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Join 2021 readers learning how to use AI & Automation tools to grow an online business.

This Workflow of the Week edition is brought to you two of my favorite tools…

Both of these have saved our team thousands of hours and brought in hundreds of leads:

Linked Helper → The Safest LinkedIn Bot I’ve Ever Used

Linked Helper is the most technically advanced platform for LinkedIn automation with a focus on security, a wide range of features, and exceptional customer support. Whenever I have a question, their team gets back to me with a solution with in minutes…something I can’t say for most other tools out there! Trusted by over 10,000 businesses worldwide.

Instantly → Hands-Free Cold Email Automations

Instantly helps you find warm leads, scale email campaigns, reach primary inboxes, engage smarter and win more with AI. I’ve been using this tool for almost a year now, and am constantly impressed with the speed of their updates, and how easy it was to build and manage automated cold email systems for myself and clients. We turned on this campaign and built a 1.4 million dollar pipeline in 10 days with this tool.

Interested in advertising with us? Check out these sponsorship opportunities here.

This week’s workflow is coming in HAWT!

This past week I had a crazy idea for a workflow…

One that I don’t see many people in the “cold email” biz talk about much.

A fully automated system that will help me grow the newsletter, without wasting money on ads or relying on the organic algorithms to get me traffic.

Not only is this going to be a workflow that I built and test for this newsletter, but it’s also one you can get pretty creative with.

Whatever your main goal is for finding, attracting, and speaking with prospects…

You can build it with just two automated tools.

Use them separately and you’ll see some success.

Or use them in tandem to create a God-tier level system that delivers 7+ touchpoints to prospects without you doing anything.

Trust me → I know how stupid that sounds…

But literally this runs all day long for me, and takes me about 20-30 minutes a week to maintain and manage.

Almost as good a pairing as:

• Peanut Butter & Chocolate

• Coffee & Donuts

• Cheese & Wine

Ok…maybe not PB & Chocolate…but its up there.

My Fully Automated Workflow to Try and Grow this Newsletter:

Instead of dropping a boring “step 1 + step 2” wall of text…

Just watch this video and learn how I combine both LinkedIn Automation + Cold Email Sequences to get in touch with prospects.

I’ll be building, testing, and deploying this new system…

And sharing the results with you at the end of the month.

Here’s the workflow diagram for the new system I’ll be battle testing:

https://whimsical.com/cold-email-strat-increase-subs-sponsors-and-traffic-RF89mSvcZKqMWA9goEq8z4

This Workflow of the Week feels illegal to know about.

I can’t wait to see the results!

If you found this insightful → share it with a friend or colleague who could use some better systems:

Share

You gotta make me 1 promise though…

That you’ll use your new superpowers for good, Autopreneur.

See you Friday,

Ryan Hutchinson

Just wanted to give a quick shoutout to our newset community members who joined The Automation Lab:

• El Amin Daouda: Cloud Solutions Architect

• Steve Butler: Systems Coach for Therapists

• Shawn McLoughlin: Solopreneur & Creator

• Kerry Morrison: Ex-CMO and Startup Exec

These entrepreneurs all wanted more for themselves in 2025…and took the first step by joining our growing community.

If you’re interested → join us here and get access to my new course “The 90 Day Autopreneur.”

I’ll give you everythign you need to build a fully automated business, that provides the flexibility and financial freedom you’re looking for in business ownership.

If you’re reading this but haven’t yet subscribed, join 1907 ambitious entrepreneurs learning how to use AI to grow an online business:

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Interested in getting your brand or business seen by thousands of readers every month?

Check out these sponsorship opportunities here.

Last Wednesday, you learned how to use a GPT prompt to automatically keep track of your expenses…

This week, you’ll learn how to use a GPT prompt to move screenshots from your phone and have them post to your website in seconds.

This step-by-step guide below will teach you exactly how to build this workflow…

Even if you’re a complete newbie to AI tools.

You can build this one on your lunch break.

Workflow of the Week:

If you’re dyslexic like me, and you enjoy watching tutorials instead…

Click to watch me build this automation on YouTube here:

Pre-requisites:

• Gmail (or similar email service) with label/tagging functionality

• Make.com account

• I use Airtable as my standalone database for everything…but you’ll need some type of database that can store images.

  • You could also have this automation feed your wordpress site, landing page, or content calendar hosted inside of Notion.

How to Build this Automation:

Building automations & workflows is like building with Legos.

This workflow is a great foundation for some really cool content, marketing, or sales automations.

Here’s how to build it in just 4 steps:

1. Create a “Testimonial Dump” folder in Google Drive.

   • Create the folder where you will be uploading your social media screenshots into.

2. Prepare Your Final Destination:

   • In my example, I’m storing these delightful social media comments inside an airtable database → for use in public dashboards like this one.

   • Create 3 columns:

     • Name: name of the person who gave you the testimonial

     • Status: if the testimonial is publicly visible on your website or not

     • Image: an "attachment” column for storing the actual screenshot file (jpg or jpeg)

3. Build the Automation Workflow in Make

   • Trigger = Google Drive → “Watch For Files in Folder”:

     • Trigger the automation to watch for any incoming files that are newly created.

     • Have it set to watch your “testimonial dump” folder you just created in google drive.

   • Module 2 = Google Drive → “Download a File”:

     • Map the “File ID” to the file from the trigger.

   • Module 3 = OpenAI GPT → “Analyze Images”:

     • Here’s the prompt:

       Analyze this screenshot of a testimonial on social media. You have only 1 task: extract the full name of the person giving the testimonial. You will ONLY give us just the person's name as your output. Do not include any other text or punctuation in your outputs. We only need the name. You must complete this task with 100% accuracy or it's a failure.

     • Map the image to module 2.

   • Final Module = Airtable → “Create a Record”:

     • Map the output of the GPT prompt to the “Name” column

     • Set the status to be either published or not, depending on if you want all new testimonials to be approved first before showing up on your website.

     • Map the “web content link” output from module 2 to the “Image” column inside of airtable.

     • NOTE: you must have the google drive folder publicly shared as “anyone that has the link” or else the image will not get downloaded.

4. Test and Run the Automation

Benefits of this Workflow:

• This is a great starter automation to build, as it takes a task you or your team would otherwise be doing constantly…and automates it from start to finish.

• You start using the comments section of your social media posts or newsletter articles as “Social Proof”

• You increase the engagement and visibility of your brand.

• The sales page or website could have fresh testimonials that look like a carousel of positivity → further showing your authority online.

• You store these screenshots and re-use them in your marketing or social media content.

This should help boost your conversion rates, turn more prospects into customers, and store valuable, brand-boosting compliments from your audience…that otherwise get forgotten about over time.

All you have to do is take a screenshot from your phone, and drop the image into your google drive folder.

The rest is taken care of for you automatically.

That’s it for this week’s Workflow, Autopreneur.

See you Friday,

Ryan Hutchinson

PS - Are you sick of clicking buttons all day?

I was SO bored doing all the manual tasks inside my business, until I discovered the easiest way to automate them...

And after building workflows for hundreds of clients in the last few years…

I’m now sharing all of these automation templates & systems inside our VIP community.

Join people like Steve, who literally joined while I was writing this:

Don’t sit on the fence…because I increase the monthly price every 10 members.

Join The Automation Lab Today.

“I’m so excited to do my taxes!”

…said no one ever.

Managing expenses can be tedious, but in today’s Workflow of the Week, you'll learn how to automate expense tracking from your emails, and build a simple AI Bookkeeper that prepares your accounting data.

This step-by-step guide simplifies the process, saving you time and ensuring accurate records—perfect for entrepreneurs looking to streamline operations.

For a step-by-step walk through on how to set this up, please watch this video.

Pre-requisites:

• Gmail (or similar email service) with label/tagging functionality

• Make.com account

• I use Airtable as my standalone database for everything…but you’ll need some type of spreadsheet or expense tracking software, with these 3 columns.

  • (e.g., Airtable, Google Sheets, QuickBooks) with at least these columns:

    • Entity: Who/what you're paying

    • Date Paid: A date column

    • Amount Paid: A currency column

How to Build this Automation:

1. Set Up Your Email Labels

   • In Gmail, create a label for expense-related emails (e.g., "Operations > Software Expenses").

   • Manually apply this label to emails containing expense details.

     • You could also set a “filter” to have it automatically label any messages with the phrase “you paid” or something similar you know is consistent.

     • Example - all my emails from PayPal whenever I buy something are the same subject line and format. I would set a filter for whenever an email comes across from paypal that says “You Paid” to be labeled with “Business Expenses” in gmail.

2. Prepare Your Database

   • Create 3 columns:

     • Entity: who you paid money to

     • Date Paid: date the payment was made

     • Amount Paid: how much you paid

   • Optionally, add a "Type" column (e.g., "Food & Bev," "Software") for categorization.

     • You can do this manually each week or have the GPT prompt (in the next step) automatically label the expenses

3. Build the Automation Workflow in Make

   • Add a “Watch Emails Module”:

     • Trigger the automation to watch for any incoming emails with the specific label you just created.

     • Set the module criteria to "unread emails only" to avoid duplicates.

     • Check the box for “Mark emails as read after processing.”

   • Add an OpenAI GPT Module with your prompt:

     • Use GPT to extract expense details from the the body of the incoming email.

     • Tell GPT to give its output in JSON format (its a programming language), with keys: amount, date, and entity.

     • Here’s the prompt I have inside the video

       • “Analyze this email, and extract the amount paid for a business expense, what date the expense was paid, and to what entity person or business it was paid to. Your output will be in JSON format, and will ONLY include 3 keys: "amount", "entity", and "date". Here's the exact format you will use need to use in your output for each key:

         "amount" = "XX.XX"

         "date" = "YYYY-MM-DD

         "entity" = business name in english spelling & capitalization

         Email Subject: {{map to the subject line}}

         Email Body: {{map to the body text}}”

4. Add a Parse JSON Module

   • Use a "Parse JSON" module to separate the extracted data into usable variables: amount, date, and entity.

   • Simply map it to the output of the GPT module and it will do the rest.

5. Add your Finance Software or Expenses Tracking Database (Airtable for me)

6. Map from the “Parse JSON” module the: amount, date, and entity variables to the corresponding database columns.

7. Test the workflow by running it with labeled expense emails.

Optional Add-On’s

1. Create an Expense Dashboard inside Airtable

   1. Build a visual dashboard in Airtable (or similar) to track total expenses, categorize spending, and analyze trends.

   2. You can also have your revenue and income flow into this dashboard, to keep track of profitability.

Benefits of this AI Bookkeeping Workflow:

• Automates expense tracking from emails to a database.

• No more loose ends and hours wasted communicating with accounting or doing your taxes…its prepared for you in real-time.

• Eliminates manual data entry by extracting the email & expenses data with GPT.

• Saves hours on bookkeeping and reduces human error.

• Perfect for solopreneurs and small businesses to who need to know the “numbers” & cash flow.

See you in the next Workflow of the Week, Autopreneur.

Ryan Hutchinson

Psssst…Hey You.

Yeah you…

You tired of clicking buttons all damn day?

Want to outsource the work, but don’t have money to hire?

What if you could get automations like this (and many more) pre-built for you?

I’ve got tons inside our community…systems that will work 24/7 for you → that you can copy and paste into your business. Step foot inside our community, The Automation Lab, and start creating your own 40k per month systems:

(Don’t wait…membership price goes up at 40 members. Click the image below to join us.)

It feels like Medium was back in 2014…everybody was getting noticed.

But yet…with even more features than Medium has today.

I just moved all my long form newsletters over here. They were buried in my ConvertKit creator page…a pointless way to host content.

Yesterday, I wrote a Deep Dive on Justin Welsh’s $4,000,000 Content Funnel post on Substack.

…and then blasted it out to my 13,000 person followers on LinkedIn & Twitter.

A bunch of new subscribers were coming in from that post…Amazing!

So you could imagine my face when I saw that…

Substack has NO built in email automations!

Whaaaaaat?

Fear not! I got your back!

Here's a 2-step automation for anyone writing content on Substack.

Use it to automatically upload Substack subscribers to your email marketing software of choice.

No more manually exporting your Substack list and then manually uploading to ConvertKit, BeeHiiv, MailChimp, etc

This 2 step automation does it for you.

Let’s learn how:

Substack to Mailing List Automation

This workaround uses the new Substack follower email notifications as the trigger to add that subscriber to your external list, via Make.com automations.

You will need:

• A gmail business account that you use for your Substack

• A Make.com account (free or paid)

• 10 Minutes to Install

Method:

• Step 1: Open the “New Subscriber” Emails you get from Substack:

  

• Step 2: In your Gmail inbox, create a new label called “Substack - New Subscriber”

• Step 3: In Gmail, create a filter for this email subject line, and have it add the “Substack - New Subscriber” tag to the email

  

• Step 4: In your mailing list provider (I use ConvertKit), create a new segment or tag called “Source: Substack”. This let’s you identify where the new subscriber came from.

• Step 5: Connect your Gmail module inside of Make, and set the trigger for “Watch Emails"

  

• Step 6: Add the ConvertKit (or other software) module as the second step.

• Step 7: Find the new subscriber email address, the “Reply to Email” data from step 1.

• Step 8: Have that email added to your newsletter opt-in form in ConvertKit (or other software).

  

• Step 9: Add the “Source: Substack” tag to the email address in the module.

• Step 10: Save and click run!

• Perform a quality check that the automation ran successfully —> verify with any new subscriber emails you receive as a test run.

Some Notes & Limitations

• First names are not always included in substack emails, and can be a bit unpredictable when they are. You can set Zapier to automatically pull them from the body text (Reply to name), but some people put their publication name into this field instead, meaning you might end up calling them “The” or similar in your personalised greetings.

• Substack does not offer GDPR-friendly tick boxes at sign up, giving people options for what they’ll receive. You can however do this afterwards by using the double opt-in setting in your external mailing list provider, getting their explicit marketing consent.

• This process doesn’t handle unsubscribes, meaning somebody will have to unsubscribe independently from both of your lists. For some subscribers this might actually be of benefit - someone who wants fewer Substack updates, for example, but still wants to know when your products are restocked. Make sure you’re explaining the situation clearly to all new subscribers from the start, and consider adding an ‘unsubscribe to all’ link to your email footers.

This should help eliminate the need for manually exporting and importing for two different lists.

Now you just shaved off some minutes from your day…

Let’s get back to building our Substack empire.

Remember…

Time > Everything.

Ryan Hutchinson

PS - I’ve built automations and systems for 200+ startups around the world…

If you’re looking for an expert to build out systems for your business…

Or want to learn to build these yourself…

DM or Email me —> Ryan@thecreatorstack.com