Mitya's Self-Explanatory

Lena Shakurova on automation + other people that can teach you to automate routine tasks

I watched this video on automation by Lena Shakurova and I thought I could use a summary.

I should only consider automating a process if:

• It's a standard process with multiple steps
• I have no time to do the task manually
• I'm not organized enough to follow through with the whole process properly

Use cases that I found relevant for me

• Calendar: Multi-step event creation, integrating text/voice, Google Calendar, Zoom, and notification workflows.
• Knowledge Organization: For example, a Telegram bot classifies and routes notes, links, and to-dos into the correct Notion tables or categories.
• Post-Meeting Calls: AI agent analyzes call transcripts to update CRM automatically, create action lists, or write follow-up emails.
• Content Creation: Repurposing (e.g., YouTube to LinkedIn posts), automated newsletters, content distribution across platforms.
• Freelance Outreach: Automated job notification and personalized message drafting for platforms like Upwork.
• Lead Generation: Automated process using Clutch (company database), Apify (data extraction), Airtable (database), Instantly (email campaigns).
• Research:
  • Competitor research with Perplexity and Tavily.
  • Custom “deep research” assistants for extended literature and citation extraction into PDFs.
• Automated Executive Assistant: Multi-purpose agent integrating several routine functions via Telegram, Notion, etc..

The key component in many workflows is an AI block that performs a classification task (e.g. to what category an email that just landed in your inbox belongs).

Apps/Services

Some of them were not directly mentioned in Lena's video.

API and Workflow Integration

• Make.com: Visual, no-code workflow automation for thousands of apps including Apify, Airtable.
• n8n: Low-code workflow builder, supports AI blocks, API connections, custom automations.
• Pipedream: Automation platform for developers to build workflows across APIs.
• Relay.app: User-friendly tool for creating workflow automations (including Google Calendar).
• Relevance AI: Agentic workflow development environment for automating business processes.
• Zapier: Popular online automation tool to link web apps, manage triggers and actions.

Brief comparison of Make.com, n8n, Pipedream, Relay.app, Relevance AI and Zapier

Pricing as of 2025

• *Relevance AI’s free plan offers ~100 credits/day, 1 user, 10MB knowledge, with paid tiers scaling users, operations, and AI capabilities. Pricing is credit-based.

Summary:

• Make.com is good for visual, complex automations with robust data tools and a moderate price curve.
• n8n is great because of self-hosting option (the only one that can be self-hosted, it seems) and great customization.
• Pipedream is developer-centric with serverless, code-heavy flows, best for those comfortable writing JavaScript or Python.
• Relay.app is focused on ease-of-use and onboarding for small teams and non-technical users.
• Relevance AI fills a specialized niche as the most AI-centric workflow tool in this lineup, ideal for businesses aiming to build autonomous, customizable AI agents for analytics, content, sales etc.
• Zapier is seen as the easiest for non-techs and has the broadest app ecosystem, but costs rise quickly.

For maximum affordability and control, n8n Community is ideal; for a plug-and-play experience, Relay.app or Zapier excel; for advanced automation and data handling, Make.com stands out.

Data Collection, Processing and Storage

• Airtable: Online relational database for storing, organizing, and integrating structured data.
• Apify: Platform for web scraping and workflow automations, can output data to Airtable or Google Sheets.
• OpenRouter: Unified API gateway for access to hundreds of AI models (Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral).

Lead Generation and Outreach

• Clutch: Business directory for finding leads and company info.
• Instantly: Tool for scaling and automating cold email campaigns.
• Upwork: Freelance platform where automations can monitor listings, draft responses.

Media Creation and Processing

• Creatomate: Video automation API, used to generate and edit media for content workflows.
• Replicate: Image generation via model APIs, used for content/video automation.
• 11labs: Text-to-speech API for automating audio generation in videos.

Research and Reference Tools

• Perplexity: Just mentioning it here, I know what it is :)
• Tavily: Intelligent research agent for summarizing and extracting citations from web sources.
• Superhuman: AI-powered advanced email client.

Others

• MindStudio: No-code platform for building AI-driven applications.
• Pyrus: Workflow, task, and communication platform with document management, approval flows, and email/task integrations. Designed for modern teams, it integrates with external apps and features no-code customization.

People and Additional Links

• Lena Shakurova (YouTube): AI advisor, workflow automation expert, founder of Pars Labs and Chatbotly, organizer of AI automation courses.
• Lena's n8n automation templates library

Lena did a wonderful job mentioning all other experts and referencing their videos.

• Nate Herk (YouTube): Educator, n8n and AI automation tutorial creator, known for actionable video blueprints.
• Roberto H Luna (YouTube): Founder sharing advanced AI agentic workflows for meetings, automating post-call actions and CRM updates.
• Clarence Nap: On his YouTube channel, he demonstrated lead generation stack (Clutch, Apify, Airtable, Instantly); known for operational sales automations .
• Leon van Zyl (YouTube): AI automation educator, workflow builder focusing on beginner-friendly n8n use cases.

Note: the base of the summary was created by AI, with manual editing afterwards.