96
Automation: Achieving More and Saving Your Brain
View this email in your browser
The weekly newsletter of the Business of Tech, giving you new insights into the world of IT service delivery.
Looking for stories from the podcast stories? Check out the pod itself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or daily in your inbox. Stories are available to everyone for five days,and Patreon supporters forever.
Was this forwarded to you? Join the list!
Leveraging Automation for Workloads
I’ve been thinking a lot about automation these days. We all know it can help with productivity, but the more I look into it, the more questions I have. What does it actually look like to create the automation itself? How do those processes come to fruition? How can MSPs work it to their advantage?
Luckily for me, a new author released a book on the logistical process of setting up automations. I recently welcomed Aytekin Tank, founder of no-code tool JotForm and author of Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff, onto a bonus episode of The Business of Tech.
Keep reading to learn Tank’s take on making the most of automation in an increasingly digital world:
Growing JotForm with Automation
I kicked off our conversation with a simple question: what drew Tank to automation in the first place? Turns out, he didn’t just embrace it to help with his own busy work – it’s also a fundamental part of JotForm, the no-code platform he launched back in 2006.
When Tank first started the company, all he wanted to do was focus on building up his product. But a few years in, he was drowning in busy work. Emails, HR, accounting, legal, ordering supplies for the office; all of it was clogging up his workday and distracting him from the creative elements of leading JotForm.
The turning point came when Google released Google Forms. Now that JotForm had a serious competitor, he had to find a way to reduce the busywork to make room for product work. The solution, of course, was automation. He used it to streamline his workday, then helped his employees set it up for themselves.
That’s when Tank realized that JotForm’s users could benefit from automation, too. He decided to build automation tools into his product, ultimately turning JotForm into a dynamic automated workflow solution.
Today, JotForm has grown to 500 employees and 20 million users. They survived Google Forms, and Tank credits that success to automation.
The Philosophy of Automation
So how does Tank recommend going about automation yourself? I asked him to share his philosophy on getting started, and he explained that:
“It’s just very easy to get lost in the details, just to think, okay, I’ve been doing this for a long time this way, why should I automate? So I talk about the Automation First Mindset.”
In his book, he breaks this mindset down into four parts.
The first step is to clarify your priorities. You have to understand how you spend your time before you automate it, so he always has people start with a time audit. After tracking how your workday unfolds for a week or so, you can start to ask yourself questions like, what should I spend my time on? What shouldn’t I spend my time on? The latter is where you should focus your automation efforts.
The second step is to harness the power of impatience and laziness. Tank referenced the famous Bill Gates ‘I’ll always hire a lazy person to do the hard job’ quote, explaining that whatever you’re tired of spending your time on is what should be automated the most.
The third step is to make time to save time. You have to shop around for the right tools and be strategic about using them. Without spending on this step, you won’t be able to optimize automation to its fullest.
The fourth step is to embrace system thinking. Everything in an organization is a system with workflows, so he recommends creating workflow diagrams to see how everything works together. Once it’s all laid out, you’ll get a better sense of what’s wasting time and where automation can have the biggest impact.
These steps are all about getting ready for the automation, which Tank believes is essential for automation success.
The MSP’s Business Opportunity
Doesn’t this sound like something that good business analysts and technologists can really help customers with? From my perspective, automation sounds like a great service offering for MSPs and IT consulting organizations.
I asked Tank what he thinks, and he confirmed that MSPs are among JotForm’s 20 million users.
In fact, Tank and his team have found that some of JotForm’s highest usage users (in this case, that could mean 2000+ forms) are actually MSPs using JotForm for all of their clients. He believes it’s so popular with tech providers because JotForm integrates well with other tools in the no-code ecosystem:
“There are just so many no-code products, and MSPs love them because it’s the built solution onto them. You can actually build things on top of them, and you can actually customize them for different kinds of clients,” he said.
In his view, no-code is taking off because in the past, only big companies had access to automation. Clients would go to SAP or Oracle, spend insane amounts of money, and walk away with a solution that was only so-so. Now, people can piece together thousands of different products to create incredible custom solutions.
Don’t think your clients would be able to handle building and managing those on their own? I had the same thought, so I asked Tank if his team has noticed what individual users will do with JotForm versus when they’ll have a provider step in.
He explained that most of JotForm’s users will create a form or two, use it forever, and never come back to explore additional features:
“And if they’re happy, we are happy. But when MSPs use JotForm, what we see is that they actually learn everything about JotForm. And they’re building all these workflows for their clients,” he said.
Now that sounds like an opportunity to me.
If you want to learn more about Tank’s framework, either for yourself or your clients, his book Automate Your Busywork: Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff is available on Amazon. You can also visit his website www.aytekintank.com.
Has automation improved your workday? Your service offerings? As always, I’d love to hear from you at [email protected]
More from MSP Radio
Missed Things?
How about our latest videos to catch you up?
The Daily Podcast available as videos
Surviving the Gates of Hell: A Kaseya Breach Victim Speaks with Robert Cioffi
The Evolution of the MSP Industry: Haves vs. Have-Nots with Dan Wensley
Democratizing Cybersecurity: A Conversation with Guardz CEO Dor Eisner
Sustainability & Technology Providers: The Importance of Power: A Conversation with Larry Hann
Understanding the Value of Solution Providers in the AI with AWS’s Ben Schreiner
Want the Daily News?
All the stories from the daily Business of Tech Podcast are available in the daily digest, and stories are available to everyone for the first five days, and Patreon supporters forever. Catch the audio of the show anytime on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find podcasts. Links at businessof.tech
Copyright © 2023 MSP Radio, All rights reserved.
Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.