My 5 Favorite Automation Tools

Joe Casabona: Automation tools are a dime a dozen these days with the ChatGPT and generative AI revolution. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of tools that could help you do your job better when used the right way. But there is a difference between leveraging these generative AI tools to help you create content or creative assets. And using the automation tools near and dear to my heart that actually perform tasks and make your processes easier.

So today on this solo episode, another segment of the Automated Solopreneur, I’m going to tell you five, maybe six of my favorite automation tools to help with the process side of things. We’ll dig into my tools and how I’m using them and how you can learn more. And stick around because I’m going to tell you how you can get some of my favorite automations completely for free.

So if you want to get all the show notes, you can head over to streamlined.fm/314. And in streamlined.fm/pro today, I’m going to tell you why I’m back on Twitter. But before all that, let’s get to the intro and then the episode.

[00:01:23] <music>

Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast where you get free coaching calls from successful creators. Each week you get actionable advice on how you can build a better content business to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority in your field. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

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Joe Casabona: All right, well, number one on this list is Make, make.com, formerly Integromat. In Episode 306, I did a full episode on Make, Zapier’s equally powerful, much cheaper alternative. Make is really where I’m going to say like 80% of my automations happen. I use it for everything, from automatically publishing my blog posts to other places like Twitter and Mastodon. I use it to move Google documents from Google Docs into Airtable. So I will write in Google Docs, and then it’ll get added to Airtable, so I have a single place for all of my social posts. I have it do things with Calendly. I have a fairly complex guest routing or guest scheduling automation for this podcast. I use it to move my wife’s work schedule onto my calendar so that people can book meetings with me when I am watching my kids, automating HARO, so it’s only surfacing relevant requests to me, publishing from Medium to WordPress when I write on Medium, and just a whole bunch of other stuff. Make is absolutely crucial for me.

One of the great things, again, I’ll point you to Episode 306, that’s streamlined.fm/306, if you want to get a deep dive into why I switched to Make. But a large part of that was pricing. I was paying about $75 per month for Zapier and I am paying $10.61 after tax for Make and I’m doing the same exact things.

As I go through and I’m coaching people on their podcast workflows, and how to automate areas of their podcast, I’m showing them Make and they seem to be getting it pretty well, even the people who have never automated anything before. So I think it’s visually nicer. I think it’s got basically feature parity and it’s a lot cheaper. It connects to everything I need it to connect to.

The only big problem for me at this point is that Make is a terrible name to google if I’m trying to find tutorials. So I still use their old name Integromat because that is a much more googlable name for their documentation. But their documentation is pretty good. And once you start to think about or once you start to understand how things work in Make… I started using it and I’ve never looked back. I don’t think I’ve logged into Zapier except to look at their new tables feature, which I haven’t even really done. I just kind of signed up for the beta.

They have a pretty generous free plan where you get a bunch of standard apps. There are some limitations on the number of active scenarios, of course, but you can definitely try Make for free. That is make.com. And if you’re anything like me, you will quickly upgrade to Core.

I’ll also just say this. The thing I really like about Make is that within their plans, right, so they have the Core plan for $9 a month, if you’re billed yearly annually, it is $10.59 per month. Ten dollars and fifty-nine cents. Here’s the other thing I like. With Zapier, it’s a 33% increase to be billed monthly. And I get it, they want you to sign up annually. But like don’t punish me for not wanting to pay for a whole year upfront. It’s a negligible difference with Make and weirdly makes me more likely to pay for a year upfront.

Anyway, you can also upgrade to get more operations within the Core plan. So they’ll charge you based on features and they’ll also charge you based on operations. So for example, in the Pro plan, the things that you get, you get a bigger file size, you get more API endpoints, you get better execution logs and operations, usage flexibility, custom variables, if you want to do some programming, higher priority scenario execution.

But if you don’t need the pro stuff, which I’ve been using Make for like six months now, and I don’t feel like I’ve had to upgrade to pro, you can stay on the Core plan and just upgrade the number of operations. You can also pay for those as you go. So if you’re executing a lot more one month, you can upgrade and add like 1,000 more operations if you need. It’s a really nice payment plan. They’re not just charging you a bunch up front and like punishing you for not using it or not wanting to use it.

To be honest, I’m probably going to upgrade to Pro. Looking at this price, Pro is still at, let’s say, $19 a month billed monthly for the same amount of operations. I’m starting to want like custom variables and scenario inputs and things like that. But you can start for free. Generous free plan, very affordable Core plan. I automate a lot and I have been happy with the Core plan. So I don’t think that you need to upgrade right to the $20 a month plan if you just want to try it out. So Make is very central to everything I am doing with my automation.

So that’s number one. Big fan of Make. Definitely try that out. Especially if you like using Zapier and you’re like, “I’m not really getting a lot of bang for my buck,” but Zapier was like the only game in town for a while, consider Make. It took me about two weeks to move everything. So if you’re right at the beginning of the Zapier billing cycle, I think you get a couple of weeks for free on Make, so you get to transition. Or you can try the free plan or trial or something like that. So strongly recommend. I think I’m a big Make fan over the last six months. I just think it’s great. So that’s Make, make.com. Check it out. It’s very central to everything that I automate in my life, or most of the things I automate, I should say.

Moving on to the next tool. That is going to be Shortcuts. Shortcuts is probably second on my list as far as important automations to me. I might even personally use it… I’m talking about Shortcuts on the iPhone and the Mac. Siri Shortcuts is probably what people call it. Because shortcuts, much like Make, is just a word. So it’s very frustrating. So I say Siri shortcuts, I think. I don’t know if it’s officially called that. I know it was and then it wasn’t and then some people get annoyed that you call it that. For clarity’s sake, I generally refer to it as Siri Shortcuts. For the rest of this conversation, I will be calling it Shortcuts.

So Shortcuts is super crucial to me for a lot of reasons. First of all, I use it for project management and quick capture. So when I have an idea or a social post and I want to make, Shortcuts is usually how I will do that. And the great thing about Shortcuts is that you can hit a URL and Make has custom webhooks. So I can send data from a Shortcut to Make, which then creates a Google Doc and an entry in Airtable, which is just wonderful because neither Google Docs nor Airtable has native shortcuts support. So the fact that I can do that via Make is fantastic.

Now, the other cool thing about Shortcuts is if you have a spare iOS or iPad OS device, which is not always the case, right… I am making some strong considerations about my device setup. I don’t know if I can run a push-cut server on a Mac Mini but I’m really, really considering a Mac Mini as a little home server. Right now I have a Raspberry Pi, running Homebridge, which is something that connects non-HomeKit devices, like my Key Lights, to HomeKit.

So I’m using a Raspberry Pi for that. That thing runs hot, though. I won’t be surprised if it just melts one day. I think I have a tiny fan on it but it runs very hot. I also have a NAS (Network Area Storage) device that I use for cold storage. I originally wanted to use that as a Plex server. Ideally, I would rip all of my DVDs and Blu-ray discs onto a computer and then I could access those via Plex for the ones that aren’t streaming or extended editions.

I know Scrubs, for example, they made the decision to remove some episodes that they felt were insensitive. They also changed all of the music in the first few seasons on streaming. And the music on the DVDs is way better. You know, stuff like that, where maybe I move like Scrubs and Friends and the DVDs I actually own over to a Plex server. Anyway, that was a little side quest.

The point is that Shortcuts is so powerful now that you can send data to the web. And if you have a… it’s called a push-cut server, right? So it’s just a little app constantly running on some device, watching for shortcuts executions, you can also receive data from the web and execute a shortcut based on that. So that’s the complicated bit.

If you are just starting out, I recommend just creating simple tasks like… You know, when I say I have an idea, it creates a note in Bear. Bear, my current notes app. Then it sends that information to Make and Google Docs. So being able to shout something out loud, and then have it create documents is super powerful, especially when I’m on walks or runs. Usually not runs, I can’t talk when I’m on runs, because I’m usually just breathing heavily and praying I don’t die.

But a couple of other things I use. I mean, I use shortcuts for so many things. I have one called Quick Link, which will grab the contents of my clipboard and add it to my newsletter Digest note. So that when I’m creating my newsletter every Sunday I have the links I want to use.

I have one called New LinkedIn Learning course, which will create a project in things for everything I need to do for LinkedIn Learning. I do the same thing for webinars. So I create a new webinar and it creates a new project in things three, again, my current task manager, that will automatically have that project ready to go.

I have one called Open Threads. This is something that I journal at the end of each day. So that I can wrap up my day without thinking I’ve forgotten something, I’ll usually just write down all of the open threads. If I’m not at my desk or I need to do it away from my journal, or away from my Kindle Scribe, which is what I’ve been using as my journal lately, I can say I have these open threads and it’ll create a note in Craft which is my project notes app. I should probably do like a whole episode on how I’m using these apps. But those are some of the examples of kind of project management stuff for Shortcuts.

The other thing I do is automate my home. So I can say I’m recording and my recording light will turn on upstairs. The lighting in my office will get set. So if you see a video of this, I’ve got purple lights or any of my YouTube videos, I have purple lights. All of that gets set when I say I’m recording. I also go into the recording focus mode so that I don’t get notifications while I’m recording.

I have one called Deep Work, which will basically turn off my iPhone, not like fully turn it off, but I can’t access any apps, I don’t get any notifications, except ones from my wife and my kids’ schools. So stuff like that, super helpful. I have a bunch of openers, which is just like list of apps I like to open. So like when I run the “read it” shortcut, it’s like, what app do you want to read? Stuff like that.

So lots of stuff going on in Shortcuts. The nice thing about Shortcuts also is that you can easily share. So if you want to get some of my favorite Make scenarios, I also have Zapier templates in there, and some of my favorite shortcuts that I’ve mentioned here, you can go to the show notes for this page, streamlined.fm/314 and get a copy of my free automations database.

The free version has 14 automations that I’ve made freely available. Now, if you become a member of How I Built It Pro, you get the full, constantly updated version of the Automations Library, which I call it. But you can start slow if you want to get the freebie. That’s over again, streamlined.fm/314. That as well as everything I’m talking about here, I’ll link to all the tools I’m mentioning.

All right, so far, we’ve talked about make.com and Shortcuts. Let’s take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, and then we’ll get into the other tools.

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Joe Casabona: All right, we’re back. So Make, Shortcuts. Airtable is number three for me. A lot of stuff happens in Airtable that I could make happen with Make or Zapier or whatever but I just liked that it’s handled natively. It mostly has to do with record management and sending emails. So for example, when I mark an episode in Airtable as “out for edit,” my editor gets an email. When an episode is marked as “ready for publish” my VA gets an email. When I’m doing outreach for guests, I have an Airtable for that where I keep track of everybody I’ve emailed and what they’ve said, and if they’ve moved to schedule. Airtable sends out those emails as well. And the nice thing about that is I can create automated but personalized email to send to each individual.

So it really functions as a CRM for me. It’s not doing a whole lot of publishing, but there’s a lot of automated status tracking and emails. For example, I’ll talk about this when I mentioned Hazel very soon. But when, for example, I have a Make automation that watches Dropbox, when a new edited episode is added to Dropbox, Make will look for the episode number in the name, it’s usually the first three characters of the name of the file and then it will match that to the episode number in Airtable and update the status to “ready for publish”, and then Airtable will email my VA.

So Airtable has a lot of really great automation stuff, especially around like status tracking and record management that just makes my life a lot easier. Plus, it works really well within the confines of other automation tools like Make and Zapier. So, again, if I’m looking at my podcast planning base, I’ve got an automation… So people can also apply to be on the show and they get added to Airtable and then they get an email whether or not I accept or reject them. I have guest outreach emails, I have emails that go to my VA. I have a script that cleans things up. And also if you want to submit feedback over at streamlined.fm/feedback that is Airtable form. And then I can update the status and there’s some automation stuff that happens based on that. So I have open feedback, a feedback board and things like that.

So, Airtable, really great tool. It’s really my business… like everything I plan for my business happens inside of Airtable and the automated… It would not be able to happen without the automation bits. Or it wouldn’t happen as cleanly, because then I’d have to make a lot more connections to make.com and have it send the emails out. And it’s just really nice having all of that happen natively. So that’s Airtable. I love Airtable. I strongly recommend Airtable. It is the thing that I use to plan my podcast and just about everything else, and the automation tools help.

All right, next up is Hazel. Hazel is a Mac-only tool, actually, the next two tools I’m going to mention are Mac-only, which is sad because it’s such a great tool. Hazel by Noodlesoft is basically a file management automation tool. Again, that’s Noodlesoft, all one word, I think it’s Noodlesoft.com. I’m double-checking that now. It’ll be in the show notes.

They build it as automated organization for your Mac. And that’s exactly what it is. So with Hazel, what you can do is have it watch a bunch of folders and then execute actions based on the files in those folders. So it comes with a lot of examples. A really simple example of what Hazel can do is, when a new item is added to your downloads folder, set the color label to blue. So it will look at new files, again, I think this comes with Hazel, and you can just turn it on. Anything new that gets added to your downloads folder gets labeled as blue.

And then it will also delete old items in your downloads folder. So if there’s a file that’s a month old that you haven’t done anything with, it’ll get deleted. It will remove the label. This is fun, right? So it will remove the color label after a day. So basically, you can look at your downloads folder and say this is all the stuff I downloaded from the day.

But you can also move files based on their type. So if the type is a movie, it’ll move it to the movie folders. If the type is music, it’ll move it to the music folder, pictures to the picture folder, et cetera. This is a really easy way to keep your downloads folder clean. One of the things that I really like is it’ll delete installers after the next day. So if you download an app installer and then you install and it doesn’t self-remove the installer, some will do that, some won’t. It’ll look at anything you downloaded yesterday, and if they are installers, it’ll delete them.

It’ll also automatically move apps to the application folder which is really cool because then you don’t have to do that yourself. And then there are a bunch more that you can do. You can also keep your desktop organized. So if you don’t want to keep a bunch of folders on your desktop, I will automatically archive files into this folder on my desktop to keep the desktop clean.

But some of the cooler things I do have to do with types of files. One thing you can do is get the download source. So what I would do for a while is download… now my accountant has access to my credit card account as my accountant, not like directly as me. But before that, I would download my monthly statements and then I would have Hazel rename it to the year and month and then Amex statement and then move it into a shared folder that we have. So instead of me having to do all that, Hazel does that automatically.

I have a lot of pre-production stuff for my podcast inside Hazel. So again I look to see if a file was downloaded from Riverside, and then I have specific naming conventions. It will say like How I Built It in the name, it’ll have the episode in the name and then I will move that into a pre-production folder for processing.

Similarly, when I add the instructions folder or instructions file to that folder, it will automatically get moved into needs editing which then kicks off an automation that emails my editor. That’s really complicated stuff. I have some of those in the automation library. But you don’t have to worry about that stuff, especially starting out.

One of the other things I do that is super useful right is I mentioned my NAS earlier, my network area storage. I will move big video files or big project files to the network area storage if they haven’t been opened within the last 40 days. So if I haven’t touched this in over a month, move it to cold storage, essentially. So move it off of my computer and into a drive that I never have to look at, so that it frees up space on my computer.

One of the other things I do is I live stream every Monday and then I make those live streams available to my members, the streamlined.fm/pro members. So once I’m done live streaming, I have Hazel watching the Ecamm Live recordings folder. And if it was streamed, then it’ll move… the name suggests that it was streamed. But if it was streamed, I move it to a Dropbox folder called Live Stream Uploads. And then Vimeo is watching that folder, automatically uploading videos from that folder.

So there’s a lot that goes on that you can do in Hazel as far as file management goes. You can also start super basic right and just turn on the ones it comes with. But for me, not having to manage those files is super great. It saves me so much time. So that was Hazel. Huge, huge fan of Hazel. I actually get a lot of questions about Hazel, I should probably make a video about it. Because Hazel is like one of those lesser-known apps that can save you tons of time.

The last app before the bonus that I want to mention is Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro is a keyboard shortcut app. But it’s so much more than that. So you can map keystrokes or create your own keyboard shortcuts. Usually, I have it open specific apps. Really my Stream Deck does most of that now. But one of the things I do is, this is back from my programming days, but if I was testing a website and I was getting some error, I would execute this terminal command, this little bit of code.

So I actually have a keyboard shortcut—it is option F—that will open up my command prompt or terminal window, type in the command, press “enter” and then if I need to, I enter my admin password, and then press “enter” again. This is all saved locally so I’m not putting that password. It’s a unique password, but I’m not putting it on the internet or anything. And it will execute that command for me, so I don’t need to remember that command.

One of my favorite things to do with Keyboard Maestro is essentially like churn through thoughtless tasks. So I have an episode coming up with Chenell Basilio over at Growth in Reverse and we were talking about Keyboard Maestro. And one of the things that I like to do is you can record an action with your mouse. So you can record your screen and then have it do exactly what you just did.

So if I need to like churn through a long, monotonous list of options, for example, I’m back on Twitter, I’ll talk about that in Pro, but on Twitter, there’s a section where it keeps a list of all of the things you’re interested in so that it shows you tweets based on that. When I came back to Twitter, I basically wanted to start as fresh as possible without creating a new account. So I found this section and I had a list of about 200 potential interests all with checkboxes. And I knew that I could press tab, spacebar, enter, tab to uncheck and then move to the next one.

So instead, what I did was I created a Keyboard Maestro script that looped through, that executed that action 100 times in a row. So I would do the keyboard action I just said and then I’d have it wait one second so that like anything that had to process on the website would process and then do it again. So I ran that, walked away and when I came back, I had all of those things unchecked and I didn’t have to do it. So things like that in Keyboard Maestro can be really powerful.

If you’re doing like [inaudible 00:29:41] churning through the same exact action a bunch of times, you could probably automate that with Keyboard Maestro, or if you don’t have a Stream Deck and you want to assign some extra keyboard shortcuts to stuff… That was the original mission of Keyboard Maestro. It’s grown to a lot more than that.

If you do have a Stream Deck, Keyboard Maestro has an integration with the Stream Deck. So you can assign—they’re called macros—Keyboard Maestro macros to your Stream Deck. A couple I have is like launch Loom is one of them on my Stream Deck. But it’s really powerful app. I’m a huge fan of it.

What I’ll do in the show notes is linked to a recent episode of… I think it’s Mac Power Users. If it’s not, it’s Automators. It’s definitely something with David Sparks, where you can learn more about that. They’ll do a better job of explaining it than I do. But it’s absolutely one of my favorite automation apps.

The last thing I want to wrap up with here is Hypefury, which is a relatively new tool I’m using since being back on Twitter. I will use that to automatically tweet, automatically create carousels for LinkedIn, automatically DM people, and a whole bunch of other Twitter-related stuff. This really allows me to interact with Twitter without being on Twitter as much, which was, again another one of my goals that I’ll talk about in streamlined.fm/pro.

But that’s like a bonus because it’s a very limited scope. That said it does connect to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. So if you’re looking to automate, engage more with your audiences on those social platforms. I’ve been really impressed with Hypefury. I’m usually suspicious of tools like that. I’ve used Tweet Hunter, it’s fine. I don’t think it was worth 50 bucks a month for me. I’ve tried Typefully, which is cheaper, but limited.

Hypefury is also 50 bucks a month for inclusion of LinkedIn, it’s 20 bucks a month without LinkedIn. But I think it’s legitimately worth 50 bucks a month for me. So I’m going to at least pay for the first month and see how it goes and see if my engagement is up and things like that. But Hypefury is a relatively new tool I’ve been sleeping on, but I’m happy with now.

So to recap, the six tools I’ve mentioned were Make, that’s make.com, formerly Integromat, Shortcuts or Siri Shortcuts, Airtable, Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, and Hypefury. I will link to all of those in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/314. You can also get the free version of my automation library over there.

If you want the full version of the automation library, as well as ad-free extended versions of every episode of this podcast, as well as the live stream archive, as well as a newsletter that goes out every Friday about automation to my members, you can sign up for 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks a year over at streamlined.fm/pro. It’ll also be linked on streamlined.fm/314. So just go there, get everything at streamlined.fm/314. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks to our sponsors. And until next time, get out there and build something.