Solo founder automation principles
For a one-person company, automation is a tool to buy time — not a hobby. Three principles:
1. **Start with clear ROI**: repetitive tasks saving 3+ hours per week 2. **Local integration first**: KakaoTalk, Naver, Hometax connectivity 3. **SaaS early, self-host at scale**: free tier to learn, migrate to n8n
Essential categories
1. Customer support automation **Channel.io** — Unified inbox for KakaoTalk, web chat, email. FAQ bot. Handles first-line while you sleep.
2. Email automation **Stibee** — Korean newsletter with 광고성 정보 consent baked in. Auto-segment sending.
3. Lead scraping / data collection **Apify** or **Browserless** — Crawl Naver cafes, blogs, e-commerce.
4. Workflow automation **Make** or **n8n** — Chains like "form submit → Slack alert → Notion save → send email."
5. AI assistants **ChatGPT / Claude** — Customer reply drafts, translation, summaries. **Wrtn** — Korean marketing copy generator. **CLOVA Note** — Korean meeting recording and summary.
6. Data / analytics **Airtable** or **kintone** — Lead/customer DB. **GA4 + Naver Analytics** — Dual traffic analytics.
Recommended solo stack
- Channel.io (support)
- Stibee (newsletter)
- n8n self-hosted (automation engine)
- Claude Pro (AI assistant)
- Airtable (DB)
- CLOVA Note (meeting notes)
Fixed cost ~KRW 200,000/month — about 1/10 the cost of a junior hire.
Common mistakes
- Skipping process documentation before automation: tangled automations are worse than manual
- Staying on Zapier too long: task volume drives costs into 6-figure KRW/month. n8n self-host wins
- Trying KakaoTalk integration through English tools: local tools like Channel.io are faster
Automation compounds. Add just one per week and you have 50 automations in a year.