Solo founders waste a brutal amount of time on admin: copying form responses to CRMs, formatting invoice data for accounting, posting to four social channels, sending welcome emails. None of it builds product. All of it has to get done.

I cut about 8 hours a week of this work using Make.com (formerly Integromat). Here are the exact scenarios I built, in the order I’d build them again, plus the mistakes that cost me time.

Why Make and not Zapier

I started with Zapier. After a year I migrated to Make because:

• Cheaper at scale: Make’s operations-based pricing is roughly half Zapier’s at my volume.
• Visual builder is more capable: branching, error handling, and aggregation are first-class. Zapier feels like a list; Make feels like a flowchart.
• Better for solo use: you don’t need a team to learn it. The learning curve is real but pays back in a week.

If you’re brand new to no-code automation and only need 2-3 simple workflows, Zapier’s free tier is friendlier. Otherwise, Make.

Scenario 1: Form → CRM → Slack → email (build this first)

Every solo business has a “someone filled out my contact form” pipeline. Mine does five things now:

1. Form submission comes in (Typeform, Tally, or website form)
2. Adds the lead to my CRM (Notion database)
3. Sends me a Slack DM with the lead summary
4. Sends the lead an auto-acknowledgment email
5. If the lead is from a high-priority source (referral link), creates a calendar hold

Time saved: ~15 minutes per lead, $0/month at my volume (Make free tier covers 1,000 operations).

Build it in: 30 minutes once you know the modules. 2 hours if it’s your first.

Scenario 2: Stripe → email list → welcome sequence

When a new customer pays:

1. Stripe webhook fires
2. Make checks if the email is already in my list
3. If not, adds them with relevant tags (plan tier, signup source)
4. Triggers the welcome sequence in Kit
5. Sends me a Slack notification with the order details

Why this matters: I used to manually move new customers into the email list. I forgot more than 30% of the time. Lost trust + lost retention emails.

Watch out for: Stripe webhook retries. If your scenario fails once, Stripe retries with the same event. Without idempotency checks, you’ll double-process. Add a “check if exists” step in Make before adding.

Scenario 3: Podcast/YouTube episode → multi-channel posting

When I publish a new podcast episode (RSS feed update triggers it):

1. Fetches the episode title, description, and audio URL
2. Generates a Twitter/X thread (Claude API)
3. Generates a LinkedIn post (different tone, same content)
4. Posts to Threads with the audio snippet
5. Adds episode metadata to a Notion content database

Time saved: 45 minutes per episode. Across 4 episodes/month = 3 hours/month.

Mistake I made: tried to automate the actual writing of social copy without human review. Quality dropped fast. Now the scenario drafts the copy and sends it to me to approve before posting. Adds 2 minutes per episode; saves the brand from sounding like a bot.

Scenario 4: Bank deposit → bookkeeping

Most non-tax-deductible time sink: matching bank deposits to invoices.

1. New Wise/Stripe deposit comes in
2. Make looks up the invoice number in the description
3. Marks the matching invoice as paid in my bookkeeping (I use Wave, free)
4. Logs the transaction to a Google Sheet for my accountant
5. Sends a “payment received” email to the client

Time saved: 5-10 minutes per payment. Adds up.

Pitfall: Wave’s API is rate-limited. If you have many deposits at once (e.g., end-of-month batch), space them out with delays. Otherwise you’ll hit rate limits and the scenario will partially fail.

Scenario 5: Calendar event → prep doc

90 minutes before any calendar event tagged “client” or “interview”:

1. Make pulls the event details
2. Looks up the contact in my CRM
3. Drafts a 1-page prep doc with last interaction notes, open todos, and relevant context
4. Sends it to me as a Notion page

Time saved: I used to spend the first 10 minutes of each call scrambling. Now I have context before I open the meeting.

What I learned about cost

Make’s pricing is operations-based. Each module run = 1 operation. The free tier (1,000 ops/mo) covers 2-3 light scenarios. The Core plan ($9/mo) gives 10,000 ops.

The trap: I once built a scenario that polled a feed every 5 minutes. That’s 8,640 operations/month just to check. Replaced with a webhook trigger — 90% cheaper.

Rule: always prefer webhooks (event-driven) over polling. If the source supports them.

What I’d build next

These are on my list:

• New customer support ticket → AI triage (Claude routes by urgency)
• Refund request → auto-process if under $50 (saves 5 min per refund, low risk)
• Monthly KPI roll-up (pulls from Stripe, Kit, Plausible, posts to Notion)

I’ll add them as the existing scenarios prove stable for 3+ months. Don’t build more than you can monitor.

How to start

If you’ve never used Make:

1. Sign up at make.com (free tier, no credit card).
2. Build Scenario 1 (Form → CRM → Slack). Use their templates if your stack matches.
3. Let it run for two weeks. Watch for errors in the “Scenarios” history tab.
4. Only after Scenario 1 is stable do you add Scenario 2.

The founders I’ve seen burn out on automation tried to set up 6 scenarios in one weekend. They all broke at the same time and nobody knew which one to fix. Build one at a time.

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