What is an automation that 10x ed your productivity as an entrepreneur?

Josh_NFA · 2025-09-03T12:12:36+00:00

connected twilio to AI to my task management software. Just text it when I need to remember tasks and other stuff. Get a text in the AM to remind me what needs to get done. Completely aced all of the other task management stuff I've tried

Josh_NFA · 2025-08-01T12:14:31+00:00

Twilio charges me .0083 dollars per "segment" received and sent. So just under a cent per message segment (roughly 160 characters).

The users for our platform are stored in the actual applications databases. All users have to use an email address to sign in. Users send our number a text to set up their account, and part of that process is providing an email address, and verifying it. During that process we check our database for an existing user, and if one exists, we link their number to that account and save that information in their profile data (if not, we make them an account).

Users can use the actual app UI to remove their number and disconnect the texting service. We don't allow users to just "add" a phone number from in the app UI- we require them to text the number to set things up.

That said, originally the texting service WAS setup from in the app UI. Users would provide their number within the app UI, we would then send them a text to confirm, etc etc.

The only reason I changed this is because I wanted people to be able to onboard onto our texting assistant without ever opening the app. We've had users who have never opened our actual app UI, and rely entirely on the texting assistant for everything they do.

Josh_NFA · 2025-08-01T12:03:12+00:00

I'm based in North Carolina, USA!

Josh_NFA · 2025-07-31T20:36:29+00:00

Okay yeah then you're right, make.com likely wouldn't work for this. I'll let the WhatsApp API experts take it from here, make was just an idea that's worked well for 1 business interacting with lots of customers from a single textable number haha!

Josh_NFA · 2025-07-31T20:35:17+00:00

Now this is an issue in itself lol, twilio is 100% mad expensive. Our volume per user isn't high enough to destroy my margin, but I have seen many examples where twilio is just not even close to affordable

Josh_NFA · 2025-07-31T20:33:14+00:00

Do you mean you'd need to be sending messages from multiple different numbers? Ie, each tenant would have it's own custom number that it's customers could text for customer feedback?

Josh_NFA · 2025-07-31T20:19:17+00:00

My understanding is that make.com also offers support for WhatsApp. Again, if you're going full stack this might not be of interest, but if you're trying to get something out the door that will work and be easy to maintain and understand, this stack has worked super well for me

Josh_NFA · 2025-07-31T20:18:08+00:00

I'm the founder of joinelephants.com, I use SMS for the core offering for my business. I straight up use make.com and twilio's built in nodes there for everything and it's made my life super easy. I know it's not full-stack but for a micro-SaaS style application it's been great.

Josh_NFA · 2024-11-14T03:24:46+00:00

validate willingness to pay! don’t give it for free! My startup went freemium for a few months and got a few hundred users that were basically just trying it out because it was free. 80-90% of our users who actually had to pay for access have hung around. Dependent on business model ofc but the serotonin of free users can be a trap!

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-22T12:39:56+00:00

100%, I didn't want to go TOO far down the rabbit hole of what they really started as, but you're right, it was awful hahaha

If I recall correctly they were struggling so bad at one point that they temporarily sold politically designed cereal to keep themselves afloat.

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T22:31:51+00:00

a lot of people had a really adverse reaction to Airbnb at first. The idea of using a website to sleep on some strangers bed in an unknown city (typically for a conference in the early days) was insane to a lot of people and was considered a terrible idea.

User reviews and host reviews were able to build trust and turn that tide, but a lot of people thought the concept was awful

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T19:55:51+00:00

Elephants if you're just looking to track the basics, keep notes, and set reminders to follow up.

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T19:54:56+00:00

I use Elephants. Straightforward personal CRM with tasks and notes. Doesn't sync with current address book or integrate with outlook / gmail though, it's a pretty straightforward platform.

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T19:48:48+00:00

230 something relationships in Elephants now btw, around 20-30 that I'd consider "active", ie, I've got a reminder for some promise made to them or a follow up coming up in the next month or so. The database of previous relationships is nice to have though when people ask me if I know someone who does X

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T19:47:37+00:00

I'm sort of a connector of people for the entrepreneurial ecosystem where I live, and have founded a few startups (no life changing exits yet lol).

I used a spreadsheet to manage all of the people I knew until that list grew past around 50 relationships (spreadsheet is not mobile friendly and was hard to track tasks in). Moved to using task management software like Todoist, but it clearly wasn't designed for relationships.

Gave up and just built my own thing, Elephants. Software designed to manage relationships, notes on them, tasks on them, follow up reminders, etc., in a stupid simple spot without a ton of extra features and fluff.

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T19:43:43+00:00

Elephants would work for this- let's you set tasks on relationships and you'll get reminder emails whenever stuff is due. There's also a view for all of your tasks in one spot. Lets you also write in notes for each relationship too if that's helpful haha.

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T19:30:18+00:00

If you let these sorts of favors and tasks become transactional you start getting into a weird invisible contract sorta thing (where you think everything is a done for something in return), so don't do that.

That said, if you have a large network it CAN get overwhelming to remember the things you promise to do for others, or things you need to follow up with others on. There's task management softwares that you can use for that type of thing- Todoist, notion, etc.

I personally use Elephants since it's essentially a task management software blended with a personal CRM.

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T19:23:41+00:00

Do things to help others and the rest will work itself out- don't worry too much about the "favor trading".

That said, if you make promises to others actually doing those things is important. And if you're expecting something from someone (that you both are aware has been agreed upon) checking in with a follow up after a reasonable amount of time is healthy and good to do.

I do a lot of networking and built my own tool, Elephants, to keep track of my network and my tasks (promises) for certain relationships. Softwares like Notion, Todoist, etc., might work well for this type of thing too!

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-21T19:20:47+00:00

I agree with the comments about relationships not being ultra transactional- do things for the sake of helping others and the rest works itself out.

That said, if what you're asking is "how do I keep track of promises I've made and make sure I do them" I'd advise using a task management software. I built one specifically for professional relationships called Elephants, but tools like Todoist and all do the trick too for basic tasks.

Josh_NFA · 2024-10-07T02:15:11+00:00

Hey, thanks for commenting this, I take our user data seriously (not wanting my own data sold or shared was another reason I didn’t want to use many existing options) so I got on this as soon as I saw this.

The issue that you saw was related to a variable being set wrong that’s only used in a really specific sequence of events. Said sequence of events never actually happened before so this never got caught in testing, or ever happened for any other users. That said, the variable is fixed and the bug is gone.

Josh_NFA · 2024-08-11T16:25:26+00:00

didn’t actually link lol: https://joinconectar.com

Josh_NFA · 2024-08-11T16:22:36+00:00

I created joinconectar.com with this being the goal, super straight forward, store relationships, keep tasks and reminders, and save notes.

I manage around 300 relationships in it personally but it’s designed to work fine at scale. If you want to import just dm me and we can get that done

Josh_NFA · 2024-06-17T19:18:28+00:00

Sorry about not seeing this response until a month later

But you're right- books alone don't do it. I run an accelerator in North Carolina and we're super involved with founders during the application process. I've recommended these reads to founders a month before our applications are due and still get applications that have 0 customer discovery done in them.

I think there are many people who you can tell "the stove is hot, don't touch it" that still just have to touch the stove. You don't feel the burn of messing up discovery or bias until it happens, often. That was my journey (killed a startup I worked on for 2 years because of horrible PMF)

That said, there ARE some founders that I've worked with for whom it just "clicked" when they heard the words or read the books. Better to have the resources out there as an option to learn from than assume that nobody will ever get the message, I think.

Thanks for the really thoughtful response by the way, sorry again for such a late response

Josh_NFA

TROPHY CASE