Haha, I do think pseudo-retired adds some level of 'getting a pass' on this, culturally.
I do think (at least for my wife) it's the estimate of time required to get to The Thing at a Specific Time that is inaccurate or overly optimistic, like all the time.
Great convo, thought I'd share some valuable zaps I've used over the last few years to save $$$ on headcount, dev time, and burn/debt on unproven ideas/experiments.
- Slack - pipe all kinds of events into special #channels to cross teams can check one spot for external happenings: new users, new sales, support chats, form/data submissions
- Forms > CRM/Sheets - shouldn't be understated. Using lead page or no-code CRM (webflow my fave) I've swapped out various signup flows to test ideas/friction/followups repeatedly before asking dev to build actual signup flows into the backend app. Can swap paperform, typeform, mailchimp, google forms in under an hour for multiple signup/landing pages w/o any devs.
- Calendar - I use Motion (similar to Calendly) across sales team to speed up meeting flows + use Zaps to pipe those bookings into sheets/Slack/CRM or EMS. Sales team calendars can be public on marketing site (webflow) and bookings generate all the alerts and data we need to just show up to the meetings.
- Leverage SMS channel - One-click surveys, recurring survey campaigns using SimpleTexting or YesInsights and piping results wherever I need 'em. Google Sheet with charted dashboards already set up to auto-update. Great for ecomm, great for call/response feature testing with zero dev required. Can add phone signups via form integration or email campaign.
- Manual issue / todo alerts: Use specific tag in Asana to pipe a ticket into Slack channel when team member wants to surface for manager/teammate - instead of asana firehose
- Light @mention feed - Pipe brand mentions/topics, including web (reddit etc - use F5bot) into sheet or #channel for marketing eyes to check daily
- Twitter bot - built @carryonbagsizes using just Zaps: anyone tweets airline name and gets carry-on bag size restrictions back from the bot (including variations on airline names ie United vs United Airlines)
Zapier makes changes on behalf of a single account. You can change the "share" permission to only allow view for anyone except for the account tied to Zapier which has edit permissions.
1) If you're piping data into Sheets, then you most likely don't have good custody practices and aren't limiting edit users to just 1.
2) Sure there's revision history but you can't "roll back just this one change". You roll back _all the changes_ to the state at that time.
3) If the marketer does appear to save new Sheets as major data changes occur, they're not properly branched. You end up with Sheets like "customer_list_v1, customer_list_v1_no_Csuite, customer_list_v2_no_CSuite, customer_list_v2_scrubbed".
As a consequence you can never be sure if the reporting is correct or if the data is up-to-date.
Building https://dopebrands.fyi - highlighting great new dtc ecommerce brands, and initially focusing on the smaller end of the market to help encourage shoppers to discover them and try them out. Launching next week!
I just passed 100 consecutive days of workouts! At least a one mile run or 20 minute Peloton ride every day. Lower impact days allow for 'active rest'.
Was a tough start, too, with a calf sprain almost right away, on Day 5. Even managed to fit in workouts on international travel days!
Congratulations. This is no easy feat. I have started and failed several times trying to work out regularly. It’s not easy to break the cycle of excuses. Any tips would you like to share ?
