Have you every wondered how some people seem to do so much? Well this week I sit down with James Rose to unlock some of the secrets of one of my favorite topics: automation. We talk about what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to take some tasks off of your plate, and off of your mind.

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Intro: Have you ever wondered how some people seem to do so much? Well, this week I sit down with James Rose to unlock some of the secrets of one of my favorite topics: automation. We talked about what it is, how it works, and how you can use it to take some of the tasks that you do off of your plate and off of your mind. It’s a great interview. James and I geek out quite a bit in it, so please bear with us. But I think you’ll learn a lot. Let’s get into it.
 
Joe: Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, how did you build that? Today we have a repeat guest on the show. His name is James Rose. He is the automation and productivity guy, where he makes fantastic courses and content over at jimmyrose.me. James, how are you today?
 
James: Joe, I am good, man. I’m excited to be here. This is a topic that normally I get to speak with business about. But to speak with a fellow automation enthusiast, oh, man, this is going to be fun.
 
Joe: Yeah, I am super excited. For those of you who are listening, James has been on the show before. I will link that in the show notes where we talked about how he built his product Content Snare, which is also super cool. But today, I am excited because we are talking about automation. It’s been a big topic of mine. A few episodes ago, I had my automation toolkit, and I put out a bunch of content, and then James got in touch. So why don’t we start, James, with who you are and what you do, and then move into the automation stuff.
 
James: Yeah, cool. I’ve been in software for a long time: since 2010. Ran a digital agency starting in around 2014, just building websites, digital marketing, that kind of stuff. My heart’s always been in software though. So at some point, we shut down the agency because I think we’re on our third software product now. We sold one of them. Actually, I probably should have started with the fact that before I started a business, I was an automation engineer of control systems like programming machinery and stuff to run without people, which was super fun. But I don’t get to do that anymore.
 
Somewhere along the way, automation in business has become my fix for all that work I don’t get to do anymore. So to me, it is just super fun. Even working on clients’ automation stuff, once I’ve got through the initial getting the information I need from clients—I hate that part—but then when I’m in Zapier accounts, and their apps, and building, and automation, I love it, man. A lot of people ask me for help with it because I talk about it so often, and that’s why I started writing about it at Jimmyrose.me.
 
Joe: That’s awesome. I mean, it sounds like you’re interested in automation. It’s probably part of the reason you created contents there anyway, right? Because that automates part of the content acquisition process.
 
James: Yeah, that’s right. Software in general is a form of automation, right? Every piece of software you buy, to some extent, you’re buying it to save you time in some way. Otherwise, you wouldn’t pay for it. So yeah, creating software like we do is solving problems with a level of automation. But it’s beyond just buying an app. You get to actually create the processes and everything in there. So yeah, like you touched on, it’s for gathering information files, content from clients.
 
We originally built it for website agencies and digital agencies to get marketing and website content from clients because that process just sucks in t