What is your background, and what do you do?
I’m the founder of Luhhu, we’re a process automation agency, helping businesses big and small save time and money by streamlining their mundane, repetitive tasks – using tools like Zapier and Integromat.
I’ve been running this for almost 4 years now, and prior to that I studied for (and dropped out of) a degree in computer science and worked sales for a bunch of media and IT companies, learning a lot about different business models along the way.
What challenges have you faced at work?
As we’ve grown, keeping up with leads as well as upselling to existing customers has become a challenge to manage.
To keep on top of things, we use Airtable as our CRM, with several heavily customised tables to keep track of leads, deals, clients, and projects – all tied into the other apps we use with Zapier.
This lets me keep a top-down view of everything going on – so we continue to win new business and wow existing clients.
What workflow has performed very well for you and your team?
We recently built an interesting workflow in Integromat that allows us to track conversations and posts about automation on Twitter. They go into an Airtable that I check once a day for interesting threads to get involved with.
This has been great for us, bringing in clients and contributors and helping us burnish our reputation as automation experts.
Searching Twitter for interesting content used to take upwards of 30 mins per day. Now in just a few moments I can scroll Airtable and pick a handful of the most interesting threads to dive into. In terms of leads, we’re generating 1 or 2 per week from Twitter now.
Can you give us a closer look at how it works?
Sure! The trigger of the automation is any time there is a new mention of “Zapier” or “Integromat” on Twitter. We then filter the incoming tweets to make sure they’re in English and don’t start with RT (retweets).
The penultimate step of the workflow adds details of the tweet to an Airtable along with a link, and the final step sends a message in Slack if the tweet contains a question mark. I want to jump on questions much quicker.
What are your tips for professionals who want to optimize their processes?
When clients first reach out to me, asking where to start with automating their business, I always give them this piece of advice.
Sit down, take a piece of paper and start writing down all the things you do manually every day/week/month. Note which apps are involved, what’s happening, and where data is going. And, most importantly, write down how long it takes you each time.
And there you have it – your shopping list of what to automate. Start with the most impactful and go from there.
