Putting Your Side Project On Auto Pilot

When I launched my last side project, InboxReads, it took up a lot of my time. Building the site was easy but to add new newsletters, and share content on social media took a ton of time. At the time my day job had me super busy as well so I needed to get as many tasks off my hand as possible to focus on improving the site.

First I created a Google Form to collect new newsletters in a form I could easily enter into the database. This still took a lot of time though because I needed to take screenshots of the newsletter's page, upload it to my Google Cloud bucket, and then copy the URL to the database. What a pain. I took a few days to turn this entire process into a simple script. I'd just enter the newsletter info and it'd handle the rest. This saved me so much time I began automating everything I could.

Why spend time writing a tweet when I could automate it? I added a function to generate a tweet for each new newsletter and add it to Buffer. What about tweets about specific types of newsletters? Just another script to add it to my arsenal.

Now I spend a few hours each week adding new newsletters, filling the buffer queue, and sending out my own newsletter about newsletters. It's freed up most of my time to work on new projects like Wave Radio, improve InboxReads, or just have more downtime when I need it.