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🧰 Build Your Own AI Automations & Get Productive
Published 24 days ago • 6 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
Know someone who’d love this newsletter? 2,000+ readers already do (thanks 🙌). Share it with friends & colleagues so they can join too.
This week: AI agents that do the work for you.
I've recently spent a lot of time studying AI agents and automation workflows, building a custom stack to research, create content, and code websites. This has made my work more efficient and improved my fact-checking.
While I'm (more or less) tech-savvy, I'm not a developer. Yet, I've done things I could have never imagined, like using AI to build a complex backend for my automations and turning my old Mac mini into a home server.
Here are some of the tools that transformed my workflow – let’s see if they can do the same for you.
Plus: a brilliant off-topic tool for finding the perfect color scheme, a simple hack to keep your accounts safe, and a plot twist about a massive password leak.
If you've ever wished you could connect different apps to work together automatically, n8n is for you. It’s a powerful workflow automation tool, often seen as the open-source alternative to Zapier. But I think it has an edge when it comes to AI workflows and agents thanks to a zillion options, and because it’s so easy to use.
I’ve been using this setup to create research briefs for my video scripts – and even the first draft of the script itself (I still edit them, of course). It also gives me a head start with this newsletter every week.
Here’s what the workflow does for me:
It sends a few of my past newsletter issues to the LLM so it can analyze my tone and writing style. The results sound surprisingly close to me – maybe even with fewer typos.
Then I tell the AI Agent what this week’s topic will be, and it drafts each section for me.
With the help of tools like Tavily and Perplexity, it fetches up-to-date info online to make sure everything is accurate.
It grabs a few relevant screenshots, does some light editing, and even generates some images to match the content.
Finally, it drops everything neatly into Google Docs and saves it in Google Drive.
All this happens while I check my morning emails or go for a quick coffee. The whole process takes about 5–8 minutes. Of course, I still test and research every tool myself – that part stays human.
While n8n offers its own cloud hosting (starting at $20/month), I went with a self-hosted setup on a Hostinger VPS and saved around $450 a year. That way, I have full control over my data and credentials – and since it’s open source, the software itself is free.
Hostinger, as you can see in the video above, makes the setup process surprisingly easy, and you could have your website (WordPress, Django, Joomla, etc), Gmail replacement and even a free alternative to Google Drive (using Nextcloud) all in there.
🛠️ Alternative to: Zapier, Make.com, coding your own agent
Ever found yourself manually copying and pasting information from a website in bulk? Browse AI is designed to put an end to that. It’s a no-code tool that lets you create "robots" to scrape data from any website, monitor it for changes, and even interact with it.
You can train a robot in minutes to extract product prices, real estate listings, or social media profiles. I find it incredibly useful for competitor research, tracking mentions, or gathering data for content ideas. For example, you could set it up to monitor a competitor’s blog and send you a notification whenever they publish a new post / changed prices or whatever you feel like.
Once you have the data, you can feed it into your other workflows, like adding new leads to a Google Sheet, Airtable or anywhere else using its API. It’s a powerful way to automate the tedious parts of data collection and keep your projects fueled with fresh information.
Creating a custom AI chatbot for your business used to be complex and expensive, but CustomGPT.ai makes it surprisingly easy. It lets you build a chatbot trained on your own content – your website, documents, videos, Notion pages, and more.
Instead of giving generic answers, your bot can provide instant, accurate responses based on your specific knowledge base. This is a game-changer for customer support, as it can answer questions 24/7 without you lifting a finger. You can also use it to create an internal knowledge base for your team, or a lead generation chat for your business.
It’s a much simpler approach than building something from scratch. You simply upload your sources, and CustomGPT.ai takes care of the rest – providing you with a smart, knowledgeable assistant that’s ready to chat with your users or team. For example, you can add your website, and it will crawl and store all your pages automatically.
I've noticed that when working with large batches of documents, the accuracy can decrease. It would be great to have a 'stop answer' button in the chat, as this is an essential feature for chat assistants. And no, it’s not the most affordable tool.
🛠️ Alternative to: Building a custom RAG pipeline, Poe
Finding the right color palette can be a huge time-sink, especially if you’re not a designer – hey, that’s me. Coolors is a fantastic tool that makes it incredibly fast and fun to discover, create, and share beautiful color schemes.
You can generate endless palettes with the press of the spacebar (it’s kind of addictive), lock colors you like, and let the tool find complementary shades. It’s perfect for everything from designing a website or presentation to creating social media graphics. This tool was a suggestion from Inka, thanks a lot!
While you could ask ChatGPT to suggest color palettes, it’s a bit slow and lacks the interactive feel. I still find myself coming back to Coolors whenever I need to quickly find colors that work well together.
With the plot twist I’m about to share, this week’s hack is all about security. If you’re not using 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) everywhere you can, you’re basically leaving your digital front door wide open.
2FA adds a second layer of security to your accounts. After you enter your password, you’ll be asked for a second piece of information – usually a code from an authenticator app on your phone (like Google Authenticator or Authy), a text message, email or similar.
Yes, it’s a tiny bit of extra effort, but it makes it exponentially harder for someone to break into your accounts, even if they have your password. Think of it like this: your password is the key to your house, but 2FA is the grumpy-looking guard dog sitting right behind the door.
It’s one of the single most effective things you can do to protect yourself online – especially if you reuse passwords 🔐.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
Think your passwords are safe? Think again.
A 2024 discovery, dubbed the "Mother of all Breaches," discovered some seriously mind-boggling data breaches, including an insane number of unique passwords (16 billion) – check source. This isn't just one company getting hacked; it's a compilation of thousands of past breaches dumped into one massive, searchable database.
Security researchers at Cybernews found the leak, which contains data from sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Dropbox, and many others. With 16 billion unique credentials, it’s one of the largest leaks ever discovered. The scary part is that your information is almost certainly in there.
This is exactly why the hack I mentioned earlier is so critical. If your password is out there (and it probably is), 2-Factor Authentication is the safest thing standing between a hacker and your digital life. It’s a stark reminder that in today’s world, a password alone is no longer enough.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll explore tools to make your online meetings less boring and much more productive.
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