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Work that comes back every week? No human needed. More on AI and automation

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Series

The Follow-Up Machine

Your CRM knows which deals have gone quiet, but it never tells you. This series is the follow-up system I built for my own pipeline on a self-hosted EspoCRM: part 1 covers the rules and what went wrong, parts 2 to 6 show the n8n workflows, the Postgres schema and the failure handling, with the real code.

6 parts, about 52 min reading in total

  1. Part 1 7 min read

    Automated CRM Follow-Up That Tells You When It Breaks

    Your CRM already knows a deal has gone quiet. It just never tells you. I built a follow-up machine that does, and that raises an alarm when it breaks itself.

  2. Part 2 8 min read

    An n8n Workflow Example Built to Survive Retries: The Follow-Up Machine Architecture

    Part 2 of the follow-up machine series: five n8n workflows that share one Postgres database, never call each other, and are all safe to run twice.

  3. Part 3 8 min read

    EspoCRM Webhooks in n8n: The Event Name, the Signature and the Stage That Did Not Exist

    Part 3 of the follow-up machine series. Receiving EspoCRM stage changes in n8n, verifying the signature properly, and four mistakes that each cost real time.

  4. Part 4 12 min read

    An Hourly n8n Workflow That Does Not Overlap Itself: Locks, Merge Barriers and Quiet Runs

    Part 4 of the series: the 45-node workflow at the centre of the system, and the three ways it stalled on the runs where there was nothing to do.

  5. Part 5 8 min read

    AI Summaries of CRM Emails with n8n and Mistral: The Prompt, the Parser and the Comma

    Part 5 of the series: summarising a deal's recent emails with Mistral in n8n, storing the result in Postgres, and the bugs that only real text revealed.

  6. Part 6 9 min read

    n8n Error Workflows That Actually Alert: Deduplication, Stale Locks and the Friday Email

    Part 6 of the series: how the machine reports that it is broken, why an empty email every Friday is part of that, and the failure it still cannot report.

Topics in this series

What Work Comes Back Every Week?

Describe one routine that costs you time regularly. I will tell you whether it can be automated and roughly what that means.

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