As a small, early-stage startup with a limited runway, our team must get creative about solving our operational problems efficiently. One way we achieve this is by automating the workflows using tools like Make, Airtable, and Retool. (A big shoutout to the 9x team for introducing Heylama to cutting-edge automation tools and best practices)

Here are three use cases that save us 3-5K EUR a month (hours saved/headcount not expanded) of manual work that we automated:

👩🏻‍🏫 Tutor recruitment

From the very first interaction of the tutors with our platform, we rely on tools like Tally, Airtable, Make, and a few others to streamline the screening, interviewing, and onboarding of the new tutors. It's not just about the number of hours it saves us if we do all of that manually; it's also the speed of onboarding the tutors that matters. Automation allows us to review, interview, and onboard them within 48 hours.

👨🏻‍🏫 Tutor management

We manage our users via Retool. Retool is a SaaS that enables you to build internal tools. After reviewing all available CRM tools and talking to experts, we opted for Retool as our tool of choice to quickly build a CRM that can be easily extended as our use cases evolve. Retool manages tutor profile activation, tutor profile completion tracking, intro video upload, and more.

🏪 Landing pages and blog

Heylama's landing page is built on top of Webflow. Webflow is a low-code website builder with a robust CMS built right into it. It lets you build beautiful, responsive websites very quickly. Our blog is also hosted on Webflow. I've been taking care of Webflow website for the last 12 months without support from the engineering team, saving us tons of money in engineering hours.

How do you use automation and low-code tools at work?