Category: Workflows
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What to Consider Before You Add Workflow Automation to a SaaS Product
Adding workflow automation to a SaaS product usually seems fairly manageable at first. Most teams picture a few triggers, a few actions, maybe a workflow builder UI, and some simple automations users can configure themselves. Then the project grows, and grows, and grows, and pretty soon, your little idea of adding workflow automation has become…
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How Embedded Workflow Automation Changes SaaS User Behavior
An entrepreneur sees that a new user signed up to his product, so he sends a follow-up email. Then creates a reminder in his CRM. Then notifies a teammate in Slack. After doing this fifty times, he stops thinking, “This is part of my workflow,” and starts thinking, “Why am I still doing this myself?”…
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Getting World Cup Updates in Slack
With the World Cup happening during work hours, I wanted score updates in Slack instead of another tab or another app. I also wanted an excuse to dogfood our workflow builder and see what it might look like if a sports SaaS embedded it for their own users. So I spent an afternoon building it.…
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Why You Shouldn’t Use iFrames to Embed Workflows in Your SaaS App
iFrames seem like the obvious way to add workflow automation to a SaaS app quickly. You drop another application into a page, pass authentication through somehow, and technically the workflow builder is now “inside” your product. At first glance, it feels like the fastest possible implementation. The problem is that users can usually tell immediately…
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Why Simple Workflows Outperform Complex Automation Systems
People don’t evaluate automation systems based on what they could do. They evaluate them based on whether they can get one thing working right now – without thinking too much about it.
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How Embedded Workflows Increase Retention – Without Adding Features
Most teams try to improve retention by adding more. More features, more settings, more things for users to explore. The assumption is that if the product does more, people will stick around longer, and pay you more money. In practice, that doesn’t always work. You can keep adding more shiny things and still have users…
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Why External Automation Tools Weaken Your Product
Think about where your user actually “builds” their process of using your product. Not where they click buttons, but where they decide what should happen next, what connects to what, what runs automatically. If that place isn’t directly inside your product, you’ve got a problem. External automation tools like Zapier are useful for a reason.…
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Why Workflows Create “Natural” Upgrade Pressure in SaaS
A lot of SaaS products rely on pushing users toward upgrades in ways that feel a bit forced. You hit a limit that doesn’t quite match how you’re using the product, or a feature is locked behind a higher plan even though it’s not something you use often. In those cases, upgrading feels like a…