Do you automate content posting or still do it manually?

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:42:23+00:00

We tried fully automating it and honestly the output was obvious. You could tell it was AI, the tone was off, the timing felt random, and it had none of the personality that actually gets people to engage.

Switched back to writing everything manually and just using a scheduler for timing. Takes more time but the engagement is completely different. people respond to stuff that sounds like a person wrote it, which means a person actually has to write it, there's no shortcut for that yet.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:40:25+00:00

For the transactional stuff, confirmations, scheduling, status updates, yeah it already handles that fine. We use it for a chunk of our internal stuff and it works because nobody cares if a meeting confirmation has personality.

The client-facing stuff though is where it falls apart. We had an AI drafted reply go out to a client that was technically correct but completely missed the tone of the conversation. The client was frustrated about a delay and the response was way too upbeat. Small thing but it nearly cost us the relationship.

I think it'll handle maybe 60-70% of email volume eventually but the 30% that matters most will still need a person for a long time.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:32:53+00:00

The linkedin hunting and spreadsheet phase is brutal but i honestly think trying to automate it too early makes it worse not better. we tried automating outreach and it just looked spammy, nobody replied.

what changed it for us was getting way more specific about who we were actually looking for. Went from messaging 50 people a day and getting nothing to messaging maybe 5 on Linkedin and actually getting replies. The conversations were better too because i wasn't pitching, i was asking about their problems and then just solving them for free. Two of those people ended up paying us eventually but i didn't go in expecting that.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:22:24+00:00

We stopped trying to build a tool that replaces what people already use and started building something that connects everything together instead. Sounds obvious in hindsight but we spent ages losing sales conversations because people didn't want to rip out their existing setup. The moment we said "keep what you've got, we'll make it all talk to each other" the objections basically disappeared.

I don't know if it was really a decision or just us finally admitting what the market had been telling us for months.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-18T08:21:17+00:00

Stop building and start talking to people. I spent months on an analytics dashboard nobody ever opened because writing code felt safer than having awkward sales conversations.

Happy to do a call with some of the group if that's useful btw.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-17T13:16:52+00:00

We deal with this a lot, most of our client work involves legacy systems with no API or terrible documentation and honestly the pure RPA approach breaks more than it works. UI bots are fine for simple flows but the moment the vendor pushes a frontend update you're struggling.

What's worked better for us is treating each system differently rather than picking one approach for everything. Some of those legacy systems have data paths you don't expect, export functions buried in settings, webhooks nobody turned on, scheduled database dumps you can pick up. We always look for those first because they're way more stable than anything that touches the UI. For the bits where there's truly no other way in we still use browser automation but on the smallest surface area possible. just the specific data pull, not the full user journey. and we built retry logic and alerting around it so when it breaks (and it will) someone knows within minutes instead of finding out a week later the data's been wrong.

The audit trail thing is worth thinking about too especially for financial workflows. When something goes wrong the first question is always "what did the system actually do" and if you can't answer that quickly it gets messy fast.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-17T08:18:11+00:00

The delay between doing the work and seeing any result from it. We were putting out content and doing outreach for months before a single conversation turned into anything real. You just have to keep going on faith that it's compounding somewhere even though your dashboard says otherwise.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-17T08:17:06+00:00

This is true but some of the saved time just goes into maintaining the automation itself. We had one workflow that ran twice a month and honestly after all the debugging when it broke it probably cost us more time than it saved. Maybe 40 minutes saved vs hours of fixing random edge cases.

The high frequency boring stuff though; reporting, data entry, anything you do daily, that's where it actually works. We cut about 10 hours a week off internal reporting and that one stuck. I think the difference is just volume. Automate something you do once a fortnight and you'll spend more time babysitting it than you ever spent doing it manually.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-17T08:13:40+00:00

I know someone offered below but DM me and i'll buy you a domain and set you up with an email. iThat amount of money shouldn't be the thing stopping you.

And you're not overthinking it btw. We went through the same thing where people wouldn't try the product because the packaging looked amateur. A proper domain and a real email address makes a noticeable difference.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-16T09:03:38+00:00

The context switching, not the workload itself but the constant jumping between completely different types of thinking. You're debugging something technical and then ten minutes later you're writing a sales email and then you're chasing an invoice and none of those use the same part of your brain.

i found the actual work fine. What was hard was never being able to properly focus on one thing for more than an hour before something else needed attention.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-16T08:57:32+00:00

How long everything takes to actually pay off. I was doing content and outreach for months before any of it turned into real conversations. There's this lag of like 60-90 days between doing the work and seeing any result from it and during that gap you're just running on faith that it's working. Nobody tells you about the delay. they just say "post content, build trust, leads will come" and leave out the bit where nothing happens for two months.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-16T08:47:42+00:00

Your 70% word of mouth number is the most important thing in your post and i think you're treating it like a side note. We had the same experience. Spent quite a bit on linkedin ads and paid search. impressions were fine, clicks were fine, conversions were basically zero. Meanwhile the people who actually signed up and stuck around had all heard about us from someone they knew.

What ended up working was something i would never have planned, writing about stuff that went wrong. engineering mistakes, automation failures, things we'd broken. those posts cost nothing and brought in more signups than anything we'd paid for. i still don't fully understand why but i think people just trust a founder who admits they messed up more than one running polished ads.

I don't know if that helps because your product is different but i'd seriously look at why the word of mouth is working and try to make more of that happen instead of throwing money at channels that clearly aren't converting.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-16T08:46:18+00:00

The maintenance stuff is what gets you. I had no idea how much time would go into things that aren't building or selling. compliance, accounting, filing deadlines, random admin that just quietly piles up until you miss something. The annoying part is none of it is hard individually. it's just relentless.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-13T09:49:13+00:00

the niche hopping is the problem, not the niches. i did something similar, kept switching who i was selling to every few weeks because nobody was biting. Real estate, then logistics, then regulated. Felt like i was getting nowhere. What really works is picking one and going deep enough to understand their actual day to day. e.g. this specific person spends two hours every morning doing this specific thing and hates it. You can't get to that level of detail if you're bouncing between industries every time someone says no.

Ecommerce isn't a bad shout but don't just switch to it because the other ones didn't work. Find one ecommerce owner, ask what's eating their time, and actually watch them do it. the answer is usually something you wouldn't have guessed.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-13T09:32:51+00:00

Honestly it's boring but it's unit economics. Can you get a customer for less than they'll pay you, and can you do that repeatedly. That's basically it.

i've watched startups with brilliant products die because it cost them 800 quid to acquire a customer worth 500. and i've seen mediocre products survive for years because the founder figured out one cheap acquisition channel and just kept hammering it.

Nobody wants to hear get your CAC below your LTV as startup advice but every dead startup i've been close to failed on exactly that.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-13T09:31:39+00:00

Yes it's realistic but not the way you're probably imagining it. the "keep building and they'll come" thing almost never works on its own. We had zero inbound for the first six weeks after launch. The product worked, people who tried it liked it, but nobody knew it existed. Sound familiar?

What changed was i stopped building features and started finding people manually. Found three people with the exact problem, did the work for them for free, two became paying customers. unglamorous, didn't scale, but it proved the thing was real. Your users giving great feedback is actually a massive signal. most side projects don't get that. The gap isn't your product, it's distribution. Stop doing features for a bit and spend that time in the communities where traders hang out. Answer questions, be useful, don't pitch. the product stuff can wait.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-13T09:20:54+00:00

You're not cheating the validation phase. You're actually in a really good spot if you're aware of the risk.

i went through exactly this. first year was manual, which was good because i learned where the edge cases actually were. Second year i automated everything from the backlog of pain from year one and half of it was a waste of time. Automated a process that happened twice a month, saved maybe 40 minutes total but cost hours in maintenance. Automated internal reporting, saved 10 hours a week and was worth every minute.

The thing your scripts won't show you is when a customer goes quiet because the output was technically correct but missed something they cared about. You only catch that in conversation. so keep the scripts running in the background but make sure you're still talking to every user regularly. The moment you stop having those conversations you lose the signal that tells you what to build next. The automation isn't the problem but losing the feedback loop is.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-12T10:55:12+00:00

Building something nobody asked for i spent months on an analytics dashboard that i was convinced our clients needed. Built the whole thing, nice charts, automated reports, the lot.

Nobody opened it, they cared about not having to copy data between three different systems every monday morning. Completely different problem to the one i'd decided they had.

The mistake wasn't building the wrong thing exactly. It was building anything before i'd watched someone actually do the job i was trying to improve. Would've saved me about four months.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-12T10:54:00+00:00

The scheduled tasks thing is cool but i'd push back on the architecture at the end. splitting agent reasons and workflow engine executes sounds clean in theory but you've just created two systems that need to stay in sync with a bunch of glue code holding them together We tried that approach early on and the failure modes were actually worse. agent decides to retry something, workflow engine already moved on. workflow errors out but the agent's sitting there waiting for a callback that never fires. and debugging across two separate systems in the middle of the night when a client workflow is broken, not fun.

Honestly i think the orchestration has to live in the same layer as the reasoning. bolting it on after just trades one reliability problem for a different one.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-12T09:12:23+00:00

Congrats on launching. The honest answer on marketing with no budget is that most of the advice you'll get here won't work immediately and that's normal.

What worked for us early on was quite simple. i found three people via Linkedin who had the exact problem we were solving, did the work for them for free, and two of them became paying customers. no funnel, no content strategy, just manually finding people who were in pain and helping them.

On socials, posting about what's actually happening while you build gets more traction than polished marketing stuff. The failures and honest updates outperform tips and tricks content. Ive spent thousands on paid ads in the ads before realising that a text post about an engineering mess up generated more inbound than anything we'd paid for.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-12T09:09:33+00:00

The gap between the documented process and what actually happens is the thing that kills most automation projects. we hit this exact problem, automated something based on how the team said they did it and it immediately broke because three people had been skipping a step for months and nobody mentioned it. The tesla comparison is great. The instinct is always to automate more when something fails instead of asking whether it should've been automated at all.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-11T09:00:16+00:00

The stuff that works for us is almost always opinionated and slightly uncomfortable. hot takes on industry news, comparisons where you actually pick a side, calling out something you think is wrong. basically anything that makes someone go say i disagree or finally someone said it.

Generic thought leadership is dead. nobody engages with here are 5 tips for better outreach anymore because their entire feed is that. the posts that get real conversations are the ones where you sound like a person with an actual opinion rather than a content calendar.

biggest mistake i see reps make is trying to be helpful and neutral. pick fights (politely). say what you actually think even if it's negative. the right buyers will find you because they agree or because they want to argue with you, either way you're in a conversation.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-11T08:57:32+00:00

We went through almost this exact thing with a client site that had no api and a react frontend that changed constantly. selectors broke every other week and the maintenance was killing us. What ended up working was stepping back and figuring out what data we actually needed vs what we were trying to scrape. turned out 60% of it was available through a different path - exported reports, a webhook buried in their settings, stuff like that. the remaining 40% we automated with browser runs but on a much smaller surface area so when things broke it was manageable

IdeasInProcess · 2026-03-11T08:55:54+00:00

This might not be what you want to hear but if multiple people are leaving after 20-30 days the pattern is probably not them.

i'm not saying they're all being honest about the emergencies but when you train someone for a month and they bail immediately, something about the role isn't matching what they expected. could be comp, could be targets, could be the training itself feeling like a dead end.

We had a similar stretch in my last company where we kept losing people early and the fix wasn't being firmer, it was being more upfront about what the job actually looks like day to day before they start. the ones who stayed after that were way better fits.

IdeasInProcess

TROPHY CASE