The Boring Tool Behind the Curtain

People sometimes ask how I get three newsletters out every week, on top of everything else. The honest answer is not glamorous. Most of it comes down to a piece of software called Make, and I do not think I have ever mentioned it here before.

Make is not exciting. It does not teach you anything new about AI, and it will not make you a dime. What it does is quietly connect things that would otherwise need a person clicking around by hand.

Here is a small example. Every week, receipts land in my inbox from the tools I use to run this whole operation. I used to let them pile up and then spend an afternoon each month digging through and adding them to a spreadsheet, hunting for what I actually spent. Now Make catches each receipt as it comes in and drops the amount straight into that spreadsheet. I did not build anything clever. I just told it once what to watch for, and it has not stopped since.

Another one. I get emails when a subscription is about to renew. I used to see those emails, think “I will deal with that later,” and then get charged for something I meant to cancel. Twice, actually. Now Make watches for those emails and texts me a few days early, while there is still time to do something about it.

None of this required me to become someone who understands computers better than I do. I set each one up once, slowly, usually with help, and then I stopped thinking about it. That is the part worth saying out loud. The value was never the cleverness of it. It was that a handful of small annoyances stopped needing my attention every week.

I am not telling you to go build something like this on your own. For a lot of people, getting the first one built and working the way you want is the part that trips people up.

What I will say is this: if one small annoyance in your own life sounds like something Make could quietly handle, and you want to try it, I am glad to walk you through building your very first one together. It does not need to be fancy. Tell me what is eating your time, and we will figure out together whether this fits. No pressure either way.

If you are curious to see the tool up close, I wrote a longer look at it here.

If this is your kind of thing, I write three times a week over at the newsletter.

— Bob