🔥
3d • Wins 🌟
From Fax Machine Chaos to $3,800/Month (My Ugliest Profitable Workflow)
Client: 40-year-old construction company. Their document sources made me cry.
THE FRANKENSTEIN INPUTS
- Fax machine from 1997 (still receives quotes)
- Email attachments in 12 different formats
- Photos from job sites (handwritten estimates on napkins)
- Scanned contracts from the 90s
- Modern PDFs from new suppliers
- Excel sheets with bizarre macros
Built the ugliest n8n workflow ever. 23 nodes of pure chaos.
THE MONSTROSITY ARCHITECTURE
Input nodes (5): Email, fax server, Dropbox, API webhook, manual upload
Document detection (7 types): Fax quality, photo, scan, PDF, Excel, Word, "other"
Processing paths (12 different strategies):
- Fax documents → Noise reduction + OCR enhancement
- Photos → Perspective correction + handwriting OCR
- Scans → Deskew + quality improvement
- PDFs → Standard extraction
- Tables → Structure preservation
- Legacy formats → Format conversion first
Validation layer (3 nodes): Confidence scoring, human review queue, retry logic
Output integration: Their ancient ERP system (SOAP API from 2003)
Notification system: Email with color-coded status reports
IT'S HIDEOUS BUT PROFITABLE
Monthly processing volume:
- 847 fax documents (yes, really)
- 1,230 email attachments
- 456 job site photos
- 2,100+ total documents
Results after 8 months:
- 97.3% processing success rate
- Saved 3 full-time data entry positions
- Client fee: $3,800/month
- API costs: $127/month
- Profit: $3,673/month
THE UGLY TRUTH
My prettiest 6-node workflows: Average $900/month
My ugliest 23+ node monsters: Average $3,200/month
Clean workflows impress developers. Working workflows impress clients.
Current ugly workflow revenue: $14,800/month across 4 clients. Pretty workflows: $4,200/month across 7 clients.
The construction client just referred me to 3 competitors. All have similar document chaos.
What's your ugliest automation that somehow prints money?
13
13 comments
From Fax Machine Chaos to $3,800/Month (My Ugliest Profitable Workflow)
skool.com/ai-automation-society
A community for mastering AI-driven automation and AI agents. Learn, collaborate, and optimize your workflows!
Leaderboard (30-day)
1
🔥
+3125
2
+873
3
+748
4
+524
5
🔥
+449
Powered by