How do I automate more?” I love watching an email platform deploy an email campaign or a robot make my coffee in the SF airport.

It brings me such joy watching something I’ve systematically given orders to that can carry out repetitive tasks that shouldn’t be taking up our valuable brainpower.

The Greek poet Archilochus said, "We don't rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training." Then American habit man James Clear remixed his own to say, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” And I will wikki-wikki say, “I do not rise to the level of what needs me. I fall to the level of what I’ve automated.”

This series, “The Automated Startup,” will be an exploration of how to go zero to one, with one. That one being you.

Top 7 Products to Automate Your Startup

All the tech bros and the books they crib from say, “Fire fast, hire slow.”

But I’d say, “Do none of that yo. You never have to fire if you never hire.”

The old adage “if you want to go fast go alone, but if you want to go far go together” didn’t currently have the level of SaaS we have today. No, not the sass a three year old with a hand on their hip gives you, but Software as a Service. It is unlocking how to go fast and far alone.

Anything you can virtually think of is likely in some platform on the internet. You need to auto-populated contracts that go out before you start a job — Honeybook gots you covered. You manage a team of people that have to travel and it is an absolute headache tracking expenses, budget, accommodations, itineraries? Then you have Navan. Descript is audio and video editing around smart ai tools that use to take a real live human editor hours to do. Now it is done in a click. A lot is just a set it and forget it. Repurpose.io (cross social posting) , Snov.io (email campaign platform), Midjourney (ai generated art), and so on and so forth. And I have no doubt some of these will become relics to other all-in-one nonstop shops for all your business needs, but for now, the now of September of 2022 that’s The Avengers team of SaaS.

My business partner Amy and myself have had a big bevy of different kinds of businesses since 2019 and the amount of software that has come out since then would have saved us tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds.

I don’t think until this moment solo-preneurs have actually been able to be solo in output equal to the way a dozen person company use to be able to, but I believe from this moment forward that’s possible and the output will increase as the years go on, until we are all hooked up to dream machines birthing whatever reality we want.

The Five Major Areas of major Business are:

Marketing (getting the product to the right audience)

Finance (budget, taxes, etc.)

Operations (the teams that create the product)

Human Resource (managing of employees)

IT (the people that handle any of the tech the employees use)

I know all of that is a bit distilled but you get it, but with The Automated Startup model the areas of your business will now consolidate to:

Marketing (content creation and strategy)

Finance (financial management software, bookkeeping, and tax packet)

Operations (the tools and process to help you make your product)

These will be the areas I’ll be covering in future posts along with other frameworks to build the structure of your business in order to find systems that create your own Rube Goldberg machine that churns out resources for you to sustain your life.

Last Thoughts on Automating Startups

A robot/software is only as good as the information and the tasks it is given, so it is up to you to keep the fidelity as high as possible on both ends and if you tie those forces together you will see magic happen.

I love OJ… the juice… the liquid stuff that is squeezed out of a citrus fruit. Damn. That was harder than I thought. I remember growing up and being in charge of juicing the juice for breakfast and it was miserable. So much work for that sweet sweet nectar. I was in Budapest in 2021 and there was a man that juiced oranges ALL DAY at the Grand Market Hall! It was nuts, he had a system, his little juicing rig, but still to create the juice it took him a minute per large cup sold. And I got that large cup every day for 2000 forint equivalent to $4. I couldn’t believe that’s all that man did all day. A year later in Portugal 2022, I saw that this part of Europe had figured out the orange juice machine and they were everywhere. Starbucks even had it! It would cut the fruit and squeeze it around a ball and juice it all into a cup in less than a minute. It was almost hypnotic watching the process. And it only cost $2 euro and it got it to me faster and more efficiently than the Budapest man.

Just to breakdown the economics. Here is a a fresh squeeze vending machine—

This machine has the capacity of 130-180 oranges, each cup of orange juice takes approximately 3 oranges. In Budapest it is 50 cents for an orange, so if it takes 3 oranges to make a cup he’s spending $1.50 on just the oranges. So let’s say 180 oranges to make 60 cups of orange juice. 60 customers at $2 a juice. He’d make $120 on a machine a day, $60 profit. He currently is there from 8am to 2pm every day. That’s six hours he works before he leaves. He pretty much always has people waiting and sometimes his line is so long that people give up. So let’s give OJ man the benefit of the doubt that he can do a cup of orange juice and payment processing every 2 minutes. That’s pretty quick. So he can make 30 cups of fresh squeeze OJ an hour. That’s $60 so we multiply that by 6 and that is $360 dollars he makes a day on his best most constant, never stopping day. The machine caps out at $120 before it runs out. The machine will cost him 15.8 days of his maxed out efficient earnings to buy. However, he is only able to serve the amount that he is able to make and like I said at his busiest times he’s not able to service 25% of the people that want OJ and just aren’t willing to wait. He is losing around $90 a day on customers unwilling to wait. The machines can make the orange juice in 30 seconds after the processing fee which we can say takes people 30 seconds to select. A minute for process and delivery of orange juice. That means this machine can serve double the amount of people the OJ man can. So it can earn $120 in half the time it takes the man to. So it’s easy for this man to get to earning $360 a day he needs the machine to process three times the amount of oranges it can hold, so this man could go back three times a day to fill the machine. He can reach his $360 or he hires someone who has a booth next to him that’s there all day to fill the machine and he pays them $50 a day to do that. He earns $310 and he only has to bring the oranges in the morning, he could also outsource that and have the person who is delivering to him to deliver straight to the person he’s hired. His whole job that he spent 8 hours a day (travel, prep, work, cleaning) is now done for no hours. He is now free and he could buy another machine to see if he’s able to capture all that want the juice. It’s possible he could make upwards of $1000 a day on juice. $500 profit. These machines operate every day of the year, so he would make $176,000 dollars. That’s over three times more than what he did working full time and that’s with 3 machines that cost 15k.

That is what automation is and if you set it up right you’ll have the entire process juicing all your beautiful thoughts, products, and information without you.

How do we create a lot out of a little? How do you create something that lasts? Something that works while we sleep?

Automations.

It is the key to the machine and a less stressful life.

Welcome to The Automated Startup!

Let’s get churning.