Welcome To The Newsletter!
My name's Jacob! My goal for this newsletter/blog is to provide you with as much value as possible within a single email every week. Staying on top of AI is very difficult, and knowing when to implement it into your business is even trickier. So if topics like these excite you:
- Business Process Automation and the tools to achieve it
- Real data that powers your processes
- The current state of AI and how you can leverage it
you'll be in GREAT company! We do actively post to other channels like LinkedIn and YouTube, but being subscribed to the newsletter means you'll get EXCLUSIVE access to free live Q&A sessions & resources to scale your business!
Our Story
I started my company, R U Coding Me, as a fun way to help others learn more about technology and integrate it. I liked the thought of starting a business while doing a Ph.D. because either career path would be a solid fallback option. However, both require a lot of work apparently!
Rather than giving one up for the other, I started looking for ways to automate inefficiencies out of my life. I tried automating everything from grading student projects to sending out grant proposals. It was through this experimentation that it hit me: you can't automate a bad process.
Our guiding doctrine is to make the task so simple, an intern on their first day should be able to follow the instructions and complete the job. For most tasks, this is accomplishable. But what "Big Automation" doesn't want you to know is that those types of tasks can be put into code for a fraction of the price they'll charge their army of AI agents to tackle.
I've spent the close to 5 years growing a team and helping clients with just about everything technology. We've worked on marketing systems, learning platforms, social media. If it has batteries and fuels your business, we've probably worked with it. But the biggest unlock for our team was when we started doing automations for ourselves.
Business Process Automation (BPA)
If you are uninitiated, Business Process Automation (BPA) is the use of technology to automate complex and repetitive business processes, aiming to improve efficiency and reduce human error. There are A TON of ways to achieve BPA. You probably have some BPA setup right now:
- Have some Make.com scenarios? Perfect!
- Writing bots with Power Automate or UiPath? Yup, that's still BPA!
- Have some Python code? You're getting the point:
While shiny tools keep getting unveiled, we asked ourselves: "What's the simplest, fastest and cheapest way we can start automating stuff?". There are literally thousands and I'm not getting into bed with every single automation builder platform out there. My bank account would go in the red faster than an AI startup #sorrynotsorry.
Good Data, Good Output
So we cut out all of the fluff and asked ourselves, "If we only had $20 for the monthly automations, how far could we stretch that budget?". The AI is only as good as the operator using it. And it seems like there is a massive amount of back-and-forth between one tab and another. Why not bring that data into the LLM? Model Context Protocol (MCP) was unveiled in late 2024, but we've had this problem for quite some time. Plus, what good does our data do if it's horribly formatted? If your sales team goes bananas every time they get a hot lead, all that time you spent cleaning the CRM will shoot up in flames. And when you ask your unpaid AI intern to go look at the data and make a report...
Creating Our AI Flywheel
Now that we had a solid way of getting our data cleaned, the automation building just made sense! We were building things left and right. If it could be dreamt, it was likely automated. But it felt like the engine was roaring and the wheels weren't spinning.
All that time spent on automation led to painful upkeep and constantly changing processes. Admittedly, we may have put the horse behind the carriage and automated unproven processes. The data kept changing and we were stuck trying to get our "AI Flywheel" turning. As more conference deadlines piled on, client work skyrocketed and managing teams for 10+ hours a day/6-days a week, our warm traffic and referral engines started to dry up. Something wasn't moving the needle and we needed to figure it out.
After perfecting our strategic planning process, we had a game plan. And with a lot of coffee, we got our ship back on course! Creating the core content of our business takes at most 30 minutes an article. As AI improves and requires less hand-holding, that number will drop down to 5 minutes. INSANE!
To top it all off, this directly bled into our podcast, YouTube and more. So whenever I sit down to record, it's just recording content. We do have some AI editing and scheduling implemented now too.