Hey r/buildinpublic
building operator23.com sharing where it's at and learnings on getting customers and daily users.
the pain. Zapier and n8n take hours to set up and break silently three weeks later. so it stays manual.
my pain was watching ops people describe their workflow to me in 30 seconds, then give up trying to build it in a tool. the gap between "i can explain this" and "i can configure this" is where everything dies.
operator23 closes that gap. you describe the workflow in plain english. "when a lead comes in, enrich in apollo, if company is over 50 people drop in sales slack and create hubspot deal, else nurture sequence". no builder, no nodes.
before it goes live you watch it dry run on real data. every step, every action, spelled out. you approve, it deploys. and when something fails the agent reads its own error, fixes it, retries. no more silent broken zaps.
the result: automation a non technical person actually ships in minutes instead of giving up after an afternoon.
one ops person told me "this is the first automation tool that didn't make me feel stupid". that line drives the roadmap.
learnings from the last few months:
removing the free trial actually helped. counterintuitive but it filtered tire kickers and the conversations with remaining signups got way more serious.
rewriting the headline using language from a customer interview (almost word for word) gave a 23x lift in signup conversion. stopped writing copy from staring at competitors.
the blank canvas problem is the silent killer. interview the user first, propose specific things to automate second. people don't want to configure software, they want software that tells them what to do next.
self healing was the feature that surprised me most. i thought speed of setup would be the headline but in user calls "it fixes itself when it breaks" is what people actually get excited about. broken zaps have left scars.
still early. 20 signups, 0 paying, talking to every one of them before spending a dollar on ads. would love feedback from anyone who's lived this on the operator side or built in the automation space. what would you push harder on, the setup speed angle or the self healing angle?