Delighting customers at scale - Richard Lo

cool so um yeah i'll just get started basically my talk is called delighting customers at scale using n8n to power in operations heavy business so a little bit of background on me um i'm more just like a maker independent entrepreneur been running a web design business with my wife now for a handful of years but that's pretty part time at this point and now i'm we're really focused on like just building side projects working on things trying to build up a portfolio of independent businesses profitable businesses so that's kind of the idea um i'm buddies with ben from the nan team so i chatted with him in the fall of last year so not too many months ago told me about nnn got me early access to anything in cloud and i had a project in mind that i wanted to test out so i had recently moved to portugal about a year ago one piece of the puzzle was getting a tax id which is a little bit challenging because you need to get a portuguese citizen to actually apply on your behalf um and i noticed that there weren't many ways for there wasn't an easy way to get that done people would go to facebook groups and they'd be like hey who can help me get this tax id and basically everyone's like oh dm this person or dm that person there's like no website there's no press transparency um none of this kind of stuff looks like max is trying to enter um and uh so my wife and i thought like oh why don't we just put together a simple website collect the order find a law firm partner here locally in portugal to actually get the tax id for people and you know whatever see if we can make a couple of orders a month and have a nice little dinner or something that was the idea um it kind of turned out to be a little bit bigger than that and i'll show you guys the results so far um but let's go ahead so let me see this okay i wonder how i hide this thing uh whatever what's wrong with this okay so border is our company name um and at this point we start out with just like helping people get tax id but we're reformulating how we view ourselves and we're thinking about more like we help people relocate to portugal so we started with tax id but we're working on bank account services and a number of other services in the pipeline as well let's go ahead started as a side project launched on twitter got my first customer a couple days later from twitter and then we started reaching out to influencers primarily on youtube people who had moved to portugal talking about the process of moving here and a lot of their audience are interested in relocating here a lot of retirees like leaving the united states or wherever country and trying to come here so and the tax id recently has become a requirement for submitting your application so that's the key a key component here so in the past few months um a lot has happened and i'll show you some stats we've earned 51 000 over 50 000 in revenue uh and we've actually fulfilled over 350 paid orders that's unique customers um and we also have a waitlist of about 250 people on the bank account services and a number of other services beyond that the bank accounts the one that we're currently working on um it's still just my wife and myself and i just wanted to show you kind of what i've been what we've been able to achieve primarily because of nan to be honest um

this is our trust pilot review as you can see people like us we've had 54 reviews so far all 5 stars 100 what's really funny is that if you take a look at our reviews if you just read some of these things like richard kept me informed along the way which is greatly appreciated basically people are thinking since we're i'm using nhn to send transactional emails using um postmark as my email provider i just sign off the emails as my own name and if they respond of course i respond but people actually think that i'm the one keeping them up to date at every step of the way but um so it works out for everyone you know it's uh it's pretty nice and we do

have transaction emails like literally for receiving your order when you submit your power of attorney that's been signed and then like literally you know every day or so you get a message and we've been fortunate enough to have a pretty quick turnaround so just after a few days we've been able to turn um turn the tax ids around to our customers i'll show you our tech stock and this is where it got really fun on the front end we're using next js just a simple static website i'm using paper form as our checkout so this handles the information intake it also handles the payment along with power by strike um using air table as our back-end database at the moment everything gets sent into there process street this is for handling um like tasks so when we assign we work with law firms right so when we assign a task to the law firm they complete the tasks there they can upload files whatnot it basically provides like a self-contained ui so that um they when they upload things they don't mess up i'm not giving access to my air table directly so once they submit something then i send it over to airtable i'm using anvil as a this is an api for generating pdfs postmarked for the transactional emails zapier a little bit when i have to because some services only are rightly it's on paid on the tier that i'm on only integrate with zapier and don't have an open api but for everything else and i'd much rather use n8n it's because it's just a lot more powerful from my perspective um i would say n8n is the much bigger piece that's connecting everything right now and just wanted to show you some of the how we've been able to scale the operations because you know as you can imagine like 300 customers is a ton of people for us to like manually do everything and we started everything manually um but over time i've been able to automate more and more with within it and a lot of these tools so um two two two key categories that have helped us

scale or one is like automation so i just did a bunch of things here adding the order to air table generating the power fraternity pdf using and bill sending the transactional emails with postmark creating the task in process street so all of these things we used to do manually and now we've been able to automate a lot of it and then secondly is which is super powerful and takes a little bit of creative thinking is like how can you turn some of your parts of your application or some parts of your workflow into self-service options so one part was people would have to up send us their signed pdf and i would manually upload that into airtable and so what i've done instead is i create a paper form where they can and it tracks their id similar to uh i forget your name already the teflon thing with its guid um it checks that in the url and so then it automatically will update their row and air table with this attached file so the self-service is like the super cool stuff i think automation is the more obvious stuff but the two of these things combined have really enabled us to to scale our operations without having to sacrifice any of the customer service that you know we wanted to provide and let me see so we've got i just wanted to show a couple of screenshots of the workflows that we've got going on here nothing crazy it's more of the thinking about nan as like the middleware between applications so here i'm using the airtable trigger and then i'm like filtering off that i've got the split in batches node generate like a time stamp and then here like for example over time we've like learned different parts of the application so like um the template is different like the power of attorney is different if you're under 18 or if you're over 18 so we handle that case and then we um basically use the http request node i don't recall what this is i think oh this is to generate the pdf using anvil and then um i had to do a workaround with aws to be able to actually update the file in air table but yeah anyway that that's one workflow for creating the power of attorney um and having it automatically sent to the customer and then this workflow is when we receive the tax id which is called a nif in portugal um i actually just basically attach it to an email send it out to our customer again using the http request node as well and this integrates with a postmark and then i updated their table just basically logging to make sure that we um we know that we've sent these things out um and that's about it so i'll leave it at that if you guys have any questions about the business side about the implementation side happy dancer