Launching and operating a business is a challenging task. Throughout the project lifecycle, there are numerous tasks that divert your attention from more creative work. However, there is a solution: organizing and automating workflows.
Organizing and automating workflows during the project lifecycle
Today, we will discuss the importance of efficient data management, collaboration workflows, and automation in achieving an easier market entry, improved operations, cost savings, and increased competitiveness.
In summary, a collaborative workspace that allows you to capture, organize, and maintain data with relationships, formulas, real-time collaboration, and automation leads to efficiency and productivity at all stages of the project lifecycle.
Part 1: Pre-launch
Before launching a startup, it is crucial to evaluate and automate business processes as much as possible. Founders seeking a competitive advantage should consider investing in automation to streamline internal operations.
Organizing your company materials
Every brand starts with an idea and defines its vision, mission, and values. As your team grows, it becomes essential to keep everyone informed about the company’s direction. To achieve this, create a consolidated company wiki where you can gather all necessary materials. Store and manage your company’s views, policies, goals, team information, and other resources using database solutions like Baserow.
Creating an industry map
An industry map is a valuable tool for positioning your startup in the market. It helps you stay updated on market trends and the pace of change.
Similarly, maintaining a page in your wiki for competitors and market research ensures that the relevant people have access to this information. Understanding your position in the market and among competitors is crucial for business success. Creating and managing a competitor analysis database online allows you to highlight your unique features and easily update it with new data.
Ideal customer profile (ICP)
To succeed in business, it is essential to know your target audience and cater to their needs. Define the issues, preferences, dislikes, and requests of your Ideal Customer by mapping out their profiles.
Tools like Baserow can help you create an editable table for your ideal customer profile (ICP), which can be updated as your company grows.
User feedback management
Throughout your journey, user feedback plays a vital role. Whether it’s gathered before the launch through test groups or after the launch to identify areas for improvement, it is crucial to collect and track this feedback effectively.
Baserow provides a User Feedback template that allows you to easily collect and manage all the feedback you receive.
Attracting new customers
Your website is a crucial element of your business. It serves as the face of your company, provides information to potential clients, and acts as a powerful marketing tool.
Once your website is created, you can leverage automation features to save time. By connecting Baserow with tools like n8n or Zapier through the API, you can set up lead generation, analytics, and more.
Hint: How do you encourage visitors to leave their email on the website?
- Offer valuable downloadable files such as e-books, white papers, or research. Require visitors to share their email to access the download.
- Provide a subscription box for receiving updates, news, and special offers.
- Host events like webinars and demo sessions.
Lead management flow:
- Save new leads to Baserow.
- Receive Slack notifications for new leads.
- Add new leads to Mailchimp or any other email provider.
- Set up an email drip sequence to send to new leads.
Learn how to create high-converting email drips using no-code tools like Baserow and SendGrid:
Part 2: Operating a startup
Analytics
In addition to all the mentioned above, you can also automate the process of managing analytics and be smarter with your business decisions.
Analyze website performance
Analytics and traffic are something that needs to be constantly monitored — any issues can result in poor conversions and loss of clients. The most efficient way to be constantly notified of any problems is to set up automation with Zapier.
For instance, you can arrange that any time there is an issue, you get a notification. No need to get your team members to constantly monitor data by themselves.
Analyze website traffic and data
Automation in analytics is not only about catching issues. It can also be used to check the traffic or changes on your website and perform a certain action. For example, when the goal is reached, you get a new row in your database. Or when content on a website changes, you get a notification.
HR: finding a team
All startups start with finding a perfect team — and this is no piece of cake. Hiring is a lengthy and time-consuming process. With modern tech, you can make it a bit less painful with things like Applicant trackers from Baserow where all relevant data can be sorted and efficiently stored and handled:
- Managing recruiting pipeline;
- On-boarding;
- Storing HR policies;
…and more.
Now that you’ve neatly organized the positions, interviews to-do, applicants data, and everything in between, you can make things even easier for yourself with the following automation path:
Applicant leaves their CV →
- They are added to a database of applicants immediately;
- You automatically send out a confirmation letter (Connect Baserow + n8n + email; add a trigger plus the consequent action). In our case, a trigger is a new row added to the database (new applicant), and the action — send an email.
Creating and following a roadmap
Having a roadmap is beneficial for your team, clients, and investors. Respectively, it helps you not to stray away from your goals, your clients and investors see that you put in effort and time to develop.
Create and keep track of everything that is on your table with the Product Roadmap template from Baserow.
Get rid of boring tasks
Some repetitive and boring tasks can easily be handed to the automated processes, while your team can focus on the creative side of running a newly-born business.
We are talking about things like creating tasks from your database:
- Send tasks from Baserow to Trello
- Send tasks from Baserow to Asana
Logging form submissions
Whatever information you are collecting—feedback, suggestions, or even what kind of coffee everyone prefers, using forms is probably the most efficient way to do so. With Baserow, you can send that gathered information to a database automatically, so it can be sorted, organized, and acted on efficiently.
Notifications for new and updated rows
Platforms like Baserow allow working on a file as a team. If you need to get notified about changes in the table without having to stare at the doc all day, good thing that adding custom webhooks in Baserow will allow you to do just that.
These real-time notifications keep you posted on new and updated rows, so you’re never out of the loop.
Create calendar events from new records in Baserow
If you have a specific database in Baserow that is dedicated to events, this automation path will be a perfect fit for you. Once set up, when new rows are added to the selected table in Baserow (events in our case), with the help of n8n you can automatically create a respective event in Google Calendar. Create new events right from your Baserow database!
Chatbots
Something as trivial as a chatbot can make your processes more efficient, and decrease the workload of your community or support manager. An automated chatbot can take care of customer queries for order tracking, subscription updates, FAQs, and even the most common support requests.
There is a whole list of things you can do to make sure your Chatbots work efficiently, for example, collect analytics.
Blog post management and search engine optimization (SEO)
Organize, track, and share your blog posts without missing a deadline or creating duplicate content through tools like Baserow. We promise you’ll like it! With Baserow you can create a complete organizational space, where you can manage not only blog posts, but also keywords, backlinks, filter out posts by copywriters and statuses, and the list goes on.
Here’s a Company Blog Management template that you can use for this.
Once you organize your content plan, move on to setting up automated publishing.
Social media management
Schedule posts across all your social media to be posted automatically — no need to do it manually all the time. Life gets in the way, we all forget about things. With automation, however, you will be 100% sure that the post is there when you need it.
When the status is approved, send a notification to Slack and post a tweet.
Emailing
In today’s modern era, the process of sending emails has become incredibly convenient. Thanks to platforms like n8n, you no longer need to concern yourself with tedious tasks such as manually adding leads to your newsletter list. With n8n, you can effortlessly automate the sending of large-scale email campaigns, track open and response rates, identify inactive email addresses, and so much more.
Take advantage of n8n’s capabilities by setting up an automated email chain that seamlessly integrates with your Baserow database. By doing so, you will have access to comprehensive data on open and click rates, all conveniently stored in your Baserow database.
Here’s an Email Marketing Campaign template to get you started.
Software application bug tracker
The best programs are not exempt from bugs. In fact, they excel because they maintain a comprehensive log of all bugs and complaints, systematically eliminating them over time. By having a centralized location to track these issues, you can quickly assign the most suitable team member who has either worked on the code before or is skilled in the programming language to address the problem immediately. Baserow’s bug tracking template reduces user downtime by effortlessly tracking, assigning, and promptly resolving software bugs.
Check out Baserow’s template for tracking bugs to streamline your bug management process.
Part 3: Scaling
The mark of a healthy startup is one that grows steadily without encountering any major obstacles along the way. Automation is a versatile tool that aids in the expansion of a business by taking on a significant portion of tasks and completing them on your behalf.
Surveys
A crucial aspect of scaling is listening to your users’ feedback. Integrate NPS and customer satisfaction surveys on your website to effortlessly gather valuable insights. With the help of automation, you can immediately send this data to your preferred database and keep track of what people are saying about your product.
Reducing errors
Machines typically don’t make mistakes when properly set up. By automating repetitive actions, you can easily identify areas that are running smoothly and those that require minor adjustments. This eliminates human error, such as typos, miscounts, and forgetfulness. With fewer errors to fix, you’ll have more time to focus on growing your business.
Grow faster than your competitors
As mentioned earlier, automation allows your business to operate mostly on auto-pilot. This frees up more of your time and effort for development, marketing, and seeking investments. By running automated and non-automated tasks simultaneously, you can accomplish more within the same timeframe.
Invest in growth
Automation is a powerful tool for reducing costs. The money saved from automating repetitive tasks can be reinvested in employee incentives, research, development, marketing, or even team-building activities.
Make the most of your databases. These powerful tools for storing and managing information can become even more efficient when paired with automation. Easily collect relevant data for your business and keep yourself and your team informed about any changes.
Invest your time and money in what truly matters. Let automation handle the rest.
