For people running n8n, Zapier, Make, Workato, or custom workflows:

Have you ever had a workflow show “successful” while the actual business process was broken?

For example:

• Data stopped reaching the CRM
• A webhook silently stopped firing
• A schema/API change broke part of the workflow
• A workflow stopped running without an obvious error

I’m trying to understand the real-world impact.

What was the most painful automation failure you’ve experienced?

Please share:
what broke → how you discovered it → how long it went unnoticed → how you fixed/prevented it.

And one important question:

If a tool could reliably detect these problems before you noticed them, would you actually pay for it? What would make it worth paying for?

I'm researching the problem, not selling anything.

I'm 21m, I had started my ai automation agency my aim is to genuinely help the business owners and the entrepreneurs by reducing their time and make the 2x of revenue.

I provide the service like the ai chat boat, ai workflows, but the real problem is that it's been very difficult for me to find the specific niche and work on it.can you guys help me in that?

You have a working automation. The awkward part is finding a business where it would actually help.

Here’s a research exercise: pick a type of business you understand and read recent customer reviews. Look for a problem several people describe, like calls nobody returns or appointments that take three attempts to book. Check the dates and owner replies before assuming it still happens.

Now you have a specific question for the owner: ‘I noticed a few customers mentioned trouble getting a callback. Is that something your team is still dealing with?’

If it is, ask how requests are recorded, who owns them, and how they spot the ones that go unanswered. Their answer should shape what you offer. A complaint gives you a reason to investigate; it doesn’t prove someone will pay.

I’m the founder of Crawdar, and this is the step I built the Pain Point Finder for. It checks up to three businesses per scan for recurring complaints in available reviews, with source evidence and possible technical fixes.

We shipped a more flexible search today: industry and location are optional, you can select several problem categories, or add specific complaint phrases. So if you know how to fix booking friction but haven’t picked a niche, you can start there.

Try it: https://crawdar.com/pain-points

Five free scans, no account or email needed. Run one search and inspect the reviews behind a finding. Does it give you a business worth talking to and a concrete question to ask? That’s the feedback I’d love.

For people who love building but get stuck finding customers, I hope this makes that first conversation easier to reach.

I worked with a handful of small and local businesses this year automating their lead handling and there's a pattern I keep running into.

Everyone wants to automate the first response, the instant "thanks for reaching out" message. That part's easy and everyone gets it right. What almost nobody automates is the follow-up sequence after someone goes quiet.

A lead comes in, gets a fast auto-reply, someone from the business calls or messages them once, doesn't hear back and then nothing. No second touch, no reminder, no re-engagement. In service businesses like dealerships, clinics, salons, that's where most of the actual revenue leak is. Not the first response. The silence after it.

The fix itself isn't hard it's just a time-delayed follow-up sequence at 3, 7 and 14 days with slightly different framing each time, that stops automatically the moment the lead replies or books. Most CRMs can do this in an afternoon. The hard part is convincing the business owner that one follow-up isn't enough. Most think chasing a cold lead twice is annoying, when in practice people just forget to reply the first time.

Do you guys also seeing the same thing or if this is specific to the local-service space.

What business tasks are you still doing manually that you wish you could automate?

I'm curious what small business owners are still doing manually every day.

Things like:

• answering the same customer questions
• following up with leads
• appointment scheduling
• replying to Instagram/WhatsApp messages
• copying information between different tools
• sending reminders
• qualifying new leads

I'm interested in real problems that are actually worth automating, rather than building another generic AI chatbot.

What's one repetitive task in your business that you would happily never do manually again?

I have noticed that browser profiles can become a bigger headache than the actual AI automation once you start running a few workflows.

Each workflow seems to need its own login state, cookies, browser settings etc. if something stops working then its hard to tell if the agent is the problem or if something changed in the browser profile.

I am trying to keep the setup simple instead of adding more moving parts every time something breaks.

How are you guys managing separate browser profiles for AI automations?

I’ve been messing around with browser automation using Claude Sonnet, mostly for tasks that involve a few different websites, downloading files and filling out forms.

The individual actions are usually pretty solid, but things start getting weird once the workflow gets longer. After maybe 10 to 15 steps, it can lose track of which page it was on, forget an intermediate result or sometimes just repeat something it already did.

I’ve had better results keeping the browser actions, files and intermediate results as separate parts of the workflow instead of throwing everything into one huge prompt.

The other annoying part is recovery. A small UI change or an unexpected tool response can throw off the whole workflow, and getting the agent back on track isn’t always straightforward.

I've been trying from the past 3 months to start automation business but I haven't got a single client. I've been cold emailing almost daily like 20+ and every email is personalized, I'm not copy pasting anything. I have my own website, I'm emailing through the my domain mail but still nothing. In using Make for the automation. What am I doing wrong? Experts Please help me.

Hey everyone,

I’m 23, based in Germany, and I’ve recently started getting much deeper into AI, automation and building small software projects.

My background is actually not in IT at all. I trained in logistics and later completed my Meister qualification in logistics, so most of my professional experience so far has been around operations, warehousing, processes and team leadership.

Over the last few months I started experimenting with Codex, vibe coding and automation tools. I’ve built a couple of very small projects so far, for example a habit tracker and an interview training app. Nothing remotely production-ready yet, but I noticed pretty quickly that I genuinely enjoy this kind of work a lot.

At the moment I’m also learning n8n, APIs, JSON, process mapping and AI agents. I’m currently building a fictional logistics company as a sandbox and trying to automate things like order intake, email classification, extracting order information, approval rules, etc.

Long term, I’d really like to become self-employed in this space. Ideally not as someone who just builds random chatbots or websites, but more around business process improvement, AI automation, system integrations and eventually custom agents/software for companies.

The problem is that the deeper I go, the more I realize how huge the field is.

Every day I see new tools, plugins, MCPs, agent frameworks, coding tools, models, databases, etc. Then there’s a whole other side with security, permissions, GDPR, data protection, authentication and building things that are actually reliable enough for a company to use.

Sometimes Instagram and YouTube make it look like everyone is building full AI companies in two weeks, while I’m sitting there thinking: “I don’t even fully understand half of this ecosystem yet.”

I’m also looking at jobs like AI Automation Consultant, AI Product Manager or similar roles to gain experience alongside building my own projects. But without a computer science degree, getting a foot in the door seems pretty difficult. A lot of job postings still seem to filter heavily for CS / software engineering backgrounds.

So I’d really like to hear from people who are actually working in this field, especially people who came in from a non-technical background.

A few things I’m curious about:

• If you started in AI automation / consulting / agents from scratch, what did your first 6–12 months actually look like?
• What skills turned out to be essential, and what looked important at first but was mostly hype?
• How much actual coding do you think someone needs if the goal is professional B2B automation?
• How important are things like APIs, databases, authentication, Docker, cloud infrastructure and basic software architecture compared with learning more AI tools?
• At what point did you feel comfortable building something for a real company instead of just personal projects?
• How did you get your first real client or pilot project?
• Would you recommend starting with one industry and one process instead of offering general AI automation?
• For someone with a logistics background, would you lean into that niche heavily or stay broader at the beginning?
• What security / privacy knowledge should I absolutely have before touching real company data?
• What mistakes do you see beginners making when trying to start an AI automation business?
• If you were starting again today, what would you learn first and in what order?
• And maybe the most important one: how do you tell the difference between something that should be a normal deterministic automation and something that genuinely benefits from an AI agent?

I’m not looking for a “get rich with AI in 30 days” roadmap. I’m trying to figure out how to become genuinely good enough that I can eventually solve real business problems and charge for it without selling something I don’t properly understand.

Would really appreciate hearing how some of you got started.

Please answer if you have successfully sold to AI Automation & a freelancer (so no agency owners).

Do you act as a retainer (maintenance and monitoring) for your clients?

If so (basically, how stressful is it):
- How many can you manage solo?

- Do you hire subcontractors? Do you have any tips for finding or managing subcontractors?

- Do you struggle to meet timelines (for example, in the contract it could be something along the lines of "monitoring 24/7 for any issues and will solve any issue within 2 hours")?

Hey everyone,

I'm a software developer currently exploring the AI automation space.

I've spent the last few weeks talking directly to small businesses to understand where automation could genuinely create value, rather than building another AI tool and then trying to find a problem for it.

One thing I'm finding surprisingly difficult is separating problems that businesses complain about from problems they're actually willing to pay to solve.

So I'd love to hear from people who are already selling automation services to businesses.

Without sharing anything confidential about your clients:

What types of automations are businesses actually paying you for?

I'm especially curious about:

• What are the 2–3 automation use cases you see repeatedly across clients?
• What industries are buying them?
• What problem existed before the automation?
• What was the workflow before vs. after?
• What makes the client willing to spend money on that particular problem?
• Are they mainly buying because of time savings, reduced headcount/admin work, faster response times, fewer mistakes, or increased revenue?
• Roughly what do clients pay for the initial implementation and/or monthly maintenance? Even broad ranges would be useful.
• Which automations are easiest to sell?
• Which automations sound attractive to business owners but rarely turn into paying projects?
• Have you found any workflows where existing CRMs/industry software still leave a surprising amount of manual work?
• Which automations have actually stayed in production and continued providing value after 6+ months?

I'm also particularly interested in how you found your first few clients.

If you had to start again today as a solo developer with strong technical skills but zero automation clients, what problem / niche would you investigate first?

I'm not looking for anyone to reveal their secret niche or client list. I'm mainly trying to understand what the market looks like from the perspective of people who have actually gotten businesses to open their wallets.

I've already encountered things like lead/deal follow-ups, document collection, repetitive admin work, CRM updates, and client qualification in my own conversations, but I'm trying not to assume those are valuable just because they're technically easy to automate.

Would really appreciate hearing from anyone who's actually sold and deployed these systems.

Help us not make the same mistakes that you made!!!

Hey! I’m building AI automations for small businesses. I’m looking for one small business to build my first real system for. I’d build and set it up for you for free because I want to use the project to build my portfolio. If you like it and it actually helps your business, you can keep it. You’d just be responsible for any software costs needed to keep it running.

Would anyone be interested in seeing a quick demo?

When a customer disputes an AI result, the team needs enough evidence to decide whether to reuse or review it, without exposing the customer’s full input. What should an operator and a customer each be allowed to see?

I want to ask if someone has experience in AI raw monitoring of agents ? Thank you

We’re trying to clean up how we handle customer conversations across WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Right now everything is separate, so messages sometimes get missed and it’s hard to know who on the team is handling what. As the volume has grown, managing each channel individually has become a bit of a mess. I’m looking for an omnichannel automation tool that can give us one inbox, conversation history, basic routing/assignment and some automation for repetitive messages. Not looking for a massive CRM implementation. What are people using for this?

People often try to automate a process before figuring out if the process itself makes sense.

If a workflow has unnecessary steps, unclear decisions, or messy data, adding AI usually just makes the same mess happen faster.

I think the better approach is:

Simplify the process → identify the repetitive parts → then automate.

AI is powerful, but it can't fix a process that was broken to begin with.

What’s one process you think people automate too early?