Most automations fail in the first week. Here's why.

Faaz Khan

3d • General discussion 💭

Every founder automates the same task twice.

Once to build it. Once to fix what the first build missed.

The automation looked fine.

Notion connected to Slack.

The trigger fired every time a row was updated.

Summaries went out automatically.

By day four, half the summaries were wrong.

The rows were being updated three times. When a task was created, when it was assigned, when the status changed.

Nobody had mapped that before building.

Three days to build. Two weeks to debug.

If you are just starting to bring AI and automation into your business, this is the mistake that costs the most time. You automate before you understand what you are actually automating.

Before you touch any tool, run this first:

1. Write every step by hand. Every single one. Include the decisions you make without thinking. Those are the ones that break.

2. Find where the input is inconsistent. A wrong lead dropped into the wrong database, one that your workflow was built for a specific lead type, breaks the whole sequence silently. You may not catch it for days.

3. Find the step you skip when you are in a hurry. That shortcut is invisible to the automation. When you skip it manually, the output looks right and is wrong.

4. Run the task manually three times before building anything. If the steps change between runs, the workflow is not ready.

A broken workflow automated is still a broken workflow.

Map the task first.

That step saves more time than the tool does.

2 comments