Can you share a specific example of a process you’ve optimized in your own business for automation and the impact it had?
Sure. My YouTube channel is a great example of process optimization over automation. I’ve built a workflow that minimizes the time and energy needed to produce daily videos. I have two OBS instances set up with a hotkey that starts recording both at once – one for the face‑cam shorts and one for the full video with a picture‑in‑picture box. I follow a written flowchart that tells me exactly what to do next: record, do the Q&A, present the brand stats, then do the live work. All the steps are scripted, and after recording I upload the video, which automatically posts to YouTube via Auphonic. This system lets me produce consistent daily content with minimal manual effort, freeing up time for other tasks.
For daily updates specifically, I do zero preparation — I use a template: a short intro, ~15 minutes of Q&A, ~30 seconds of growth stats, then ~5 minutes of live strategy. I record with OBS Studio, using two scenes (main and screen-share overlay) that I switch between with a hotkey so I can show something on screen without staring at the camera the whole time — good for production value, and I don't need an editor to do that kind of cut in post since I control it live. The tradeoff: this setup isn't great for repurposing since my face is small and often blurry when zoomed into the corner, which editors have complained about wanting a separate dedicated face cam for.
For sure—just check out my video where I start and sell an AI service; you'll probably get the 80/20 of what you're looking for. I've answered enough for now and need to prep for my weekly office hour, where I go into more detail. I'm currently doing brand stats across my channels; growth on the main channel isn't great today, but I expect it to improve tomorrow after publishing a video. I made a recent video called 'most automation content is P star RN' to avoid demonetization; it's my highest‑performing video last month because it was the only one I posted. I know the average viewer is low, possibly because it's not flashy, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Aside from that, I'm working on more stories and improving my storytelling. Feel free to drop any questions below—I'll add them to my stack for a big Q&A day soon. Have a lovely rest of the day, and I'll see you in the next video.
To run my OBS setup, I use OBS Studio as the core platform. I have a scene configuration with a few sources: my camera (Sony A7C connected via HDMI), a shadow filter for depth, screen capture of my monitor, another shadow layer, and my microphone (a Samsung QTU). I use hotkeys—Command+Shift+1 to switch to screen capture and Command+Shift+2 to return to my talking‑head view—so I can jump between full‑head, screen‑share, and blurred‑screen scenes quickly. The monitor is set up with nice margins so the OBS UI doesn’t show ugly bars, and I adjust the display resolution as needed. I keep the production simple: minimal cuts, few edits, and mostly just me in my room. This approach lets me record content at a roughly one‑to‑one ratio—five to ten minutes of recording yields five to ten minutes of finished video—because I prioritize speed over flashy production. I believe that as AI makes stunning visuals easy, audiences will value human presence and authenticity more than polished effects, so I keep the setup straightforward and focus on delivering value quickly.
Here's the exact SOP I set up yesterday: it's a self-regulating shorts pipeline that editors run with no supervision from me. When I upload a raw file to a Google Drive folder called 'footage,' a Make.com automation watches that folder, creates a parent folder named after the file (e.g. 'daily short Feb 24'), and inside it makes two subfolders — 'source' and 'deliverable.' The raw file gets moved into 'source,' and that same info creates a task in a ClickUp pipeline with statuses: queue, timestamps, editing, ready to publish, and publish. Editors watch the source video, add subtask timestamps for good clips ('23s to 59s,' etc.), then move the task through editing themselves. When they're done, they drop the finished file into 'deliverable' and move the task to ready-to-publish — both a top-level deliverable link and a file-specific link get generated, and I've tagged a few draft channel names to publish to. Someone then manually publishes them for me. I could fully automate that last publishing step via API, but I've read enough (admittedly informal) studies from other creators showing automated/API-published Shorts get substantially less reach, so I don't recommend it — I'm having my team handle that step by hand instead. You're welcome to just take the blueprint for free — I'll probably keep adding to the system, so check back for updates.