S2. Ep13 - How to Get Started With Automations (A Beginner's Guide)

Where do you even start with automations?

In this episode, Katie and Noel go right back to basics and walk through three specific automations that every service-based business owner can set up from scratch no coding, no tech skills, no experience needed. They cover booking management with AI-powered lead qualification, CRM automations that bypass expensive platform tiers, and a content scheduling setup that posts to multiple social media platforms from a simple Google Sheet.

They also chat about the leaked Claude Mythos (version five), why Make.com, Zapier, and n8n are the three platforms worth looking at, Katie's Meet Edgar content bucket saga, and why Noel built his first ever automation on a dog holiday. Priorities.

Check out our review of all no code automations on Season 1 Episode 34.

How to find us:

Join our membership over on Skool, where we support you on your AI and automation journey. We share exclusive content in the membership that shows you the automations we talks about in action how to build them. Find out more about the AI Business Club here.

We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all.

New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us.

If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai

• Episode Transcript

  Katie (00:26)

  Hello, welcome back to another episode. Hello, I'm Katie and as always, I've got my co-host here with me, Noel. Hi Noel, how are you doing this week?

  Noel (00:36)

  Doing fantastic this week, how are you doing?

  Katie (00:38)

  Yeah, all good. Thank you. So before we get into this week's episode, any AI or automation updates that we should be aware of? Because I know last episode there were quite a few.

  Noel (00:56)

  There was, wasn't there. So yeah, I think Claude or Anthropic were getting all their updates out before Easter or maybe the year end, I guess. So we had a flurry of stuff that we covered last week. But this week, I would say it's been quite quiet. There's been a leak of potentially what could be Claude's version five called Mythos.

  Katie (01:25)

  Okay, what have they been saying? What's the rumour?

  Noel (01:29)

  Well, obviously it's going to be the most powerful thing they've ever released and all that sort of stuff. But basically somebody found an unpublished set of press articles and things that link into this thing called Mythos on the Anthropic website. Whoops.

  Katie (01:52)

  Do you think someone's in trouble?

  Noel (01:56)

  But yeah, it was the usual. So they didn't give away any sort of figures or anything like that. But yeah, I think we can expect that fairly soonish. I would hope.

  Katie (01:59)

  Okay, so what do you think that's going to look like?

  Noel (02:11)

  I don't really know. I mean, they obviously always say it's going to be the most powerful. I would assume it's going to be more towards coding because Claude Code is absolutely crazy at the minute. It does such a good job as it does already. So I'd imagine that's only going to get better. I think they've kind of got all of the pieces together, haven't they, with all the other updates. I think just a better model to use them would just make that so much better. But yeah, that's the big sneaky news to look out for when that gets released.

  Katie (02:42)

  Okay. So this week's episode is all about how to get started with automations. And we're going to do this from a very beginner's point of view. So if you've heard lots of things about AI automations or automations in your business and you think, well, I'd love to be able to save time or be able to save money, maybe you're juggling lots of tasks and maybe you're at that stage in the business where you would love to have a VA, a virtual assistant, but actually you can't quite afford one yet. I feel like automations obviously do not replace a VA by any means, but they will take some of the tasks away off your calendar, off your plate.

  And allow things to just flow better in your business as well, which we all want. Providing a better customer experience, which is a win-win.

  Noel (03:56)

  Absolutely, that's what we all want, isn't it? Better experience.

  Katie (03:59)

  So like I said, we're going to go through a few different scenarios about where you can get started with automations within your service based business. And hopefully if you've already got these automations in place or they don't apply to you, hopefully they spark some ideas on what you could automate in your business and how to get started.

  So, Noel, before we even get started with some of the scenarios that we've got planned, where do we even start with automations? How much tech knowledge do you need? Or is it a bit like the LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini where actually it's all about communication rather than your technical skills?

  Noel (04:56)

  So I guess in terms of technical expertise, you don't need to understand things like how apps and APIs communicate to each other on the internet. I don't think you would need that sort of deep knowledge to get you started. There's lots of no-code automation platforms out there which can connect thousands of apps into AI or together with each other.

  You don't have to have AI in everything. If you just need something to go from point A to point B, you can still do that sort of stuff. There are three main no-code automation platforms which I would suggest you look at. So they are Zapier, n8n, and our old favourite, Make.com.

  They're all kind of different in their own way. And we did an episode back in October, so that was season one, episode 34. And we went through and talked about all three of those platforms, pros and cons and things like that. And since then, I would say not a lot's changed. There's been a few bits added, but generally it's exactly the same as it used to be.

  Katie (06:03)

  Okay, good to know.

  Noel (06:10)

  So yeah, there's plenty of no-code options. You don't need to understand coding or anything super complicated. All you really need is the ability to go off and grab an API key from whichever platform or account that you use that you would like to connect. So as long as you can find that, you can pretty much set up anything within any of these platforms, which is pretty cool.

  Katie (06:34)

  Okay, that's good to know. So you're going to choose which platform you want, sign up, create an account. Now there are free accounts and there are also paid accounts for those different platforms that we talked about. Again, we do talk more about that in the episode that Noel mentioned. We will make sure we link it below in the show notes for you if you want to go and check that out after this episode.

  So yeah, we've signed up to the platform that we like. Where are we going next?

  Noel (07:05)

  So I guess all of these platforms give you a blank canvas, which is great. You can build and connect whatever you want in whatever order you like. But as someone who might be new to this, that's kind of a little bit overwhelming to start off with. So what I would suggest is to maybe pick something that you do repetitively. Something that's fairly straightforward to do and then just write it out.

  So you're going to want to move data from application A and then you want it to go to application B and then on to C and D, whatever it might be. And then just write all that down. So you have a picture of what you're going to build before you try and build it. Because sometimes when you try and do it without having that picture to start off with, you can go down all kinds of rabbit holes. Either it doesn't work or it gets super complicated. Just keep it simple to start off with is what I would suggest.

  Katie (08:14)

  I think as well starting from a blank canvas is very intimidating and feels very overwhelming. But yeah, if you've written down actually I want this to go from this to this and then when that happens, I want this to go from here to there.

  Noel (08:19)

  Yeah, definitely. There's also, especially on Make.com, I think Zapier have it as well, I think all three of them have it, but they also have templates. So with Make.com as the example, you could go through their template library and then go, actually that's kind of what I was after doing, that fits what I want it to do. And then you can just say, use the template and it will take you through step by step what you then need to do to configure and get that set up. So that's also a really cool way to start. I mean, hopefully they've got the exact one you want. That'd be helpful. But even if you just got to that point and then was like, right, now I just need to add something else or remove something, that's a really nice starting point.

  And then I guess in the future that's kind of changing as well, isn't it? We've got some more conversational stuff coming to help you get started. So Make.com have got Maia that's coming out soonish. So you'd be able to just chat with it and say, this is what I want to connect in what order. And it will then go off and guide you through that process. And n8n have something similar already to help you do that. So that sort of help is coming soon as well. So if you're completely new and you get a bit lost, those tools will be available very soon.

  Katie (10:06)

  Perfect. Okay, so shall we go through and talk about some of the automation examples that we have and then how we would build them out as well?

  Noel (10:21)

  Yeah, absolutely. I guess the first one on our list is to do with managing bookings. So let's say you've got a website form and you then get an email sent to you saying this person's booked in or is interested in your service.

  Katie (10:34)

  Yeah, let's say that someone's interested in, let's say some coaching with you or having a consultation with you and they've come through via the website form.

  Noel (10:55)

  Yep. So you would get that generally to your email. So what we can do is connect pretty much any email account into Make.com. All the main ones like Gmail, Outlook, all of those are already pre-built into the platform. So I would say we'd start off with that module first. And what I would also do is, especially for emails, maybe set up an automation rule within your inbox. So where that's going to come from in the subject title, just create a folder within that email account. So every time that comes in, it goes in that folder. And that would make your automation life a lot easier because you can just say in the Gmail or Outlook module, just look in that folder. Something new comes in that folder, do something. So you're not just going to start processing any random newsletter emails that come through. We don't want those.

  So that's kind of where I would start off with. And what I would do is when you first start connecting the first module, which is going to be really important because this is the start point, I would say this is the same for every automation that I build. I would put that first module in place and then I would test it straight away.

  So all of these apps allow you to run it once kind of thing to get the information. So we'd send an email, make sure it goes in that folder or whatever, and then run the application in your automation platform and then see that data comes through. And if that happens, we're all good. We're happy to move on at that point.

  Katie (12:53)

  Okay, so we can go on to the next step.

  Noel (12:55)

  Exactly. It's really important because I used to build all of it and then test it and then I'd end up with it not working. So that saves a lot of time if we do that.

  Katie (13:08)

  Yeah, because otherwise if you've built all of it and then test it, it's harder to figure out what part of it's gone wrong.

  Noel (13:17)

  Yes. It can be, especially if it's quite complicated. You could spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. So from that email, where they're wanting to book in, like Katie mentioned, they've got a consultation or maybe they're interested in one-on-one coaching or a specific service. All of these apps allow you to provide multiple routes. So you could have one route which is for one service, one route for another one. So depending on what they've asked for in the form, we can filter that out. And then after that point, we could connect it to something like Calendly to then basically send them that link. So we're sending them the right link for the right service.

  So yeah, that's really straightforward. And then after that you would send them the email. So you would have another Gmail or whatever email platform you use to then send that link with whatever text you wish. And you can send that straight back to them. And this will run automatically.

  Katie (14:39)

  And that can all be automated.

  Noel (14:39)

  Yes, you would never have to look at it again, hopefully. It would just happen. It doesn't matter, day or night. Just keeps running.

  Katie (14:44)

  And on this form, would you be able to, so obviously not everyone's going to qualify for, for example, a discovery call. So would you be able to filter out the people that don't qualify so they don't get the link to book a discovery call?

  Noel (15:02)

  You could do, yes. You could add in an AI module in there to basically read the message, understand it, and then figure out is this person the right fit. You could have the message box, give that to the AI to read it. And then that could qualify which route they then go down within your system. So yeah, that can definitely be done.

  When it comes to AI you can attach any AI model you wish within there. So it doesn't matter if you love OpenAI or Anthropic or Gemini, whatever. You can use whatever you wish within any of these platforms.

  Katie (15:53)

  Okay, sounds good. So that's one part of it.

  Noel (16:06)

  From that point you could even go through Stripe as well. You could add that in. So you also then send an invoice to then go through the booking link or things like that. So there's lots of different things that you could add in. It all kind of depends on what your company processes are and how you onboard customers. But yeah, if you use an online app, you could add it in wherever you wish.

  Katie (16:33)

  Yes, then you could add it. If the discovery call was successful and someone wants to start working with you, you could then start another automation where you send the invoice and then once the invoice is paid, it automatically sends a contract to them. Once the contract is signed, you can then automatically send another calendar link for them to book in their call again.

  Noel (16:40)

  Exactly. With the contract side, there are applications that allow you to build contracts and things like that. And those apps are usually within Make.com or whatever. But I know some of those can actually cost quite a bit of money sometimes. And if you don't have a high throughput, it's probably not worth it. But what you could do is link it into things like Google Docs. So you could create a formatted template within there and then send them a link to the Google Doc. And within the template, you could have their name and things like that. Everything that they provided to you that you have access to, you could automatically import all that information. So you don't have to manually do that at any point. You could fully automate it if you wish.

  Katie (17:53)

  Yeah. Okay. That's good to know.

  Noel (17:59)

  Absolutely. There's lots of things you can do with it.

  Katie (18:03)

  Yeah, so that's a really helpful automation just for sending contracts or sending calendar links that will save a lot of time. And for me, it's not a very enjoyable, repetitive task.

  Noel (18:12)

  Yeah, it's not great, is it? But if you add all that time together, then you can already work out how much time you're going to save straight away. If you know it's going to take you half an hour, 40 minutes to do that full process, then that's time you've won back, which is fantastic.

  Katie (18:29)

  Yeah. Okay, so that's a great automation that people can get started with. Have you got another example for us?

  Noel (18:44)

  Yep. So CRM automations are quite big, I would say. So when it comes to platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce and things like that. The big CRMs offer, well, they kind of offer automations built in, but I tend to find that they're not particularly great. And then they gatekeep a lot of the functions. So you might see something like, oh, I could do that within whatever platform. And then you go to do it and it's like, no, you've got to pay another $50 a month just to do that one thing. You're like, well, I don't want to do that.

  Katie (19:15)

  Yeah, you've got to be on the pro plan or something.

  Noel (19:31)

  Exactly. It's really frustrating. But what we can do with CRMs in the no-code automation side is we have access to pretty much all of the API endpoints for those platforms. So I think HubSpot's got hundreds of different things that you could do within that platform. There's so much stuff to pick from. But what we can do is outsource that automation away from that platform into that no-code builder where you as the user can build it and understand it and test it. You can see how it works. And it also gives you that extra functionality as well. So you shouldn't have to pay the extra money.

  But I guess kind of like a common CRM automation is lead qualification. So let's say they automatically get added into your CRM. They've given you their business email or website and things like that. So you could go off and basically look up that business. You could use AI to find out more about them and then assess against any additional information that's been added at that point in the CRM. And then basically start crafting personalised outreach. So you could send them an email straight away to say, thanks so much for signing up, we've seen that you do X, Y, and Z in these industries. We've got all of that from the website. And we can send back something that's hyper-personalised. And it would also happen almost instantaneously.

  It depends on if you want to check it first. If you want that human in the loop factor, then obviously it would take a bit of time for you to check it and then approve it. But if you had it on automation, it could just happen within a minute or so.

  Katie (21:42)

  Love that. Another great time saver.

  Noel (21:51)

  I guess you could also add a time delay, so it doesn't look like it's fully automated and you've just used AI. You could have a sleep module in Make.com which is set to three minutes or five minutes. So it looks like you as the business owner have actually gone on that website and looked them up and then sent them a personalised email. So yeah, you can do that as well.

  Katie (22:24)

  Yeah. Okay. So two really good time savers so far. And we really hope that as we're talking and you're thinking about your own business, it's sparking off different thoughts and ideas that you could go, well, actually I don't offer that or I don't do that, but I do do this. And actually I wonder if I could do that.

  Noel (22:30)

  Absolutely.

  Katie (22:52)

  I'm really hoping that as we're talking, it's given you some food for thought.

  Noel (22:57)

  Absolutely. Let's hope so.

  Katie (22:59)

  And we've got one more example, haven't we?

  Noel (23:04)

  We do. So this is kind of more aimed at content creation. Lots of businesses will use scheduling platforms for social media posts. I know Katie, you've been using those for years.

  Katie (23:17)

  Yes. I used to use one all the time for Twitter. So I used to run a Twitter chat hour and to promote it, I would schedule out tons of tweets every week. But I used to use a scheduler called Meet Edgar. And then when Twitter changed their API so you couldn't keep recycling tweets, every tweet had to be unique, that's when I stopped using it because that's what Meet Edgar was great at. You used to have different content buckets and you would fill it up with lots of different tweets and then it would pick and choose. You would tell it like on Wednesday at 10am you want a tweet from this content bucket to go out and it would pick one. So that was what was so good about Meet Edgar. But then when Twitter changed and it was like, no, you're not allowed to recycle tweets, every tweet has to be slightly different, I was like, well, this is no longer going to work for me. Which is so annoying. Because at the time I was running two businesses and it was just such a great automation for me.

  But yeah, after that I just stopped using it. And actually I stopped using any schedulers because then the whole thing came in with, if I schedule a post, will it affect my organic reach? And I was finding that when I was using it on Facebook, it really dramatically changed my organic reach. So I was like, right, I'm just going back to organically posting. But the head of Instagram, he does an ask me anything every Friday on Instagram. People send him their questions. He probably answers about five or six questions. And this question comes up every time. If I use a scheduler to schedule my posts, will it affect my organic reach? And he insists that it will not now affect your organic reach. I've yet to try it, but when I was talking to clients about content marketing and posting on social media, for me, it was always like, it's much better that you actually get a post out there and have post schedules rather than going, I forgot, or I ran out of time.

  Noel (26:22)

  That's me. I always think three days later, I should have done that.

  Katie (26:24)

  Yeah. So whereas straight away you could be like, right, I'm going to write a post about that but actually I want it to go out two days later. It is really helpful rather than you having to remember or just having it in your draft.

  Noel (26:43)

  Well, these days, those content buckets and picking and choosing could be done with no-code automations.

  Katie (27:05)

  Shall I bring back the Twitter chat hour?

  Noel (27:07)

  Well, I guess one thing to note is the X API changed last year and basically Make.com, Zapier, and n8n have all gone, we're not touching it. Because they charge silly amounts of money to connect to it. And obviously the no-code automation platforms would be the ones that would have to pay for it per user. So they were like, yeah, we're not touching it. But any other platform, we're good to go.

  Katie (27:37)

  Okay. So we're not bringing back the Twitter chat. Sorry.

  Noel (27:42)

  No, we'd have to put it on Threads or something. But yeah, to get to the automation. So let's say we'll go super simple. Let's say we've got a Google Sheet and we can create content, different posts or post ideas. We can even get AI to create this for us. If you want to be super lazy, you can get it to create that Google Sheet for you. But what we can do within these no-code platforms is link that sheet into the automation and then have it run every day and say, right, what posts do I need to post today at 10 o'clock?

  So it would run, it would find that line within that spreadsheet to say, that's today. Here's the post text. Here's maybe the image you might have saved on Google Drive. So you can say, here's the share link for that particular image. And then you could post it directly using the native modules within Make.com and the other platforms to your Facebook, Instagram, and all that sort of stuff. All of those big platforms apart from X are all in there. LinkedIn's there. You can do company and personal posts. There's all sorts. And for anyone that's ever kind of looked at the API docs for things like Meta especially, it's an absolute disaster to try to figure it out manually. Whereas in these no-code platforms, they've already done all of that hard work for you. You've just got to connect your account and then you're good to go. So you don't have to reverse engineer anything, thankfully.

  But yeah, that could be as simple or as complicated as you want with your content. You could have it creating posts to go on every single platform all at once. There's all sorts you can do. And going back to your buckets idea, you could have that in there and then have an AI module which would create a unique post based on that particular content bucket and then send it out to all the platforms. So that's also pretty possible as well.

  Katie (30:06)

  Okay, that sounds good. And we've got things showing you how to do this within AI Business Club, haven't we? Our membership that is hosted over on Skool.

  Noel (30:18)

  We do, yes. So if you've never touched an automation platform, no-code in your life, then we take you through how to use Make.com from the very beginning. Take you through all of the common modules that are in there. And then there's a couple of projects in there where we take you through and show you how to build those out as well. So yeah, we've got things in there showing you how to use the AI agent systems and things like that, which is maybe a bit beyond a beginner, but that's in there ready for when you're ready as well.

  Katie (30:55)

  Yeah. And I think the first thing is getting used to how the platforms work. And I feel like once you've done your first automation, it gets easier and easier from there.

  Noel (31:07)

  It's kind of like eating Pringles, isn't it? You just can't stop. At least that's what I found anyway. I built one and I was astonished when it worked. I was like, wow.

  Katie (31:26)

  Yeah, I do feel like you have an automation addiction.

  Noel (31:33)

  A little bit, yeah.

  Katie (31:35)

  Yeah, like people have addictions with Pringles and Diet Coke.

  Noel (31:40)

  Yeah. Well, I built my first automation when we were on holiday. It was one of our dog holidays. And I remember you saying to me, so what on earth are you building? I was building my first Make.com automation. I spent the time wisely learning a new skill. That's what I put it down as.

  Katie (31:53)

  Yeah, Noel likes to relax.

  Yeah, and of course, Noel's always there as well to hold your hand if you get stuck. You can ask as many questions as you like, and if you're really stuck and Noel's got time, he will probably jump on a call with you and talk you through it.

  Noel (32:07)

  Yeah, there's definitely times where it's easier for me to see it as well and work through it together. Definitely.

  Katie (32:23)

  Yeah, for sure. I don't think we get that in many memberships, do you?

  Noel (32:30)

  No, not that I'm part of anyway.

  Katie (32:32)

  No, none that I've been part of ever either.

  But we will leave the link for AI Business Club below for you, or you can just go and search AI Business Club over on Skool, and we would love to have you join us. Whether you're a beginner or you've done a little bit of automations before but you just want to maybe improve your skills or you want to do some trickier automations, then that is definitely going to be the place for you.

  If you have any questions about this episode, please come and let us know. We have a free LinkedIn group called AI Automations for Business. So if you just search LinkedIn for our group, that will pop up, but again, we'll leave the link below. Or you can send us an email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

  And again, we'll leave that email address below. But yeah, we love hearing from you. If you've got any questions or if there's anything you would like us to do a future episode on or discuss, then let us know. We're always open to new ideas and things, aren't we Noel?

  Noel (33:47)

  Definitely. There's so many different things we could do in this world that we haven't even thought of yet.

  Katie (33:54)

  Yeah. So thank you very much for listening to this week's episode. If you've liked it, please give us a like or leave a review. It really helps us get the word out about our podcast. But we will catch you next time for another episode very soon.