The Workflow

AI-powered creative coding

Garrett Houghton — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Some housekeeping - moving to Substack!

Thanks for subscribing to The Workflow, where we explore the latest trends in indie work and technology. When I started this newsletter, my goal was to deliver high-value automation insights to interested readers — but after ten issues, I found the process was becoming more of a grind than a joy.

Why? I'm not just a tech enthusiast—I also write about creativity, philosophy, and even short stories. To cater to these varied interests, I split my writing between two platforms: my tech content here and my non-tech writing on Substack. Over time, maintaining this division has felt both cumbersome and creatively limiting.

So, in the spirit of embracing a broader creative vision, I’m consolidating all of my online writing on Substack.

I’ll be transferring The Workflow subscribers to my Substack publication soon. If this broader direction isn’t what you’re looking for, feel free to unsubscribe. But if you’re excited about exploring these diverse topics, I’d love for you to join me over on Substack.

Below, you’ll find my first tech post on AI-powered coding—cross-posted from Substack—to give you a taste of what’s to come.

Without further ado, my AI-powered creative coding process…

My AI-powered creative coding process

As a non-coder, I’ve long dreamed of creating interactive, engaging web projects. For years, I cobbled together solutions using no-code tools like Zapier, Airtable, Softr, and various website builders. Yet, these tools often felt rigid and limited compared to traditionally coded counterparts—they just weren’t as dynamic or interactive.

Now, with AI-powered development tools like Bolt and Lovable, that dream is finally coming to fruition.

In just a few weeks, I’ve brought a wide array of creative projects to life, including:

A daily quiz game I created with Bolt and OpenAI’s API.

My creative potential online is now limited only by my imagination—not by my technical skills.

My streamlined creation process looks like this:

Idea Generation: I brainstorm and record ideas in Apple Notes.
Prototyping: I pick an idea and start prototyping with Bolt.
Evaluation: If the build process aligns with my vision, I continue; if not, I pause the project.
Deployment: Once I have a version 1 prototype, I deploy it to Netlify via Bolt’s integration.
Feedback: I share the project with a few friends to gather feedback.
Iteration: I either leave the project as is or continue refining it through subsequent versions.

This process—transitioning directly from idea to prototype to a live version without relying on traditional IDEs or elaborate Figma designs—feels more like sketching on paper than conventional development. It’s an approach that excites me about the future of the internet and the new possibilities for creativity on the web.

Ways To Connect

1. Follow me on Substack: As mentioned above, I’m consolidating my tech (and additional) writing to Substack. I’d love it if you followed me there!

2. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether specific automations for your business, AI and no-code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

3. Work With My Agency: My creative x technology agency Onboard helps companies onboard innovation—from new prototypes to digital marketing stunts and more. Reach out if you’re interested in collaborating.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

4 Types of Small Internet Businesses

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of indie work and technology. In today’s edition, we’re examining four types of small Internet businesses you can create; the pros, cons, and leverage that come with each model; and examples of entrepreneurs and businesses from each category. We’ll also explore one of my new favorite workflows—turning voice notes into structured content. Let’s dive in!

Today’s Topics

4 types of small Internet businesses
Turn voice notes into structured content
Helpful workflow tools
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 8 minutes

4 types of small Internet businesses

Source: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Are you interested in starting an Internet business, but not excited about taking on venture capital, scaling to the moon, or creating shareholder value at all costs? If so, these four types of small Internet businesses might be interesting models for you to explore.

Indie Consulting

Indie consulting takes the classic management consulting model and niches it down into a specialized knowledge area or process deployed by a single consultant or small team. This model is characterized by a high degree of autonomy, allowing you to pick and choose projects based on personal interest, often prioritizing flexibility and creative freedom over scaling or building large teams. Indie consultants tend to focus on niche expertise or specialized knowledge, delivering insights without the overhead and bureaucracy of larger organizations.

✅ Pros: Intellectually stimulating; flexibility; freedom

❌ Cons: Unpredictable revenue; scaling challenges

Leverage: Specialized knowledge; high hourly and/or project rate

Examples: Venkatesh Rao, Jason Liu

Productized Services

Productized services are typically contractor services (design, copywriting, SEO, etc.) that are packaged into predefined offerings and typically monetized via a monthly retainer. This model eliminates the complexities of traditional freelancing/agency engagements, such as negotiating prices and project scopes individually. This model enables faster turnaround times and consistent quality, making it easier for businesses to outsource tasks. Clients benefit from transparent pricing and clear deliverables, while service providers can optimize their workflows and focus on delivering value with limited overhead.

✅ Pros: Predictable recurring revenue; high demand for services

❌ Cons: Constant fulfillment requirements; monotonous work; scaling challenges

Leverage: Hard skills; delivery speed arbitrage; systems and processes

Examples: Design Joy, Baked Design, Story Arb

Info Products

Info product providers specialize in creating and selling digital educational content—such as online courses, e-books, and guides—that share their expertise with a broad audience. By packaging insights into scalable digital products, these businesses can reach a wide audience without the limitations of one-on-one consulting or coaching. This model enables relative passive income generation for the creator while providing affordable, high-quality knowledge to consumers looking to learn and grow in specific areas.

✅ Pros: Relatively passive revenue; asynchronous work; highly scalable

❌ Cons: Requires audience or marketing; upfront investment with unpredictable payoff

Leverage: Audience

Examples: Justin Welsh, Ben’s Bites

Indie SaaS

Indie SaaS is independently created software products typically built by solo entrepreneurs or small teams. These developers focus on launching scalable, web-based solutions that cater to specific niches or address particular problems without relying on external funding. Utilizing lean startup principles, these folks rapidly develop minimum viable products (MVPs), release them to the market, and iteratively improve based on user feedback.

✅ Pros: Recurring revenue; huge leverage; highly scalable

❌ Cons: Customer support; technical overhead; requires audience or marketing

Leverage: Code

Examples: levelsio, Marc Louvion, John Rush

By no means is this an exhaustive list of all the types of small Internet businesses. If you think I missed one, respond to this email or fill out one of our surveys below and let me know! I’d love to cover it in a future edition.

Turn voice notes into structured content

This week’s workflow recipe is one I’ve been using quite a bit for creating content. I write tutorials for Ben’s Bites, and to speed up my tutorial writing process, I’ve been using a three-step process with ChatGPT and Claude to go from a voice note to a written tutorial.

Steps to follow:

Dictate content to ChatGPT: Using the ChatGPT app on my phone, I’ll click the voice-to-text button and start with the phrase: “Turn this text into a transcript with timestamps.” I’ll then proceed to talk out the content I want to eventually write into a structured post.
Copy ChatGPT transcript into Claude: ChatGPT will output a perfect transcript; however, it’s not as great of a writer as Claude. So I’ll take the transcript and drop it into a custom Claude Project I’ve trained on my previous tutorials and ask it to write a tutorial based on the transcript.
Edit the tutorial content manually: No offense to Claude, but even with providing many examples of my past writing, it still doesn’t nail my voice, tone, structure, and style. So I’ll always finish the process by manually editing and improving the writing.

This voice-first writing process with AI tools is a new workflow paradigm for me, and I plan to keep expanding my use cases for it across many different tasks. It’s a big reason why I see AI as a viable on-ramp for AR-enabled work, as I’ve written previously. I’m curious if any of you are using voice-first workflows for your tasks — if you are, reply to this email and let me know!

Helpful workflow tools

Frase - Empowers content creators to go from keyword to well-researched, SEO-optimized articles faster and better.

Commenter AI - Your AI-powered LinkedIn commenting adviser. Save hours every week and draft your comments with a click.

v0 by Vercel - Generate UI, ask questions, debug, execute code, and much more with natural language prompts.

Workflow automation news

Learning to Reason with LLMs With the launch of its newest o1 models, OpenAI is enhancing the reasoning abilities of its LLMs by training them on diverse tasks and using techniques like chain-of-thought prompting to have it “think” before it answers. Early results show its improving effectiveness in complex problem-solving and decision-making.

Klarna is replacing SaaS with AI The fintech firm Klarna is severing its relationships with two of the biggest enterprise software providers—Salesforce and Workday—in favor of automating its services with AI. And the company says it could potentially eliminate more.

Rebuild Clay in Zapier Sales outreach just got easier (and more affordable). Learn how to rebuild Clay in Zapier to generate lead lists from LinkedIn, automate email finding and verification, enrich leads, draft AI emails, get recent news, and more.

Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether specific automations for your business, AI and no-code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no-code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

My Solopreneur Tech Stack

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. In today’s edition, we’re getting a bit meta and looking at the no-code and AI tech stack that runs my solopreneur business. For background, in addition to this newsletter, I run a content creation productized service for no-code and AI startups. I’ll walk through all the tools I use to make it happen. Let’s dive in!

Today’s Topics

My solopreneur tech stack
How to set up an AI virtual assistant to triage your email
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 5 minutes

My solopreneur tech stack

Source: Onboard

At Onboard, I deliver written content and how-to videos for clients. I charge a monthly retainer for these services, and as such, build long-term relationships with clients and keep my client roster low (< 5 clients per month). My tech stack reflects the solo nature and low client volume of my work — keep that in mind as you read through my tech stack.

💼 Sales: Cold Outreach, CRM

My sales process is so low-tech and non-automated that it feels ironic in the context of this newsletter. I use LinkedIn DMs, Twitter DMs, and email outreach from my personal Gmail to reach out to potential clients. Zero automation. Zero AI. Zero data platforms.

As the bulk of my job is researching, testing, and writing about no-code and AI tools, my sales research is done as a part of my core work. When I have the capacity and find a company that’s a good fit, I reach out via one of the above platforms directly to the person on the team that most likely oversees the type of work I provide.

For my CRM, I built a very simple client table (i.e. Name, Email, Stage) and a visual Kanban board in Airtable to track the status of my pipeline. This client table maps to my project management table in Airtable too (more on this below!).

✍️ Fulfillment: Content Writing, Video Creation

For writing content, I’ll use either Notion or Google Docs, depending on client preference. Both of these are great for creating and collaborating on written content. I prefer Notion as it can double as a client CMS.

For screenshots, I use CleanShot X. Previously, I used the built-in Mac screenshot tool with Skitch, but that became a bit cumbersome and hard to manage after taking hundreds of screenshots. CleanShot X combines screenshot-taking with editing, image cloud storage, and more — it makes my screenshots look much more professional.

For recording and editing how-to videos, I use Screen Studio. I started with Loom, but upgraded to Screen Studio quickly due to its specialization in screen recording, easy video editing features, and video resolution quality. If I need to add additional video graphics or animations, I’ll export the video to Capcut to add these finishers.

I’ll often work with ChatGPT and Claude on ideation, brainstorming, and outlines of all my content.

👋 Client Operations: Communication, CMS, Client Portal

Nothing too sexy here, I use Slack and Gmail for client communication. I prefer Gmail because it encourages more asynchronous communication, whereas Slack has an “always-on” vibe.

For my Client Portal and Content Management System (CMS)—a simple Kanban board of content requests and statuses—I use Notion. I invite clients to specific team spaces, they add requests, I complete them and update their status, and that’s it!

🔀 Internal Operations: Project Mgmt, Invoicing, Bookkeeping, Taxes

For project management, I use Airtable. I create a record for each project, link it to the client record from my Airtable CRM table, and add details like price, due date, estimated time to complete, project status, and more.

I use Quickbook’s Self-Employed product for bookkeeping, taxes, and invoicing. It allows me to do everything in one place. I’ll occasionally use Stripe for invoicing ad hoc, one-off client work.

And for banking, I use Mercury. No notes. It’s awesome.

📢 Marketing: Content Creation, Social Posting, & Newsletter

This category of work isn’t core to my business, but it’s focused on a more long-term interest of providing no-code and AI education content at scale. This is one of my most software-heavy categories of work.

I use Typefully for social post-scheduling on LinkedIn and X. I wouldn’t say this tool is 100% necessary—you can do everything you need to in the social platforms themselves—but this was more of an investment to keep me accountable for posting regularly.

I use a mix of Claude, ChatGPT, and Spiral to remix my long-form writing into social post drafts.

Beehiiv is my newsletter hosting and sending service (powering this very newsletter!)

I plan to expand into video creation on social channels like YouTube and TikTok and will be experimenting more with OpusClip for this use case. Looking forward to exploring this medium further!

Let me know if you want me to go deeper into any of the above use cases. Respond to this email or fill out one of the surveys below and I’ll do a deep dive into it in a future edition!

Set up an AI virtual assistant to triage your email

Lindy is an awesome tool to automate virtual assistant tasks at scale. Working with the tool has blown my mind as to what’s possible with AI workflow builders and agentic processes. In this workflow, you can set up an AI virtual assistant to triage and respond to your email (with full oversight by you!).

You can get started with the workflow via this Lindy template.

Steps to follow:

Authorize your Email Account: Add an “Email Received” trigger with your email provider to the workflow. You can add a filter to this step so Lindy only actions on specific emails (e.g., Labels, Domains, etc.).
Add a Knowledge Base: Optionally, you can provide Lindy with a knowledge base (your website, CRM, files, etc.) to have her respond to emails with this context.
Customize Responses with a Prompt: Finally, you can provide Lindy with a high-level prompt on how to respond to emails, with elements like desired tone, writing style, email format, and more.

This process will allow Lindy to triage specific emails and craft tailored responses. Even better, you can add a human-in-the-loop step so that Lindy can provide you with a draft of the email for approval before sending it. Check out Lindy here.

Workflow automation news

100M Token Context Windows Magic recently introduced ultra-long context models capable of processing up to 100 million tokens during inference, enabling AI models to better handle vast amounts of code and documentation. This innovation has the potential to revolutionize software development by allowing more accurate code synthesis and feature creation.

Claude for Enterprise Anthropic introduced Claude for Enterprise, allowing organizations to securely collaborate with Claude without training on chats or files. It features a 500K context window, native GitHub integration, and enterprise-grade security, currently available in beta for early users.

The Key to Great AI Prompting? Show, Don’t Tell The key to great AI prompting is using examples to guide AI models, much like training humans. By providing a few-shot learning approach—offering a handful of examples—AI can perform tasks with higher accuracy and creativity, mimicking the power of human imitation to enhance results.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no-code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

Takeaways from a16z's Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps report

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. In today’s edition, we’re diving deep into Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) recent Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps report, which analyzes the top AI consumer apps and categories that are gaining traction. We’ve broken down the full report into key takeaways and what it means for you. Plus, we’ll walk through a workflow on how to mine Reddit for audience insights. Let’s get into it!

Today’s Topics

Our takeaways from a16z’s Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps report
How to mine Reddit for audience insights
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 5 minutes

Our takeaways on a16z’s Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps report

Source: a16z

Every six months, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) takes a deep dive into the data to rank the top 50 AI-first web products and top 50 AI-first mobile apps. And woah, the landscape has changed quite a bit in half a year. Nearly 30% of the companies in the latest report are new compared to just six months ago. Talk about a fast-moving field!

Here are some key takeaways:

1. Creative tools are dominating the scene
2. AI assistants are battling it out for the top spot
3. New categories are emerging, including aesthetics and dating
4. Discord traffic is often a leading indicator for up-and-coming apps

Let's break it down further, shall we?

🎨 Creative Tools: The Rising Stars

Remember when we thought image generation was the be-all and end-all of AI creativity? Well, times are changing! While image gen tools are still popular, there’s a surge in other modalities:

52% of web-based AI apps focus on content generation or editing
Video and music generation tools are gaining steam
On mobile, content editing for image and video is the second-largest category

Some noteworthy newcomers:

1. Luma - Video generation
2. Viggle - Video editing
3. Suno - Music generation

Pro tip: Keep an eye on multi-modal creative tools. They're not just for fun – they could revolutionize how we create content for work and play.

🤖 AI Assistants: The Battle Heats Up

While ChatGPT still reigns supreme at #1 on both web and mobile, the competition is getting fierce. Here's what's shaking up the AI assistant world:

1. Perplexity - AI-powered search engine with cited sources
2. Claude by Anthropic - Direct ChatGPT competitor
3. Luzia - Spanish-language AI assistant with 45 million users

What does this mean for you? More options and potentially better AI assistants tailored to specific needs.

💡 New Categories and Emerging Trends

1. Aesthetics and Dating Apps: These apps use AI to rate attractiveness, suggest improvements, and even help with dating app messages. It's a brave new world out there… 😬

2. Bytedance's AI Push: TikTok's parent company is making waves with new AI products: Gauth (Edtech platform), Coze (Bot builder), Doubao (General assistant).

3. Discord as a Testing Ground: Many successful AI apps start on Discord before launching standalone products. It's like the minor leagues for AI!

Want to stay ahead of the curve? Keep an eye on popular AI Discord servers – they might just be the next big thing in consumer AI apps!

How to mine Reddit for audience insights

Source: The Workflow

Are you scrolling through social platforms to find audience insights? If so, here's a helpful tool for you: GummySearch — this tool turns Reddit's goldmine of organic conversations into actionable intelligence. Here’s a step-by-step workflow for how to use the tool for insights.

Steps to follow:

Build custom audiences: Curate Subreddit communities for your niche
Dive into discussions: Explore suggested conversations and ask questions
Do keyword searches: Use keywords to uncover helpful signals
Spot patterns: Read theme reports to understand common patterns
Share data: Send sharable URLs of insights and reports to colleagues

Workflow automation news

Introducing Ideogram 2.0 The AI image generation company launched its most advanced text-to-image model, now available to all users for free. Additional updates include the release of the Ideogram iOS app, the beta version of the Ideogram API, and Ideogram Search.

LLMs struggle with deductive tasks New research reveals that large language models (LLMs) are proficient in inductive reasoning, where they generalize from specific examples. However, they face challenges with deductive reasoning tasks, which require applying strict logical rules to derive conclusions, highlighting a key limitation in their cognitive abilities.

Anthropic publishes the ‘system prompts’ that make Claude tick The AI company has publicly shared the system prompt behind its AI model, Claude, offering insights into the guiding instructions that shape the model's behavior and responses.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no-code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

Automate you content creation processes

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. In today’s edition, we’re focusing on content creation workflows, and how you can make your content production and remixing processes as efficient, high-quality, and automated as possible. Whether you’re a writer, video creator, or graphic designer, we’ll touch on various tools and workflows across all of these content mediums. Let’s dive in!

Today’s Topics

Streamlining your content creation processes
Turn one idea into several pieces of content
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 5 minutes

Streamlining your content creation processes

Source: Unsplash

✍️ Turn blog posts into Tweets

One of the best ways to create leverage with your text content creation workflows is to write one great piece and then use AI and automation tools to convert it into several different formats. For instance, writing a blog post and then chopping it into several Twitter/X threads, LinkedIn posts, or Substack notes.

Our favorite tool for this process is Spiral, which was created by the Every team. Spiral lets you create custom, prompt-based text transformers, enabling you to train the tool on sample text inputs and outputs. Once trained, it will start converting your content into tweets, PRDs, proposals, summaries, and more — all in your voice and style.

We use this tool to transform our newsletter content into Tweets and LinkedIn posts. (See the next section for our step-by-step workflow!)

🎬 Convert long-form videos into viral clips

Video editing is a time-consuming process, but with recent video automation tools, you can convert long-form videos into viral clips in minutes. There are a lot of apps on the market offering this service (we’ve tried them all!), but our favorite one for this use case is OpusClip.

With OpusClip, you can upload a 30-minute video interview and get 30-second social clips, with animated captions, auto reframes, virality clip ratings, and more — in minutes. If video editing has been a pain point, this will drastically speed up your process.

🖼️ Create e-commerce mockups from text prompts and logos

For our last content creation workflow, we’ll dive into the world of graphic design. Our go-to tool for all workflows in this space is Recraft — think of it like an AI-first Figma.

You can design graphics like logos, vector illustrations, and even e-commerce mockups. For instance, you can prompt Recraft to create a “white t-shirt mockup,” upload your brand’s logo, and drag and drop it onto the mockup. And just like that, you have a high-quality branded merch design graphic. You can check out a step-by-step walkthrough of this workflow in this Ben’s Bites tutorial (written by yours truly!)

Let us know if you want us to go deeper into any of the above use cases. Respond to this email or fill out one of our surveys below and we’ll do a deep dive into it in a future edition!

Turn one idea into several pieces of content

This week’s workflow recipe uses Anthropic's Claude and Spiral to help you go from content ideas to several social posts. We've been experimenting with different tools to speed up our writing process and this is the one we’re currently using.

Steps to follow:

Initial Draft with Claude: Start by using Claude to generate initial rough drafts of your content ideas. This gives you a solid foundation to work from.
Refinement with Spiral: Next, feed Claude's output into Spiral, adapting it to your specific voice and style based on previous examples you’ve provided.
Add a Personal Touch: Finally, review and edit the Spiral-refined content to fully match your tone and point of view. This is a vital step, so don’t skip it.
Remix with Spiral: Now for a meta-step, you can feed the final output back into Spiral to have it remix the content into other formats, like transforming Tweets into LinkedIn posts.

This process will allow you to generate ideas more quickly, maintain consistency in your writing style across platforms, and focus more on high-level concepts and less on repetitive tasks.

Workflow automation news

Prompt caching with Claude Prompt caching, which enables developers to cache frequently used context between API calls, is now available on the Anthropic API. This is a big cost-saving feature for folks developing AI tools with the Anthropic API.

Is your company AI washing? Rippling founder Parker Conrad thinks it might be. He also thinks that too many software companies have been adding not-really useful, novelty AI features into their products. Do you agree?

Napkin turns text into visuals With a little generative AI, the new startup can take text prompts and turn them into flowcharts, graphs, infographics, Venn diagrams, and decision trees. (This is a nifty tool! We might do a step-by-step guide on it in an upcoming edition).

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no-code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

AI signal vs. noise

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. In today’s edition, we’re exploring which AI workflows can deliver value today vs. sometime in the future vs. maybe never… With all the AI hype, finding the signal vs. noise is tough. After reading today’s newsletter, we hope you’ll have a stronger sense of where the value is with AI today and what’s coming tomorrow.

Today’s Topics

Where’s the AI signal vs. noise?
Turn meeting notes into follow-up emails
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 5 minutes

Where’s the AI signal vs. noise?

Source: Unsplash

After working with a ton of AI tools, we’ve come up with a non-exhaustive list of where we see the current value across the most popular AI workflows. We’ve found the top bucket of use cases easy to get high-quality output today. In the next bucket of use cases, you can get high-quality output, but it takes some work or advanced knowledge. Finally, in the bottom bucket of use cases, most of the tools feel like futuristic prototypes — they make for great demos but they’re not practical to use in production workflows yet.

🚀 Helpful, current use cases today:

Transcription, speech-to-text
Content analysis and summarization
Code generation
Content outlining/brainstorming/transformation
Translation, text-to-speech
Unstructured to structured data
Chat with a knowledge base (i.e. RAG)

🤞 Almost there, but challenging to get quality results:

Image generation
Graphic design
Presentation generation
Web design
Web browsing

📉 Shows early promise, but not there yet, maybe someday:

Video generation
Novel content generation
Data enrichment
App creation

Let us know if you want us to go deeper into any of the above use cases. Respond to this email or fill out one of our surveys below and we’ll do a deep dive into it in a future edition!

Turn meeting notes into follow-up emails

Ever wished your meeting notes could write follow-up emails for you? 🤔

This week’s workflow recipe uses a few of the most helpful AI use cases—transcription and content transformation—to do just that.

We've been experimenting with using Fireflies, Zapier, OpenAI, and Gmail to take meeting recordings and transform them into follow-up emails. It's been a game-changer for post-meeting sales follow-ups.

Steps to follow:

Fireflies records and transcribes the meeting
Zapier triggers a ChatGPT conversation
ChatGPT drafts a follow-up email based on the transcript
Gmail creates a draft with the AI-generated content

The result? A personalized follow-up email waiting in your drafts folder minutes after each meeting. 📧✨

Workflow automation news

Is GenAI an Existential Risk to Low Code/No Code? Low-code/no-code platforms simplify software development. So does GenAI. While the sun isn’t setting on low code/no code just yet, it may eventually—or not. (Great read!)
Introducing postgres.new Supabase has launched an in-browser Postgres sandbox with AI assistance. With postgres.new, you can instantly spin up an unlimited number of Postgres databases that run directly in your browser (and soon, deploy them to S3).
Move over SEO, Profound is helping brands with AI search optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) has been top of mind for brands for more than a decade. But search is changing, and as consumers increasingly turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude to search for things, brands need a new strategy.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether it’s specific automations for your business, AI and no-code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

Turn meetings into action items with AI

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. Today, we’re going deep on all things AI meeting assistants. These tools can turn meetings into action items and transform conversations into structured data — all without having to take a single note. Read on to learn more about the top AI meeting assistants and how to take your meetings to the next level.

Today’s Topics

How AI meeting assistants can save you time
Convert meeting transcripts into follow-up emails
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 6 minutes

How AI meeting assistants can save you time

Source: ChatGPT

One of the highest utility use cases we’ve experienced with generative AI in the workplace is meeting transcription. Tools in this domain seriously deliver value. Onboarding one for yourself or your team will markedly improve your meeting quality and output. It will also save time. Gone are the days of needing a dedicated notetaker or finding out important action items have fallen through the cracks. With today’s AI transcription tools, you can get highly accurate, full readouts of meetings without taking a single note and automate this data across your suite of communication and data tools.

If there’s one thing you leave with from reading this week’s edition, it’s that these tools actually work, and work well. If there’s a second thing you leave with, it’s that the majority of these tools have all converged on doing the same things and doing them well.

What are some of the top tools in the market?

We’re not going to push one tool over another, as we haven’t tried them all (full disclosure: we use Fireflies), but it’s helpful to know what these tools can do and what to look for when evaluating one for your business.

What can these tools do?

Transcribe, summarize, and analyze voice conversations from your video or audio meetings.
Transform transcriptions into organized notes, follow-ups, and searchable content repositories.
Send meeting data to other tools and platforms, like your CRM, chat client, project management tools, and more.
Export content in various formats: PDF, structured docs, video recording, unabridged transcript, and more.

Our recommendation is to uncover your highest priority requirements for meeting automation, review these tools’ offerings, and onboard one or two to test. For instance, if you want video recordings, Fireflies is great; if you want structured notes documents, Granola is wonderful.

Convert meeting transcripts into follow-up emails

One of our favorite workflows with an AI meeting assistant tool is to hook it up to Zapier and turn your meeting notes into further automated processes. For example, with Fireflies, Zapier, OpenAI, and Gmail, you can take a sales meeting recording and automatically generate a follow-up email draft to a prospect.

Steps to follow:

Create a Zap in Zapier with Fireflies “New Meeting” event as the trigger
Set the next action to a ChatGPT “Conversation”
Add this prompt to your ChatGPT step: “Convert the below meeting summary into a follow-up email to {insert attendee from step 1}. {insert meeting summary from step 1}. Just output the email body and nothing else.”
Add a third step to create an email draft, either via Outlook or Gmail
Make the subject of the email: “Follow-up: {insert meeting name}”
Insert the output from the ChatGPT step as the body of the email
Set the recipient as the attendee from the Fireflies meeting

And that’s it! Set the Zap live and a few minutes after your next meeting, you should have a follow-up email in your drafts folder. This is a great workflow for any client or customer-facing team.

Workflow automation news

OpenAI introduces Structured Outputs in the API This is a new feature designed to ensure model-generated outputs will exactly match JSON Schemas provided by developers, further enhancing one of the core AI use cases of generating structured data from unstructured inputs.
What if AI had a corporate culture? How AI software engineering agents perform differently based on structuring interactions as big tech org charts like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and more. Fascinating read!
How I Use "AI" Nicholas Carlini provides specific instances where AI models, particularly large language models like GPT-4, have helped solve complex problems and enhance productivity in both work and life.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether it’s specific automations for your business, AI and no code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

Create Presentations In Seconds

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. Today, we're going deep on all things design — how to design a presentation, landing page, or report with Gamma, an incredible AI-powered tool that lets you convert raw notes, URLs, documents, and more into professional, modern-looking presentation formats.

Today’s Topics

Meet Gamma, your new presentation copilot
Convert a notes document into a presentation
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 5 minutes

Meet Gamma, your new presentation copilot

Source: Gamma

If you've ever wished for a tool that could create presentations, reports, or landing pages from raw notes or files, Gamma is the answer you've been waiting for. It’s honestly quite mind-blowing. How does it work? Let’s dive in.

✍️ Effortless Creation: No more fiddling with slide layouts or spending hours on design tweaks. Simply input your content, either from an existing document, a website URL, or even a prompt, and Gamma’s AI handles the rest.

🤖 AI-Powered Design: One of Gamma's standout features is its AI-powered design. It automatically suggests design elements, layouts, and even images that align with your content. This means you can focus on what you want to say, and Gamma will make it look great.

🎨 Easy Customization: While Gamma’s AI does a lot of the heavy lifting, you still have full control over the final product. Customize colors, fonts, and layouts to match your brand or personal style. Gamma strikes the perfect balance between automation and customization.

🧩 Solid Integrations: Gamma integrates with tools you already use, like Google Drive and Notion. This means you can easily import content from where it already lives without having to copy/paste. The Google Docs integration is a personal favorite!

Convert a notes document into a presentation

Now that you know more about Gamma, let’s walk through a step-by-step workflow on how to convert a notes document into a well-designed presentation with it.

Steps to follow:

Click the Create New AI button in the Gamma dashboard
Select the Import file or URL option
Select the Upload a file option (or, Import from Drive) and choose your notes document or meeting transcript
Choose the Presentation output format
Select the number of slides, text per card, and image style
Pick a theme and then generate your presentation with a click

And voila! You’ll have a fully-designed presentation from your notes file. You can update the images, format, and text in the presentation editor, and when you’re happy with it, export it as a PDF, PowerPoint, or publish it to the web.

Workflow automation news

Generative AI in the Contact Center Generative AI is revolutionizing contact centers by automating routine tasks, enhancing customer interactions, and providing real-time assistance via voice generation, call summarization, and sentiment analysis.
Sybill’s AI reads customer behavior to automate sales workflows This AI assistant, which recently raised $11 million in Series A funding, focuses on boosting productivity for sales representatives by handling repetitive tasks like call summarization, follow-up emails, and CRM updates.
Introducing Stable Fast 3D Stable Fast 3D generates high-quality 3D assets from a single image in just 0.5 seconds. The model has applications for game and virtual reality developers, as well as professionals in retail, architecture, design, and other graphic-intense professions.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether it’s a specific automation for your business, AI/no code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

Data Workflows To Save You Time

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. Today, we're going deep into all things data. We’re going to review three data tools that can save you time, walk through how to develop an internal request management workflow, and finally, provide you with a mega AI prompt for data labeling. Let’s dive in!

Today’s Topics

Three data tools to save you time
Workflow of the week: internal request management
Prompt of the week: data labeling
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 8 minutes

Three data tools to save you time

Source: Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Managing and cleaning data can be an absolute time suck. Inconsistent data formats, duplicate entries, and incomplete records can create a labyrinth of inefficiencies, leading to inaccurate insights and flawed decision-making. But we have some tools to help you with this. We’re going to walk through three data tools you can try to take your data processing, management, and analysis game to the next level.

Coefficient: Your Google Sheets AI copilot

Source: Coefficient

Coefficient is one of our favorite new data products. They’ve harnessed the power of ChatGPT and have brought AI-powered formulas directly into your spreadsheets. It’s a plugin that works in Google Sheets, and with their custom formulas, you can do things like classify, tag, summarize, format, and map data directly in your spreadsheet. For example, if you wanted to tag a list of data, you could create a column with their formula =GPTX_TAG(text, tags) and it’d automatically tag your data with the proper tags—no vlookups needed! It can also auto-generate charts and graphs based on your data as well.

Recommended workflow: Cleaning, formatting, and tagging data in Google Sheets.

Julius AI: The ChatGPT of data analysis

Source: AI Tools Club

Julius AI is an AI-powered data analyst. It started as a standalone chatbot experience where you could upload your data and ask it to do pretty much anything—create charts and graphs, summarize the data, find insights across your datasets—and recently, the Julius AI team has released workflows, which allow teams to automate these data workflows in bulk and create multi-step processing automations.

Recommended workflow: Data analysis, data manipulation (e.g. combine two CSVs), and complex data cleaning workflows.

Airtable: Build internal data applications

Source: Airtable

Airtable is a no-code database and internal app-building tool. And we have to admit, it’s probably one of our favorite tools. If you’re looking to do more than just reporting and analysis with your data, and have it power collaborative workflows and interfaces, then you’ll want to check out this tool. You can easily create relational databases, develop drag-and-drop collaborative interfaces on top of them, automate integrations with Airtable’s workflows, and so much more.

Recommended workflow: Developing data-powered internal applications and central data storage.

Build an internal request management application

In our workflow spotlight this week, we’re going to build an internal request management application with Airtable. This workflow can be used by marketing teams fielding requests from internal partners, by product teams fielding feedback from other employees, and more.

Here’s the high-level workflow on how to build this with Airtable:

Create an Airtable request form (and share it with your partners)
Create a Requests table in Airtable to store form submissions
Create an Assignee table in Airtable with your team members
Link the Requests and Assignee table with a lookup field
Create a public Airtable Interface with a Kanban board visualization so partners can see where requests are in your queue and who’s working on them
Create an email automation with Airtable Automations to automate communication between you and your partner teams
Create a private Airtable Dashboard Interface to track metrics on your process (e.g. time to complete, tasks per employee, etc).

Prompt of the week: data labeling

We’re adding a new prompt of the week section to The Workflow. The goal is to help improve your AI prompting across a variety of workflows. To fit this week’s data theme, check out the below prompt to automatically label your datasets. You could add this prompt into a Zapier workflow or modify it to use with a file upload in an AI chatbot experience.

You are tasked with tagging a piece of content using a provided list of tags. Your goal is to accurately identify and apply relevant tags to the content.

Here is the list of tags you should use:

{{TAGS}}


Here is the content you need to tag:

{{CONTENT}}


Your task is to analyze the content and assign appropriate tags from the provided list. Each tag should be relevant to the themes, topics, or key elements present in the content.

Follow these steps to complete the task:

1. Carefully read through the entire content.
2. Identify the main themes, topics, and key elements in the content.
3. Compare these identified elements with the provided list of tags.
4. Select the most relevant tags that accurately represent the content.
5. Apply the chosen tags to the content.

Present your output in the following format:

[Original content in one columns with tags listed in a corresponding column]


Additional guidelines:

- Apply tags to the smallest relevant portion of the content.
- If a larger portion of the content fits under a more general tag, you may use nested tags.
- Do not create or use any tags that are not in the provided list.
- If you believe a relevant tag is missing from the list, do not add it. Only use the tags provided.
- If no tags from the list are relevant to the content, output "No relevant tags found" for that item.

Proceed with tagging the content using the provided instructions and format.

Workflow automation news

Airtable’s new Cobuilder unlocks instant no-code app creation: You can now describe what you want in words, and Cobuilder takes your idea from concept to reality, generating a customizable application in seconds. This means you can easily build and customize intuitive internal apps much faster.
OpenAI announces SearchGPT: Step aside Google. OpenAI is making a play to be the next leader in web search with their recent prototype launch of SearchGPT, which has new search features, like real-time sources and visual results, to make getting questions answered even easier.
Blaze 2.0 launches to make marketing easy: Blaze uses AI and automation to scan millions of online signals to help modern companies target the right potential customers as soon as they show interest.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

The Hidden Gems of Zapier: Chatbots, Interfaces, and Tables

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. Today, we're uncovering some newer and lesser-known features of Zapier that can supercharge your workflows: Zapier Central, Zapier Chatbots, Zapier Interfaces, and Zapier Tables. If you thought you knew all there was to know about Zapier, think again!

Today’s Topics

Zapier central, chatbots, interfaces, and tables overview
Build an automated lead management workflow
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 7 minutes

Zapier central, chatbots, interfaces, and tables overview

Source: Zapier

Zapier is now more than just a tool for simple automations. With recent feature additions of Central, Chatbots, Interfaces, and Tables, it’s a robust platform that can handle complex workflows and data management. Whether you're looking to improve customer engagement, streamline your team’s interactions, or organize your data more effectively, these features are worth exploring.

Zapier Central & Chatbots: Your New Automated Assistants

Source: Zapier

What They Are
Zapier Central and Zapier Chatbots are an incredible addition to your automation toolkit. These tools allow you to create customized AI assistants, leveraging your own data and instructions, to automate workflows around the web, onboard new employees, and even interact with customers.

Why They Matter
With Zapier Central and Chatbots, you can automate customer support, gather feedback, and even handle complex tasks like web research or report creation. They are fully customizable, allowing you to create a bot that integrates with your tech stack and data.

How to Use Them
Setting up a Zapier Central bot or Zapier Chatbot is straightforward. Define the directive for the bot, add additional reference data, and link it to any action within Zapier’s ecosystem. For instance, you could create a bot that schedules meetings when prompted by a specific keyword.

Zapier Interfaces: Streamlined Interactions

Source: Zapier

What They Are
Zapier Interfaces allows you to create custom user interfaces for your workflows. These interfaces can be used to collect data, trigger workflows, and provide users with a more interactive experience.

Why They Matter
Zapier Interfaces make it easier to interact with your workflows, especially for team members who may not be familiar with the backend processes. They offer a clean, intuitive way to gather inputs and present outputs, making your automations more accessible and user-friendly. They can also collapse the amount of software you need to use. For instance, if you need a form submission to trigger a Zapier automation, you can use Zapier’s Interface form vs. a 3rd party form tool.

How to Use Them
To get started, design an interface using Zapier’s drag-and-drop Interface builder. You can add form fields, buttons, and other interactive elements. Then, connect these elements to your Zaps. For example, a form submission in the interface could trigger a Zap that processes the data and sends it to your CRM.

Zapier Tables: Organize and Manage Your Data

Source: Zapier

What They Are
Zapier Tables is a powerful feature that lets you store, organize, and manipulate data within Zapier. Think of it as a lightweight database that integrates seamlessly with your Zaps, Interfaces, and Chatbots.

Why They Matter
With Zapier Tables, you can keep track of data that’s important to your workflows without needing a separate database or spreadsheet. They’re perfect for managing lists, tracking project statuses, or storing any other data your automations need.

How to Use Them
Create a new table in Zapier, define your columns, and start adding rows. You can import data from 3rd party services like Google Sheets, Airtable, and more. You can then create Zaps that interact with this table—adding, updating, or retrieving data as needed. For instance, you could use a table to track customer support tickets and automatically update their status as they move through your support process.

Build an automated lead management workflow

Now that you know more about Zapier’s newest features, let’s put them to work to develop an automated lead management workflow.

Here’s the high-level workflow on how to do it all with Zapier:

Create a Zapier Interface with a lead submission form
Add a Zapier chatbot to the interface with a company knowledge source to provide leads with more information (optional)
Create a Zapier table to store the lead submission data
Make a Zap automation to send lead data from your Zapier table to Slack to alert your team of new leads
Within the Zap automation, add a ChatGPT web browsing step to enrich the lead with more data and/or qualify the lead (optional)
Create a Zap automation to automatically send the lead data to your CRM and auto-respond to the lead to book a meeting

You can develop all of this with Zapier, freeing you up from your inbox, keeping your CRM data up to date, and hopefully helping you book more qualified meetings!

Workflow automation news

You know what spreadsheets need? LLMs, says Microsoft Researchers at Microsoft have developed a framework designed to make it easier for large language models (LLMs) to analyze the content of spreadsheets and perform data management and analysis tasks, because why not?
Turn your diagram sketches into digital schemes A new indie product has dropped on Product Hunt that I think this audience of operators will find useful. Sketch2scheme converts your hand-drawn flowcharts and diagrams into digital schemes. Bring your ideas to life with just a few clicks.
OpenAI ships a new “mini” model GPT-4o mini is OpenAI’s new and more affordable model that outperforms GPT-3.5 Turbo while being over 60% cheaper. GPT-4o mini is touted as perfect for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks, and fast-response AI applications and workflows.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.

AI workflow startups aim to be the new Zapier

Garrett Houghton — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 22:38:47 +0000

Welcome to The Workflow!

In this week’s issue, we’ll review the top AI-powered no code workflow builders, and I’ll share a tip to enhance your prompt engineering skills. Zapier and Make have long dominated the no code workflow automation space. But, incumbents are taking a different approach, building no code workflow builders from the ground up with AI at the center of every component. Keep reading for a review of the top tools in the space and some tips for improving your AI prompts.

Today’s Topics

AI-powered no code workflow tools review
Tips for improving AI prompts
Workflow automation news
Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 6 minutes

No Code AI Workflow Builder Reviews

The no code AI workflow builders I’ve been exploring the most recently are Leap AI, Gumloop, and Lindy AI. Each of these tools is in the early, startup stage, with each showing promise and challenges in different areas.

Leap AI focuses on automating sales and marketing workflows using AI. It features tools for content generation, lead enrichment, and email outreach, and offers a flexible workflow builder, brand voice copywriting, and an array of integrations with existing tools. It requires uploading data or submitting content via a form to trigger automations, so it’s best suited for one-off or bulk data processing workflows.

Pros: Simple to use; pre-built AI actions; pre-built marketing actions
Cons: Limited number of integrations; no automated 3rd party triggers

Gumloop allows you to build and manage automations by dragging and dropping modular components, integrating with popular services like GitHub, YouTube, and Airtable. It differentiates itself by allowing for highly complex workflows, powered by “subflows”, looping tools, and pre-built AI processing components. This is a great tool if you’re ready to build complex workflows with software development-like processing steps.

Pros: Many integrations; enables highly complex workflows
Cons: Complex builder; non-intuitive builder UI/UX

Lindy AI allows you to create custom AI assistants to automate various business workflows. Its agentic AI offerings differ it from the other two tools, allowing it to power customer support, HR support, sales automation, and executive assistance workflows for tasks like scheduling, email management, CRM updates, and document processing. If you’re looking for AI agents to perform tasks on your behalf, this is the tool to use.

Pros: AI agent workflows & chat interfaces; pre-built workflow templates
Cons: Occasional bugs; transitioning from chat-first tools to workflows

Automation Tips

My automation tip for the week is to use Anthropic’s developer console to create prompts for your workflows. They have a prompt generator feature that is extremely powerful and simple to use.

All you have to do is describe what you want to accomplish, and it will generate a detailed and optimized prompt that will work across all LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) to generate a high-quality output for your request.

For example, for summarizing a document, enter this request into Anthropic’s prompt generator:

Summarize documents into 10 bullet points max

And it will generate the below prompt you can use:

You are tasked with summarizing a document into a maximum of 10 bullet points. Here is the document to be summarized:


{{DOCUMENT}}


Please follow these instructions to create an effective summary:

1. Read the entire document carefully to understand its main ideas and key points.

2. Identify the most important information, focusing on main concepts, crucial details, and significant conclusions.

3. Condense this information into clear, concise bullet points.

4. Limit your summary to a maximum of 10 bullet points. If the document is short or simple, you may use fewer bullet points, but never exceed 10.

5. Each bullet point should:
   - Be a single sentence, ideally no longer than 20 words
   - Capture a distinct main idea or key piece of information
   - Be written in a clear, straightforward manner
   - Avoid redundancy with other bullet points

6. Arrange the bullet points in a logical order, which may be:
   - Chronological (if summarizing events or processes)
   - By order of importance (most crucial information first)
   - Following the structure of the original document

7. Use parallel structure in your bullet points for consistency and readability.

8. Avoid including minor details, examples, or tangential information unless they are crucial to understanding the main points.

9. Ensure that your summary provides a balanced overview of the entire document, not just the beginning or end.

10. After creating your summary, review it to ensure it accurately represents the key points of the original document without any misinterpretations.

Please provide your summary within  tags. Begin each bullet point with a dash (-) and a space.

That’s a better prompt than I could write from scratch! I highly recommend using this tool for all your prompt generation needs.

Workflow News

What exactly is an AI agent? That depends on who you ask. AI agents are often recognized as autonomous software entities designed to perform tasks with minimal human intervention.
Zoom launches Workflow Automation, a no-code workflow builder, to help users automate routine tasks and boost productivity within Zoom Workplace and third-party applications.
Want To Mitigate Risk? Invest in Automation. While automation can preserve institutional knowledge and maintain operations, it also requires regular maintenance to prevent technical debt and ensure reliability as systems evolve.

Tweet of the Week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

Find me on X, LinkedIn, or Book a 1:1 Call

P.S. If you liked this newsletter, share it with your friends and colleagues here.