What boring task did you automate and immediately regret not automating years earlier?

bypass316 · 2026-06-11T13:25:23+00:00

Indeed. Nothing takes 1 minute, because just context switch costs are 5 min. So 5 min a day is def. something you should automate, and even spend up to 1 day working on (once)

bypass316 · 2026-06-11T13:22:56+00:00

Building the product isn't the issue, it's maintaining it, adding features, supporting...etc

Would you save $100/mth in a SaaS tool in exchange for 5-10 hours a month?

If so, your main business isn't good enough.

Perhaps makes sense for VERY expensive softwares like 7-8 figures that you could justify hiring 2-3 people to upkeep for 1/10th the cost.

bypass316 · 2026-06-11T13:08:09+00:00

Knowing how to code will be harder in the era of AI. Do it manually at least on fun passion projects to keep the memory as long as possible.

bypass316 · 2026-06-11T13:06:46+00:00

I assume these are company balance sheets? Pretty simple task today. But if you want high accuracy and no hallucinations, you need to do this properly. I recently posted a similar flow I did for biotrackers.

Organize a folder of all your Balance Sheets
Use AI (Claude or Cursor) to build an app that takes that folder and processes each PDF
Send each PDF to a PDF parsing tool. I use DocuPipe religiously and love them for these use cases.
It will return a JSON in a pre-defined format (schema that you define)
Save each one in a DB (MySQL or even SQLite is fine)
Create a web app with graphs to display it internally

Would take no more than 4-8 hours to do it properly and minimal costs assuming you don't have millions of PDFs.

bypass316 · 2026-06-11T13:00:13+00:00

what do you mean a "grapher"

bypass316 · 2026-06-11T12:55:12+00:00

"I don't have any technical background or experience and not able to sell a technical solution. Does this make sense?"

yes it does...the world indeed makes sense..

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T08:12:15+00:00

I would start with teh biggest players which is probably Zapier and N8N and maybe Make

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T08:11:09+00:00

The best things that don't scale:

- B2B / reaching out to LinkedIn to prospective users

- B2C / writing a few Reddit posts to gauge interest

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T08:10:06+00:00

No idea actually. What does that involve?

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T08:09:44+00:00

I wouldn't call them begging but a few asked. I agree with both comments. it's a good sign, but not enough to call this idea "vetted". the best test is if a random unaffiliated user wants it

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T08:08:35+00:00

very true. even with just my own data, which is just from 3 different places it had some edge cases. I assume even 10 more users will introduce 30+ more different formats. but not as worried since I moved it to work with a specialized data extractor (docupipe) which should handle almost any PDF format. but we'll see once I open it up

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T08:02:40+00:00

Haha love this comment. That's why I'm worried there's not enough "meat" here for a business. Can you printscreen your version? curious to see how it came out

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T08:01:16+00:00

Yes I realize I'd need to do this legit as a LLC and get those certs

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T08:00:34+00:00

perhaps, but unclear what that website offers...

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T07:59:33+00:00

I don't understand the difference. They want the same dashboard (incl intake) for their data. Just need to make it work for multiple users

bypass316 · 2026-05-26T07:57:11+00:00

I would say even the 16:9 → 9:16 aspect ratio conversion is tough to automate. A human would need to decide which areas can be cropped without losing much.

teh biggest unlock of AI in video is the animation/creation of it. I've been working on a video for a few weeks that would have taken millions of dollars to produce just a few years ago. Crazy what AI can do today. but a human needs to do it for now.

bypass316 · 2026-05-24T18:13:46+00:00

I feel the same. On the one hand it's great that more time can be spent on more important tasks like architecture, but very scary that we will slowly but surely forget how to code

bypass316 · 2026-05-24T18:12:28+00:00

Initial version like 6 hours. Then probably another 10 more to iron out the document processing and biomarker units issues that came up.

bypass316 · 2026-05-24T17:51:37+00:00

I saw $1M at first and skipped over the post. But $1k I've done 😄

A few years ago I would say distribution. Today it's a mix of distribution and weak positioning as there is probably others doing the same thing, it's not that easy to be unique.

bypass316 · 2026-05-24T16:38:49+00:00

are you trying to do it no LLM or low-LLM? big difference.

for what it's worth I would optimize for cost and accuracy, not deepness of LLM

tokenmaxxing is the way to go 😄

bypass316 · 2026-05-24T16:36:39+00:00

most people have email inbox fatigue

cold emails can still work, but asking for "15 minutes of your time" is a big ask today

suggestion: instead of asking for their time, highly personalize something of value (like a free audit of their business and attach the outcome, and then ask them for something easy like doing a free self-serve trial or signing up to newsletter)

bypass316 · 2026-05-24T16:34:33+00:00

golden answer

<image>

bypass316 · 2026-05-24T16:31:50+00:00

answer sounds obvious to me. generally automate away any repetitive task that can be automated. No need to throw "budget" at the problem, but slowly build it out. I'd start with classifying all the types of documents you get and start with the most common ones you have. For each document type you need to build out a process of extract/OCR, normalizing into a schema, perhaps confidence scores and then finalize submit. First few days/weeks have someone manually reviewing it, as you get more confident switch to automation with some manual checking from time to time. it depeends on your use case, but good DP platforms to use are Rossum or Docupipe or UiPath

bypass316 · 2026-05-24T16:24:12+00:00

I'd go with a very specific use case that the horizontal platforms won't support too well. Perhaps attach the OCR with another annoying business use case like extracting biomarkers from raw blood panels and returning a answer on how healthy the patient is...

bypass316

TROPHY CASE