Workflow Starters

Automations that tell you when something has gone wrong

Every automation on this site fails the same way: it stops producing output, and an absence of output looks exactly like a quiet week. The same is true of a website, a certificate and a booking form.

This is the least exciting category in the library and the one we would build first, because everything else on these pages assumes somebody would notice if it stopped.

4 starters in knowing when something breaks

01

The website downtime alert

An hour
Starts when
A check every few minutes
It does
Fetches your site and messages you if it fails twice in a row.
Connects
n8n, Slack or Telegram, email
Why it pays
Most small businesses find out their site is down because a customer mentions it. Two consecutive failures rather than one is what stops it crying wolf at every blip.
Its limit
It proves the page answered. It cannot tell you the contact form stopped delivering, which is the outage that actually costs you.
Read the build guide
02

The certificate and domain expiry alert

An hour
Starts when
A daily check against your domains
It does
Warns you thirty and seven days before an SSL certificate or domain registration lapses.
Connects
n8n, an SSL checker, email
Why it pays
An expired certificate puts a browser warning in front of every visitor, and a lapsed domain is worse. Both are entirely preventable and both still happen constantly.
Its limit
It watches what you point it at. A domain somebody else registered for you years ago is invisible until it is not.
Read the build guide
03

The new review alert

An afternoon
Starts when
A new public review appearing for your business
It does
Sends you the review, the rating and the link, the day it appears.
Connects
A reviews source, Slack or email, n8n
Why it pays
A bad review answered the same day reads completely differently from the same answer three weeks later, and nobody checks these pages on a schedule.
Its limit
It brings you the review. Writing the reply is the whole job, and it is not one to hand to a machine in public.
Read the build guide
04

The heartbeat that says your automations still run

An afternoon
Starts when
A weekly schedule
It does
Counts what each automation did this week and messages you the totals, including the zeros.
Connects
n8n, Google Sheets, email or Slack
Why it pays
This is the one that makes everything else on this site trustworthy. A failed automation produces silence, and silence is indistinguishable from a quiet week until you have a number that should not be zero.
Its limit
It reports what ran. An automation that was never switched on reports nothing and looks the same as one that has no work to do.
Read the build guide

What these deliberately do not do

An alert is not a fix. These tell a person something has happened, and none of them attempt to repair anything or reply to anybody, because an automation acting on a fault it has misread makes a small problem into an interesting one.

The same line runs through the whole library, and the hub explains where we draw it. Anything a customer reads as a reply from you is work rather than tooling, which is why we run it as a service instead of shipping it as a template.

Other categories

Finding new customers

4 starters

Paperwork that files itself

4 starters

Getting found online

4 starters

Questions about automating knowing when something breaks

How do you know if an automation has stopped working?

You build something that counts what it did and tells you the number on a schedule, including when the number is zero. Automations rarely fail loudly: a field gets renamed or a connection expires, and the workflow produces no output rather than an error. Without a heartbeat, the first sign is usually a customer asking why nobody replied.

What is the simplest monitoring automation worth building?

A website check every few minutes that messages you after two consecutive failures. It takes about an hour, it needs no paid service, and requiring two failures rather than one is what keeps it from alerting on every transient blip. Most small businesses currently learn their site is down from a customer.

Should alerts go to email?

Send them to two places, not one. Alert email lands in spam more often than people expect, and an alerting system nobody sees is worse than none because it produces false confidence. We push our own to a phone notification and an email address, which has caught things email alone would have missed.

The next step

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