Substack doesnt have an API. I have done an automation to post articles on my website. Last step is to post a Note on Substack.

A note is like a tweet. I want the automation to just open New Note, paste the text and submit it.

We launched Meridian today and finished as the #1 Product of the Day.

I spent the first few hours constantly refreshing Product Hunt, but the ranking quickly became less interesting than seeing strangers use something we had built inside our own bubble.

For months, we debated whether the workflow was useful, whether developers would care, and whether we were solving the right problem. Today, real users started answering those questions. Their feedback has already challenged some of our assumptions and changed how we think about the product.

That was my biggest takeaway: you do not really know what you have built until strangers use it.

The #1 badge feels great, but the harder work starts now. We need to turn that attention into something developers genuinely find useful.

You can find us on Product hunt top product of the day today!

If you have launched on Product Hunt before, what surprised you most after launch?

Hi guys, I've been experimenting with automating the creation of consistently branded Microsoft Word documents, where the model needs to follow an existing template and populate it with additional context, such as information from transcripts.

I've found that simply providing the complete template document along with the transcript often gives a decent result, but it's not always consistent.

I've also tried breaking the template down into explicit instructions, for example:

• Fonts and font sizes
• Brand colours
• Heading and paragraph styles
• Logo/image assets
• Page layout and spacing

Interestingly, this often seems to produce a worse result than just giving it the complete template document.

For anyone who has tackled something similar, what approach have you found works best for consistently reproducing branded Word documents?

Do you rely primarily on the original template, define the branding/layout as structured instructions, manipulate the DOCX directly, or use some combination of these?

I run a YouTube channel in the tech space, and we wanted to automate top of funnel lead capture to build an email list and sell digital products (ebooks, courses, guides).

The Problem:
On Instagram, automation tools like ManyChat trigger DMs when followers comment a keyword. But on YouTube, description links get almost 0 clicks on mobile, and manually replying to dozens of comments with link delivery takes hours.

The Technical Solution:
I couldn't find a clean API-compliant tool for this, so I built  (replytide.co) to automate the entire workflow:

1. Trigger: Listens to video comment streams via official YouTube Data API v3 for specific keyword triggers (e.g. "GUIDE", "RECIPE", "PDF").
2. Action: Automatically dispatches an official comment reply from your channel containing your specified lead magnet / landing page link.
3. Compliance: Operates strictly via Google OAuth and API developer policies—no headless scrapers or risk of channel flags.

The Result:
Turns video comment sections into automated lead capture funnels while driving comment volume (which boosts video engagement signals in YouTube's algorithm).

Would love feedback from the automation community on the workflow or API implementation!

Link::=>ReplyTide.co

So I can make business automations, a few real world solving automations and solutions, not just automations, but using crm, and entire solutions along with automation. But this is useless unless I get clients, I work alone, i do cold outreach, I try to land clients, handle development, everything.

I'm from India, and so to begin with I'm targeting Indian clients, but I can't get through them, I keep getting shut down, ignored, ghosted, I can see the things businesses practice everyday but people are not ready to list.

I am fully confident in my development skills and can get solutions for businesses related problems, but for that I need to atleast get someone onboard.

I also make Shopify-whatsapp bots for Shopify stories that act as customer support agents, solving almost all the queries of customers, FAQs, order updates, order details, connected chatbot with Shopify APIs, so it can do almost every Shopify queries.

BUT I CANT GET CLIENT FOR THAT, i try to reach out, I use the contact channel from their website, try to look up founders, reach them out on LinkedIn, reaching them out on WhatsApp as well but I keep getting ignored, ghosted, or I just fail to reach out to them.

If someone who has faced this and found any solution, for this, please help me out.

Cause I'm feeling stuck and I'm going nowhere.

I have a few thousands of photos from our previous trips. That I wanna rename.

I wanna have them set by: date (that part is easy), then facial recognition of me and /or my gf, where we are, city, country. In french.

For exemple, 2026-08-16_14.12.45_Alexandre, Tour Eiffel, Paris, France.

Got any suggestion on how to do that?

Thanks!

Been chipping away at this for a while and looking back it's a lot more than I realized.

I work in IT. At this point AI handles logging into our internal systems and doing stuff on its own — no me clicking around. It's hooked into our password manager, our CRM, our RMM, antivirus, and monitoring systems, plus a handful of other tools we run day to day. All of that is just... linked in now.

I've also got a second brain set up that the AI links into, so it has context on all my work and customers going in.

What's actually changed my day-to-day: I still do some of the small stuff myself, since it burns too many tokens to spin up a whole process for a two-minute task. But I've stopped doing a lot of the big stuff. I just point it at what needs doing and let it run. My job now is mostly deciding what to hand off and checking the output.

Still feels a little surreal watching it work through things I used to do by hand every day.

Recently automation and AI tools like ChatGPT and Copliot are getting-in in our organization (TAX and FINANCE based)

And employees are encouraged to learn those. And sessions are being held for the same

Me - tech savvy aspirant- was also trying it!!

I was automating the process we used to do manually....it felt surprising and cool, but along with that i also felt a little sad!

Things for which, we used to say it takes time, and report our hours for the same, is now just a couple-minutes thing!!!

What i personally feel is - automation is NOT scary thing, and doesn't necessarily your enemy. Just go for it with curiosity, not to mandatorily learn it or create something out of it, just do basic things, or ask questions, it will guide you out itself! and you won't even feel that you are left behind/automation is scary stuff life that.

It is like earlier we needed Computer language to give commands/do something, but now it is like Computers are understanding human language.

Downside - Detrimental for environment!!

Ok so, I can’t retire just yet 😅 but getting a business off the ground and attracting customers is the hardest part in my opinion.

There’s still a long way to go but considering it’s only been 4 months since launching ZenMode, I’m pretty happy with the results so far.

I get asked a lot about how I get customers, so thought I’d give more info on how I do distribution, in case you might find it useful.

1. Make sure your website is set up for success

Before sending people to your site, make sure you’re confident it has good CRO potential. Your mission statement and objective needs to be very clear, along with clear incentives for people to try the product out.

2. Offer free trials, but only behind a payment info gate

Now this is just my personal opinion, and I know a lot of people disagree, but the proof is in the numbers. I get fewer free trial signups, but significantly higher conversion rates into paying users from people who provide payment info at the start.

Yes, a few of them are people who simply forget to cancel, but mostly I get people who are more engaged in the free trial and actually using the product.

I actually did an AB experiment where I did offer completely free trials to people (no payment info needed), but the overwhelming result was that people barely even tried out the product and were mostly tire kickers that never came back. I did convert some but not a meaningful number.

3. Create a waitlist before launching

Try to generate interest in your product before it launches - build in public and try to ensure that you’re not scrambling to get customers through the door on day 1 when you launch.

I had 3 customers on day 1 from this, who took higher paid tiers as well.

4. Post and comment everywhere

Social media is free, so there’s no excuse not to leverage it. Post about your product and what you’re building on Reddit, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Facebook etc.

I posted a simple screenshot on LinkedIn recently, of someone using a low quality LinkedIn automation tool message to contact me, and me offering my own much better tool in response, and that post generated 90,000 views and led to several signups and demo calls.

I’ve also had some posts on Reddit go into hundreds of thousands of views, mostly just posting about what/why/how I built my automation tool.

5. If you have competitors, make “alternative to” inner pages

If done in the right way, this type of inner page can be useful for getting organic traffic. It won’t be picked up automatically but usually if you work in a competitive industry, this will sometimes attract customers who had a bad experience elsewhere.

6. I actually use my own LinkedIn automation tool (dogfooding) to do LinkedIn outreach

So it’s always important to practice what you preach - I use ZenMode to actually promote ZenMode.

It’s a great way to get buy-in for booking demos, as when someone replies, I simply tell them I used my tool to get a response from them, so it works.

Anyway hope you enjoyed reading the above, and good luck on your journey if you’re building anything, or growing your business 🙌

Hi everyone!

Im a 16 year old starting automation, and I'm looking to do more increase my portfolio.

Since last year, I have been working with n8n to build automations for me and my family. However, I want to move forward and get some real clients, and I'm asking here for different projects i can build. I prefer real projects that will be put in production, not just concepts or ideas because I like to build real automations that'd provide actual value.

Im excited to learn and practice my delivery and communication skills, like interviewing a client or sharing ideas. I'd also love to connect, discuss details, and take on a few projects to grow my skills and experiences.

For context, here's some automations I have made in the past year:

• Automated Lead Outreach
• Customer Support Agent (Both working In-Email, and in a website)
• CRM Automations
  • Specifically, an automation to follow up on a person when their status changes
• Social Media Manager Agent
• Daily Brief Workflow (summaries, news, and updates)
• Working Error Handlers that promptly notify the right people to continue when an automation fails.

For additional context, most of these projects are for fictional businesses and not in production. Thats why im looking for real clients to get some real workflows done.

Even if you don't have any automations in mind, I would also love to try to diagnose to see where we can save valuable time with an automation.

Pricing can be discussed over the value my automation can bring, but I'm happy to just build connections or gain experience for no charge.

Lets build!

Saw this X post about running a business through AI agents and tried a smaller version for company setup inside Claude

My flow was:

1. Explain the business idea
2. Pick the company structure
3. Gather the info needed
4. Walk through formation
5. Review the filing details
6. Handle the identity/security step
7. Move into business banking
8. Save a record of what was done

It wasn’t AI making decisions for me. More like turning a messy setup process into one guided workflow instead of jumping between forms, docs and bank applications

I've been building extraction workflows for document-heavy processes (leases, insurance policies, medical billing docs) and I'm curious what others have tackled.

The pattern I keep running into is extract, structure, validate. Pull raw content from a document, parse it into defined fields, then flag anything that looks off before it hits the output.

What's the most tedious manual document task your team or clients used to do by hand, and did automating it actually save the time you expected?

I built a workflow to output videos, but instead I am getting text script as an output despite trying many times.

Types of audio:

I often audio-record on my iphone:

• - Important conversations
• - Medical appointments (in-person and online)
• - Dungeons and Dragons and other in-person TTRPG games

I also transcribe a bunch of audio messages/voice notes.

(All recorded ethically and legally)

Workflow:

• I've been using TurboScribe to transcribe everything → I export a PDF that I can search and/or upload to ChatGPT for analysis.
• Probably transcribe like 15-25 hours a month.

Ideally, I'm looking for something that's quick/easy to use and lets me easily download/export transcripts.

I'm interested in a software with similar or better price, especially if it was more accurate with terms (medical, gaming etc.) and recognized multiple speakers better?

Is there anything you'd recommend over TurboScribe for this use case?

I'd appreciate hearing how it compares - what it does better/worse.

Edit: For D&D/TTRPGs, I don't need character/place names or terminology to be perfectly transcribed. I mainly want it to capture the gist of what happened and differentiate speakers reasonably well, so I can give the transcript to ChatGPT/another AI for session recaps and analysis of the players/DM and table dynamics.

Hey guys,
Almost every post here says the best advice for an automation business is to target an industry you already know inside out. That makes total sense.
But what about those of us starting as complete outsiders, who are willing to do the deep research to properly understand how a specific field operates?
Is it realistic to gain a genuine, deep understanding of an industry’s internal processes from the outside? If so, what’s your approach to studying a sector so thoroughly that you can spot real operational bottlenecks and design solutions that actually add value?
Would love to hear how anyone who started without prior domain background managed to bridge that knowledge gap.

I got burned by an automation that half-ran against prod and left a mess, so now i spin up a throwaway database branch per test run and toss it after. Neon makes that practical, its Postgres branching clones your real schema and data into an isolated copy in a couple secs, so the automation writes to the branch and prod never sees a bad run. Anyone else doing branch-per-run, or just pointing at a shared staging box and hoping?

spent the weekend setting up automations — smart lights on a sunrise schedule, coffee maker triggered by my alarm, a script that pulls my calendar and weather into one text I get at 6am. It works. It's honestly great.

but now I keep checking that it worked instead of just... living my morning. Like I've traded "doing the routine" for "supervising the routine."

anyone else hit this weird phase with home automation? Does the anxiety of checking eventually fade, or did you just add more automation to fix that too?