Cheers, Here is where I landed. https://www.gumloop.com/pipeline?workbook_id=oidbyMdjDLf7jdENi861mc&run_id=eP39GPp8fn58mFdtDLdmF7 — It started off with having Get Lists and Join List nodes … Gummie sent me from Batch on to Batch off and everything in between. Eventually instructed me to remove the get list, so obviously the Jon list had to go too.
FWIW:
If you want to get some real world feedback, here is it:
As a general observation. I come from a retail background & then corporate. Most of the GPT wrappers are geared towards digital marketing & content creation, and most automation tools are geared towards shovelling data between Gmail and Slack - and similar - sll very much geared at what I imagine the environment and required tools are for startups. Out there in the world of plumbers and shoe shops and restaurants and builders, the need for automation is HIGH and the applicability of the tools is LOW or COMPLEX. This example I am working on is to do this. Client has a pet store, They have ‘loyalty points’ that are tracked in an archaic POS system with no webhooks or APIs. They get a PDF or a CSV at best. Then they want to text their clients from a 3rd party SMS platform that needs the data in specific format. They don’t even know how to do conditional formatting/ concatenation / adding or removing leading zeroes etc in Excel. AI is their future. But he currently has someone spending 30 minutes downloading, copying & pasting and then cleaning up the data.
Another example is simply to take customer names, addresses and phone numbers from Shopify, that stores data in a specific format. They need to extract this and reformat the mobile number because the Courier Company who sends delivery SMS needs the manifest to be formatted differently. Busy store, and she had a staff member spend half the day (I kid you not) manually reformatting. I have given her a simple 2-module MAKE solution with a small MACRO to clean it up. Which now requires zero work. Except that Make is writing this to a Sheet, and every transaction (hundred per day) are APPENDED to the sheet which makes navigating things tedious very quickly. A simple automation solution should fix this.
I have played around with Make, Vectorshift and N8N and others and the problem are still pretty much the same. If simple data manipulation/ cleanup is going to require 6 steps and multiple settings like to extract data, the extract list and then split and join and aggregate and write and then back up and down. It’s crazy.
I have a client that is a media company specialising in drone/ video content. He has offered me $15K to give him a solution that will:
Take incoming leads from email form and phone calls, and analyse the request, reply with request for more information if required, or otherwise go ahead and create OR UPDATE the customer in the Accounting Package, create a Card in ClickUp, and prepare a draft quote based on the product/price list in the Accounting package. When sent to a customer, and approval is received, update the task, generate the invoice and notify.
This shouldn’t be too hard. But doing that on a platform that is simple enough for them to then EDIT and tweak once it is implemented, is the stumbling block.
I hope this helps.
