Simplifying Business with Automation with Zapier

One of the things I've noticed running Plymouth Software over the years is just how quick and easy it is to over-complicate everyday tasks.

As business owners, there is a vast (vast!) number of apps and services vying for our attention - and curiosity leads me to want to try each of them.

Over months and years, all these things build up until eventually we spend more time navigating between them, learning new interfaces, etc. than actually creating anything…

For this reason, I've spent a little time recently trying to cut complexities out of my business, and settle on using a few simple tools and approaches.

One of the most important services I am using to do this is Zapier, a "no/low-code" application to connect various systems together. With a small amount of custom code to tidy up text and formatting, Zapier can be used to build powerful event-driven processes into your business.

Email as the Interface

As an example, this post was written in my normal email app. I love the simplicity of email-as-the-interface, and wanted to adopt the approach for my mailing lists. I currently use (Convert) Kit, but I find the content editor creates too much friction. I wondered if I could instead write posts in my normal email UI, but still publish them through Kit.

So I created a Zapier automation - or Zap - to do just this. I send the email to a special, unique address created by Zapier. It then parses the content, using a little custom code to do tweak the content so it meets Kit's requirements, and then creates the email draft via their API.

Future improvements

Currently, the automation stops there, leaving the email as a draft in my Kit account. This lets me tweak the audience segments, schedule publication date, and so on.

Once Zapier updates the Kit integration to support the V4 API, this is something that I hope to fully automate.