Original Summary

I'm 21, working out of a small town in India, and I take on web dev and automation projects to fund my own product ideas (the agency work is the fuel, the products are the mission). Recently a client came to me with a problem that I think a lot of freelancers here will recognize: they were manually copying ~200 customer inquiries a week from email into a spreadsheet, then manually matching them to follow-up reminders. Two people spent maybe 10 hours/week on this. Human error meant leads silently died. What I built (stack: Next.js + Postgres + cron jobs, nothing exotic): Email parser that extracts name/phone/requirement from the inquiry body (regex + a few rules, no AI needed - people write semi-structured emails more than you'd think) Auto-entry into a pipeline board, status flags based on keywords ('urgent' = flagged red) A nightly job that generates follow-up reminders grouped by salesperson, delivered as one email at 9am instead of 47 pings The result: those 10 hours/week are now 20 minutes of review. The client's response time went from ~2 days to under 4 hours, which they tell me has directly improved close rate. What I learned doing this (the honest version): Regex parsing beat an LLM call here - cheaper, faster, no hallucinated phone numbers. I only reach for AI when the input is truly unstructured. The client didn't want a dashboard. They wanted one email. I over-built first, got it wrong, then listened. 80% of the value was in 20% of the features. The fancy reporting module I designed has literally never been opened. Happy to answer questions about the architecture or how I scoped/priced it. Also curious: what's the most boring automation you've built that turned out to be the highest-value one?   submitted by   /u/realbhavya [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：工作与职业机会
  • 分类依据：内容涉及招聘、求职或职业发展
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/9/21 21:55:34