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Automation

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Quick Overview

Here's how to build automation systems that save 10+ hours per week for any freelance business. From simple email workflows to complex AI-powered content pipelines, these step-by-step guides show you exactly what works and what doesn't.

Article
Category: systems
Tags:
automation system design analytics

You're looking at your analytics dashboard, and 80% of your traffic is labeled "Direct." You know this is wrong. Your team is running campaigns on LinkedIn, Reddit, and paid search, but you have no clear view of what's actually working. You're spending a budget but can't calculate the ROI, and you're being asked to make strategic decisions based on data you fundamentally don't trust.

This is a common failure point in marketing strategy.

Analytics fails at the "first mile": data entry. Companies often try to solve this with policy (e.g., "everyone please use the new spreadsheet"), but relying on human...

GetViajo
Note
Category: milestones
Tags:
systems tools markdown converter automation

Shipped MarkdownToEmailConverter.com

I just shipped a new public-facing tool: markdowntoemailconverter.com

This project was born from a critical bottleneck in my content pipeline. Writing articles in markdown is efficient, but manually converting them to email-ready HTML for my newsletter (GetViajo.com) was a tedious, error-prone process that wasted hours. Tables, formatting, and inline CSS were a constant problem.

In two days, working with Claude and Gemini as development partners, I built a solution.

The impressive part of this, IMO, is the intelligent truncation engine. It automatically calculates the total size of the HTML (including the inline CSS) to proactively prevent the “email clipping” that Gmail and other clients enforce. It solves the entire ecosystem problem, not just the formatting one.

This was a 48-hour investment that will save me dozens of hours and eliminate a major point of friction in my marketing workflow. I put it online for anyone to use—free, no signup. If you run a newsletter and write in markdown, this will save you time.

Note
Category: automation
Tags:
social media scheduler automation systems

I Built My Own Social Media Scheduler

I ran into a “build vs. buy” problem with social media. Tools like Buffer or Hootsuite are great, but they didn’t fit my exact workflow. I’m also not (very) profitable yet and it made sense to save some money here.

I write all my content—for my blog, LinkedIn, Bluesky, etc. in Markdown files first. This meant I’d have to manually copy-paste every single post from my text editor into the scheduler’s web app. It was a point of friction I knew I’d end up hating.

So, I spent a weekend building a simple, custom system that does fit my workflow.

It’s just two parts:

  1. I write a post as a .md file with simple frontmatter (like platform: linkedin and schedule: 2025-10-30T09:00:00).
  2. A CRON job (an automated task) runs every 15 minutes. It checks a “scheduled” folder, and if it’s time, it uses the right API to publish the post onto the respective platform of choice

The file then gets moved to a “published” folder, and I have a perfect archive.

This both saves me a few bucks and significantly removes friction from my workflow, allowing me to schedule any matter of content as far in advance as I’d like. I can now batch-create content for all my platforms, and the system handles distribution endlessly. This frees me up to batch-create content one or two weeks a month, and spend the rest of the time doing more big-picture “CEO-level” type things. Very proud of this one.