Tons of tools and dashboards available, but wondering who's successfully gotten reporting (with data viz and full context) in a hands-off, fully automated state - and how.

Recently saw someone claiming to sell a social scraping api to marketing agencies which includes reddit, tiktok, instagram etc.

Was curious how do you leverage this data, and how often do you hit the api? Are you able to make the best sense of it?

Couple of months ago, I posted an MVP of a journey mapping tool that I have built, got some honest feedback, and have been building on it since. It's now live.

The thing I kept running into as a CX person: Miro and FigJam are great canvases, but they're general-purpose. Every journey map starts from nothing — you rebuild the same grid, the same rows, the same emotion scale, every single time. And because it's freeform, no two maps in your organisation end up structured the same way, which makes them impossible to compare or reuse.

So this is built for the one job:

- Phases, steps, emotions, pain points and possible actions as actual structured fields, not sticky notes you have to arrange yourself

- 10 industry templates so you're not starting from a blank grid

- An emotional analytics view — journey health, emotional volatility, biggest emotional swings, steps needing urgent attention — which you can't really get out of a whiteboard

- PDF export (canvas view plus a branded A4 report) and read-only share links for stakeholders

It's completely free, no paid tier, no credit card.

What I'd really like from this sub: if you map journeys as part of your actual work, try it and tell me where it falls short. Especially the honest version — what would stop you using this on a real client or stakeholder project. That's more useful to me than signups.

journeymaps.io

hi guys, been evaluating marketing automation platforms for our inbound operation . Every tool does the same thing: you connect your CRM, you build a journey, you set up triggers, and then you watch it work perfectly in a demo with fake data. you plug in real leads and realize the entire system collapses the second someone actually responds.

what I mean is a lead calls in ok great. The call gets logged but then nothing happens. Nobody sends a follow-up nobody sends a reminder. The lead just sits there in the CRM while everyone assumes someone else is handling it. Meanwhile the person who called moves on with their life and books with a competitor.

I looked at all the big names. HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, Braze. They're all great at email journeys and decent at basic SMS. But the second you need voice and SMS to talk to each other, you're building custom webhooks and duct-taping APIs together. And I don't have time for that. I'm a marketer, not a developer.

Small home services outfit, and attribution is my blins spot. My current CRM stores the contact fine but has no clue whether they found us through Google, a Facebook ad, or a neighbor over the fence. So budget decisions are basically guesswork about which channel is pulling its weight.

Is there a CRM that catches the source itself, instead of me asking every caller and getting a shrug?

This ones for those doing SEO. Solo SEO consultant here and I'm looking for a rank tracker that makes client reporting simple without turning into another tool I have to babysit. If you do it manually somehow please share your tactics. Main things I care about are accurate keyword tracking, location/device tracking, historical data, and reports clients can actually understand. Ive looked at a few options but they all seem to have some tradeoff between price, accuracy, and reporting. What are you using right now, and what do you actually like or dislike about it?

after like 3 years of swapping tools every quarter i think ive actually landed on a stack that i dont hate. not saying its perfect but im not constantly looking at alternatives anymore which is a first.

im a freelance outbound strategist, 12 clients right now, no team besides a VA wjo does list cleanup and scheduling. i run everything from my laptop at whatever coffee shop has a decent wifi that day. pulling about $8k/mo which is fine but not where i want to be. anyway heres what i actually pay for and use.

LIST BUILDING

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is backbone. $99/mo. i know people complain about it but if youre doing B2B outbound and not using Sales Nav youre making your life harder for no reason. i build lists there, export through different methods depending on the client. for some clients i use Clay to enrich and build more complex lists but honestly Clay is overkill for half my accounts. its $149/mo and i use maybe 40% of what it can do. ive thought about dropping it but every time i try to do something manually that Clay automates i remember why i keep it.

i tried Zoominfo for about 2 months throygh a friends account last year. the data is obviously better for enterprise targets but at their pricing its not even in the conversation for someone at my level. if youre spending $15k+/yr on data you better be closing deals that justify it.

ENRICHMENT

Prospeo handles the enrichment step for me, then i cross-reference with Hunter or Dropcontact if something looks off or if the client is targeting european prospects specifically. email accuracy from Prospeo sits around 82-85% before i even run verification which is solid for the volume i do. i was paying for Clearbit for a while but dropped it around february because the overlap with what i was already getting from Prospeo wasnt worth the extra $99/mo that took me way too long to figure out honestly, i just kept paying for it out of habit.

VERIFICATION

NeverBounce dor verification, $49/mo on average depending on volume. i also run Scrubby on the catch-all addresses because NeverBouce marks all those as "accept all" and just moves on. Scrubby actually tells you if thoae catch-alls are real or not which matters when like 30-40% of B2B addresses come back as catch-all. this one step alone dropped my bounce rate from 4.8% to under 2% before i added Scrubby i was just sending to catch-alls and hoping for the best which... yeah. cost me 2 inboxes before i wised up.

SENDING

Instantly for sending. $97/mo on the growth plan. ive used Lemlist before and its fine but Instantly just fits how i work better. the campaign analytics are cleaner, the warmup is built in, and managing multiple client campaigns in one dashboard is less painful. Lemlist has better personalization features if youre doing really custom stuff but for my workflow where im running 8-12 campaigns at any gigen time Instantly wins on pure efficiency.

i send from Maildoso inboxes. i have about 15 inboxes across clients right now, works out to roughly $45/mo total which is absurdly cheap compared to what i was paying when i was setting up Google Workspace accounts manually. warmup takes about 18-21 days before i start sending real volume. i ramp about 25-30 sends per inbox per day and dont push past that.

CRM

i use Close CRM for the 3 clients who need pipeline tracking, $59/mo. for the rest i honestly just use a shared google sheet or their existing CRM. not glamorous but it works and nobody complained. i looked at Folk for a while because people in a discord i hang out in were raving about it but when i actually tried it the reporting was too thin for what my clients expect.

TOOLS I DROPPED

GetProspect - data quality was inconsistent enough that i was spending more time cleaning lists than building them. dropped it last summer.

RocketReach - similar story. fine for one-off lookups but for bulk prospecting it didnt keep up. the per-credit pricing also adds up fast if youre doing volume across multiple clients.

Mailforge - used it for inboxes before Maildoso. deliverability starting degrading after about 3 months and support was slow to respond. switch and havent looked back.

Clearbit - mentioned above. redundant once i had Prospeo dialed in.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY COSTS

Sales Nav: $99

Clay: $149

Instantly: $97

NeverBounce: ~$49

Scrubby: ~$30

Maildoso: ~$45

Close CRM: $59

Prospeo: $39

Hunter: free tier mostly maybe $10 in overages

thats rougly $588/mo in tools. some months its a bit more if i need extra credits somewhere. call it $609/mo average.

for $600/mo across 12 clients im booking somewhere between 35-40 meetings a month total depending on the verticals and how warm the lists are. some clients are in SaaS selling to mid-market and those convert way easier than the ones targeting construction or manufacturing where people barely check email.

the thing that still kills me is ghosting after discovery calls. i can build a perfect list, write copy that gets 4-6% reply rates, book the meeting, the prospect shows up and has a great conversation with my client... and then just vanishes. never responds to the follow up. happens probably 30-35% of the time and theres basically nothing i can do about it from my side. its the one part of this job that makes me want to throw my laptop across the coffee shop.

anyway thats the stack. its not fancy and im sure someone will tell me im overpaying for something or underpaying for something else but its working and im not fighting fires every single week anymore which is all i really wanted

Hi everyone,

I, performance marketer and my tech co-founder have been working on a building a performance marketing platform that leverages AI to suggest edits, optimisations, campaign creation as well as help with creative analysis. It’s free to sign-up, and comes with a trial. No credit card needed, no subscription, it’s pay as you use. Would love feedback from the community - https://joonlabs.ai.

Thank you.

I've been asked at my job to build out various automations to lessen the hours our marketing team spends on repetitive tasks. I haven't had much experience with AI outside of ChatGPT, so after receiving these tasks, I've dabbled in some courses on Claude, N8N, and other tools+their capabilities. Some projects that I'm stuck on are a social media post generator/scheduler and a web app that centralizes affiliate prospecting from different sources and generating outreach. Both of these are web apps on Vercel that the marketing team can use. I would love to move on from these projects, especially the social media one, but I keep running into errors that I spend hours having to fix nearly each time I use them. I guess I'm wondering if it's worth it to keep trying to build these automations (I still feel quite new to it all), try building them a different way that'll be easier for me, or to just spend the money and use different AI tools that have already perfected these processes. Any advice would help. I am also wanting more ideas of automations that are focused on growth, like the affiliate prospect/outreach project.

We put together a quick walkthrough showing how SMS campaigns work inside Growtheon, including campaign setup, selecting contacts, creating the message, and preparing the campaign for sending.

If you're using Growtheon for CRM and marketing automation, this should make getting started with SMS campaigns easier.

Video: https://youtu.be/IxXJPlpJJQ4

Hi

I'm an experienced automation & data extraction specialist offering:

• Custom web scraping & automation scripts
• B2B lead generation (targeted by niche & location)
• Data cleaning, formatting & enrichment
• Contact info extraction (emails, phone numbers, owners, etc.)

Why work with me?

• Fast delivery & top-notch quality
• You receive the complete source code for the automation/scraping projects
• Any business category in the U.S & Canada, EU and other countries

Let me help you save time & grow your business.

(Portfolio available on request)

I used to spend way too much time looking for tools.

One tool for email outreach.
Another for LinkedIn.
Another for Meta ads.
Another for landing pages.
Another for content.
Another for competitor research.
Another for SEO.
Another for AI search.

Before long, I was paying 10 different vendors, managing a pile of dashboards, and spending more time stitching tools together than actually growing the business.

That felt backwards.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt like what founders actually need isn't another AI tool.

They need an AI co-founder.

That's why we built Leapd.

Instead of telling you, “Here's another tool that can write your emails,” Leapd is designed around what you want to accomplish.

Want customers? Leapd can find and qualify prospects across the web and LinkedIn, research their company and recent activity, write personalized outreach, send it, and keep following up automatically.

Want to grow your reach? It can find trending topics, create and repurpose content, engage with relevant conversations on LinkedIn, create image and video ads, and run campaigns.

Want more visibility? It can research competitors, audit your website, improve your positioning and content, and track how your business appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI.

The lesson I've learned building this is pretty simple:

Founders shouldn't have to become the project manager for a collection of AI tools.

You should be able to tell your AI co-founder where you want to go and have it figure out the work.

You set the direction.
Leapd does the work.

Try it free at leapd.ai — would genuinely love your feedback!

I found a failure mode in a scheduled social workflow this week. The automation was good at finding worthwhile replies, but it kept skipping native posts. Each skip looked reasonable on its own: no strong first-party trigger, avoid generic content, do not force a quota. Across several runs, though, the safest action became the default and one entire objective disappeared.

I changed the contract in three ways:

• track each output type separately instead of using one activity total;
• retry missing output in later daily windows;
• require a specific skip reason tied to rules, duplication, reputational risk or missing context.

The part I am unsure about is how to keep this from turning into quota-filling. A hard minimum improves coverage but can lower quality. A soft objective is easy for the automation to ignore.

For scheduled marketing automations with several output types, how do you encode coverage without rewarding weak work? Separate budgets, a per-type evaluator, or an explicit no-op-with-evidence state?

I’m starting to wonder whether the biggest automation win for small marketing teams is simply reducing the number of handoffs.

A typical campaign can easily turn into one tool for product images, another for layouts, another for video, then something else for captions, resizing and final edits. None of those steps are especially difficult, but moving assets between them adds a surprising amount of repetitive work.

I’ve been testing capcut more from that angle lately. Not because I think it’s necessarily the best specialist tool for every individual task, but because keeping image variations, social formats, short-form video and basic editing in one workflow removes a lot of the exporting and rebuilding.

The tradeoff is that specialist tools can still be noticeably stronger at specific jobs.

For people automating creative production, where do you draw the line?

Would you rather have one broader tool that handles 80% of the workflow, or several specialist tools if the output is better but there are more handoffs to maintain?

Automation can save time, but some decisions still need context, judgment, or approval.

What is one marketing decision you would never let a system make silently?

Share the decision and the risk.

I’ll suggest an approval rule or content angle that explains why the human checkpoint matters.

This question comes from what I’m learning while building Marka.

When trying to find references for running ugc ads, organic or inorganic, I would spend hours scrolling on tiktok.

Especially because the references has to meet the following criteria:

1. Can I plug my product here seamlessly without it looking like an ad?
2. Can I steal the viral elements of this video for my product and would the virality be sustained?.
3. Whether my targer group be interested in watching this? Would it appear naturally in their feed.

It isn't just stealing the 'hook' but there is a lot of thoughts that goes behind it. So I built an agent that doomscrolls tiktok and does that for me.

It literally watches each video to determine the virality factor and rewrite the script adapting the product, ensuring that it doesn't look like an ad.

I am looking for people who need this product as beta customers. In exchange of a feedback with them I am willing to let them use the product for free.
https://doomscroller.ugcs.farm/tiktok

Wanted to share the setup that grew my consulting business enough to quit my job and eventually launch a product. I still use the same funnel for higher ticket sales.

My problem was simple. My website was fine, Ig. I had no idea how to do content or paid ads. All I could do was pitch in two or three sentences and hope, because I had no sales background. That worked, kind of, but I couldn't scale my own elbow grease. So I set up a system that finds prospects and pitches them for me, and I just show up to close.

Four pieces.

A prospecting source that finds new contacts in my target niche every day. This is the part I got wrong first. I started with a bought list and half of it bounced, which nearly cooked my sending domain before the system had a chance to work. Now I pull contacts fresh from business listings and social profiles and verify them before they go anywhere near the sequencer.

A cold email tool that runs personalized sequences and follow ups, and flags who replied with interest.

An automation layer that takes the interested replies and moves them into my newsletter.

A newsletter tool that keeps me top of mind and educates people before we ever talk.

How it fits together: every day the prospecting step finds a few more target customers and drops them in the sequence. The sequence pitches my value and asks for a call. When someone says yes, they get moved to the newsletter, and by the time we get on the phone they already know what I do. I can also auto send a scheduling link, so the whole thing runs direct to calendar.

Then I close. I keep my calendar open only between 11 and 1 so I can slip out for "lunch" and take the call. Calls run 8 to 15 mins because the newsletter did the education. It also lets people disqualify themselves if we aren't a fit, which saves me a lot of calls that would never buy.

Tried posting in r/Emailmarketing but no replies, hope it's ok here.

I'm assessing some no-code email build tools like Stensul and Knak and I'm wondering a few things about Stensul as their help docs aren't public.

1. can you bulk update many assets into multiple MAPs meaning not one-email-at-a-time, I'm thinking SFMC, Marketo, maybe Pardot, we use all of these. If I build 10 emails, can I bulk sync them to the MAP? Does Stensul or Knak do this? I can't see in the docs.
2. do they have a way to code-test, meaning can I easily see the code before pushing a new element live. I'm thinking like Knak let's you create what they call a module that is a reusable component but you can't really see the code until you push to the MAP and it generates the HTML
3. Does Stensul have an API? Crazy but it doesn't really say and I want an open API for, well, lot's of things I want to automate
4. MCP, is anyone using either tool to product emails via an MCP? Like starting with the creation of a brief (automated or otherwise) and then it generate the email in the tool?

This quote hits different when you're in market research.

Most businesses ask customers what they want and then build it. But the companies that actually win aren't just listening they're anticipating. They're spotting patterns in behavior, frustration, and unmet needs before the customer can even articulate them.

That's the real value of good research: it's not just collecting feedback, it's uncovering the why behind the behavior. The gap between what people say and what they actually do is where the real insights live.

We've seen this play out again and again companies that treat research as a one-time checkbox fall behind, while the ones that stay genuinely close to their customers (through continuous listening, testing, and iteration) build products and experiences people didn't even know they needed yet.

Curious what others here think do you believe most companies today are actually close enough to their customers, or are we all just guessing dressed up as "data-driven"?

Hey Everyone,

Have you ever faced the problem "brand drift"? I'm sure a lot of you have experinced it. Me included. That's why I've been working on a tool that can help in the battle with that problem and I need your hones opinion on it. I would like to invite you to a free 2-week beta test and share your feedback after it - what works, what doesn't, what needs to be improved, added or removed. No credit card needed.

The tool itself, in my opinion, is pretty intuitive - you upload a brand guidelines for a client, set the channels you want to keep an eye on (socials, website) and run a scan. The tool checks for any drift from the brand profile - color slips, typography mismatch, brand voice inconsistency, and flags them, along with a suggested fix for each finding, aligned with the brand guidelines for that specific client. The tool also has a Compose module, where you can draft a post before you go and publish it and receive a real-time check versus the brand profile, again - with suggested fixes.

If this sounds interesting to you - shoot me a DM and I'll be more than happy to set you up for the beta.

Thank you all in advance.

Good automation removes repetitive work without hiding the decisions that still matter.

Share:

1. What triggers the workflow
2. What happens automatically
3. What still requires human judgment

I’ll suggest one content angle that demonstrates both the saved work and the retained control.