Brady Hugins: Hi everyone, joining in. This is Brady Hugans with Mirror Mirror Systems.
Brady Hugins: This is a webinar, it's May 22nd, Friday, at 10.30 a.m.
Brady Hugins: Currently in Phoenix, Arizona, Chandler, actually.
Brady Hugins: It's gorgeous day outside, even for May here.
Brady Hugins: So, I want to invite you to join us today. We're… Going to be…
Brady Hugins: Showcasing day number 4 for engines and automations today for the MirrorMirror Data Sovereignty introduction.
Brady Hugins: So this is part of a… course that is… About 7 modules.
Brady Hugins: and that we're covering all the components of what I've…
Brady Hugins: coined as data sovereignty. Data sovereignty is…
Brady Hugins: The idea of having a technical infrastructure and system for yourselves, that you can see your data, your workflows, your executions, and are able to
Brady Hugins: Either sell your own products, or be able to have your own libraries of information.
Brady Hugins: And that way you can have a more independent infrastructure. There's quite a bit of new…
Brady Hugins: Creators that are producing content, either video or courses, or audio and music.
Brady Hugins: And… There's some great tools that are available for people to start taking in the…
Brady Hugins: the processing of their own information and be able to disseminate and share out with more people more independently. So, independent media is here, independent technology is here.
Brady Hugins: And I work with a number of different tools in our ecosystem that is… anyone can use, and so… and I encourage people to…
Brady Hugins: to do that, as they're looking at solutions for themselves. Most of the people that enjoy this types of information are either creative types, or they're creating some sort of media.
Brady Hugins: Or they're a technology…
Brady Hugins: Person that's looking to have their own infrastructure and tech stack, or they're looking to help host and help other businesses with theirs.
Brady Hugins: Or they're interested in it from,
Brady Hugins: an operational level. There might be some more functional reasons for it, or a different use case, or a particular need for you.
Brady Hugins: Archiving, I like… People that like to have libraries of information and archivists in order to…
Brady Hugins: protect and have some copies of information available out to independent people, I think is really important to do.
Brady Hugins: So with that, we'll get started with the presentation.
Brady Hugins: Okay… So… Great.
Brady Hugins: I'm sure you can see that. On my screen here…
Brady Hugins: So, engines and automation. So, what are engines? What are automations?
Brady Hugins: Right, so… We've covered some components in the past.
Brady Hugins: About building a spine, an infrastructure spine, what that plan looks like, with all the layouts and components, major components? What's the rhythm?
Brady Hugins: How does this thing… how do… does your system work over time, and what's the common rhythm?
Brady Hugins: But today, we're going to be working on and covering…
Brady Hugins: Engine and automation. So… This is the components and the workflows that make everything very quick.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: the… the costs or the challenges of working with engines and automations is they're very execution heavy. If they don't work precisely in the right way, they'll fail in error.
Brady Hugins: But if they do, and everything lines up well… like, think of it like an engine, like a locomotive.
Brady Hugins: Everything needs to line up, and everything needs to coordinate well with each other in order for things to move.
Brady Hugins: That's what a lot of these systems for automators are like. They're like big locomotives, or…
Brady Hugins: A big, warehouse factory.
Brady Hugins: But you're able to take different forms of information from data, put it in one form, and put it in another database. So, these are for ingesting different emails or marketing information.
Brady Hugins: Touching in and sending a message out to someone.
Brady Hugins: That's typically what we use them for, automated workflows and marketing.
Brady Hugins: But this could be for creating reports.
Brady Hugins: It could be for sending out information.
Brady Hugins: It could be creating summaries for yourself, So…
Brady Hugins: There's… when you start getting into the engines and the automations, these are some of the components that work passively for you, and very inexpensive.
Brady Hugins: When you run a query or you're building something, it can be expensive on your time, whether you're using Cloud Code or some sort of other builder.
Brady Hugins: Whereas engines and automators Are meant to be set up and be more passive.
Brady Hugins: Work in the background. Work while you're asynchronously working on other things.
Brady Hugins: So, they're great multipliers over time.
Brady Hugins: And great compounders over time.
Brady Hugins: So, manual work.
Brady Hugins: is a form of silent debt. Whenever there's…
Brady Hugins: Work that needs to be done in the business.
Brady Hugins: This could be creative work, or sales work, marketing.
Brady Hugins: We're creating fatigue in the people that work on the business. That could be the owner-manager, it could be the employees, and…
Brady Hugins: That's all a function of the business, where we want to be able to work and fatigue it, but the… some of these manual processes can be disjointed. They could take more time than is expected.
Brady Hugins: They can… disjoint different… Departments in the organization.
Brady Hugins: So… There's some taxes.
Brady Hugins: That are an issue with different workflows.
Brady Hugins: And you can find that it can be one of the most, if not the most significant factor, because labor…
Brady Hugins: Almost always is the highest cost in an organization, and therefore any taxation of time of…
Brady Hugins: resources and of stress.
Brady Hugins: We should work to reduce In order to harmonize and create more…
Brady Hugins: Synchronism between the people that are working there, so things can be quicker.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: Switching tools, so when you're manually switching tools, when you're going through these workflows, processes, you're switching contexts, so you're maybe moving from one…
Brady Hugins: UI, user interface to another user interface, or you're taking time to take steps between different tasks?
Brady Hugins: And… that is… fatiguing. It can be… It can add in time.
Brady Hugins: Friction.
Brady Hugins: And you don't really see that impacting your team at all.
Brady Hugins: Latency. So, this happens in regards to customers.
Brady Hugins: Latency debt?
Brady Hugins: Customer signs up on a fri- Tuesday, you see it on a Friday, by the time you reach out, the moment's gone.
Brady Hugins: So, there's some momentum that's needed in order to facilitate different sales processes where people get information at the right time, or they get responses in an expected timeline.
Brady Hugins: These could be minutes, it could be hours, it could be days, depending on the… information.
Brady Hugins: Could be automatic, or very quickly, too.
Brady Hugins: So, it's about… Compressing those so that their expectation is more clear, and there's less latency.
Brady Hugins: Consistency?
Brady Hugins: So, if there's manual processing, there's a lack of consistency, because humans…
Brady Hugins: Organically moved from one task to the next. We're not machines, so we should have machine work be done by the machines, and then human work be done by the humans.
Brady Hugins: So, you'll do the welcome email one week, but forget it the next.
Brady Hugins: So customers get a more unified experience over time.
Brady Hugins: Or there's an expected result that's… Is needed, that's more consistent?
Brady Hugins: And then scale ceiling.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: there's… When things aren't monitored, They're not managed.
Brady Hugins: It's a common term in… Management.
Brady Hugins: And business management.
Brady Hugins: And… When things are not measured and…
Brady Hugins: Workflows aren't measured and managed, then they can fail easily.
Brady Hugins: they can fail very easily in most cases. Getting a workflow
Brady Hugins: buttoned up where it's working really well is inherently…
Brady Hugins: Either a somewhat challenging or a very challenging thing, because there are many, many, many factors and parameters that are sometimes outside the…
Brady Hugins: Understanding that's easy for humans to solve.
Brady Hugins: a human… a human…
Brady Hugins: Can go and identify, usually, a best case, or, you know, because they can empathize with someone.
Brady Hugins: Pretty quickly.
Brady Hugins: Whereas a computer, even a really efficient or a really good one, you have to explain the context, and the context of the situation, whereas humans will be able to walk in and infer
Brady Hugins: Oftentimes, what… what is needed, and act accordingly. Much more than they think they do.
Brady Hugins: I've noticed.
Brady Hugins: So, there's costs here.
Brady Hugins: So there's… when you do the manual work.
Brady Hugins: There's costs in different types of our currency, time, money, Trust, possibilities.
Brady Hugins: And then the engine is the trade-up in order to create uniformity.
Brady Hugins: speed, Right workflow for the right context.
Brady Hugins: Proper scaling.
Brady Hugins: So… An engine is basically a package of workflows, or a…
Brady Hugins: Computer engine that's able to take in a certain task and then move it from one…
Brady Hugins: segment to the next. Trigger fires… The steps execute.
Brady Hugins: And then the output lands somewhere useful.
Brady Hugins: but without you in the loop as the owner-operator. Now, you can get reporting, you can get error checking.
Brady Hugins: You can get the outputs.
Brady Hugins: And copies of the inputs?
Brady Hugins: So… As an example, a trigger is a webhook.
Brady Hugins: Firing, so that's someone coming to and interacting with the form, and the form having a webhook that pings.
Brady Hugins: Buyers?
Brady Hugins: Schedule hits… Or a file lands in the folder, so there might be a timed event, or…
Brady Hugins: A file may land somewhere.
Brady Hugins: These are all the triggers.
Brady Hugins: A customer submits a form, It could be multiple triggers as well.
Brady Hugins: Then what are the steps?
Brady Hugins: There's often a lookup.
Brady Hugins: of information, a deciding of where to put it, a writing of where that information goes and why I'm sending.
Brady Hugins: And each one, step by step, is change. Chained steps that replace your hands.
Brady Hugins: So you don't have to be there in order to intake the information, you can have the forum do the work.
Brady Hugins: You can have the engine do the work.
Brady Hugins: And this is basically having computer systems that are able to see these
Brady Hugins: And then send them to the appropriate spots.
Brady Hugins: So, what do we get? We get an out… an output.
Brady Hugins: It's a row to a database.
Brady Hugins: An email is sent.
Brady Hugins: Our file is stored.
Brady Hugins: A message is sent to a channel, And… There's downstream utility in use.
Brady Hugins: So, an operator is able to stack Up a number of workflows.
Brady Hugins: We have more than 300, I think, active at the moment. We'll go into our…
Brady Hugins: Engine here, in a little bit, after we have some more notes.
Brady Hugins: We… we have a number of different workflows.
Brady Hugins: Can show you.
Brady Hugins: So, the best spot is to start with…
Brady Hugins: best needs or highest needs of the organization. These are just examples of some of the top ones that you could put in a stacked flow.
Brady Hugins: These compound on themselves, as you'll find, and run into opportunities with customers.
Brady Hugins: You can even try different things, or test things very quickly.
Brady Hugins: So, an intake engine, so form submission, Row created.
Brady Hugins: Confirmation email is sent, and then you're notified.
Brady Hugins: And the work happens, no matter if you're awake or not.
Brady Hugins: Fulfillment engine. The payment is received, and the product's delivered.
Brady Hugins: It's tagged in the CRM, Proceed is logged.
Brady Hugins: And then they paid it, they got it, without…
Brady Hugins: This is Brady, without a Brady step. So, there's a number of different delivery…
Brady Hugins: the… that are available. Now, these are… Also, part of…
Brady Hugins: what you would consider, like, Shopify or MailChimp as standard.
Brady Hugins: The difference between this is you're building them in the backend.
Brady Hugins: And able to customize anything to your… imaginative.
Brady Hugins: capacity. So the flexibility to be able to see, And be able to create is the…
Brady Hugins: Ability that you… you get in this.
Brady Hugins: Follow-up, engine, and days after event.
Brady Hugins: Check status.
Brady Hugins: And then they send the right next step, depending on what status that they have at that moment.
Brady Hugins: And then you're checking in, and… Caring about them when… they've…
Brady Hugins: Don't know if you necessarily remembered.
Brady Hugins: These can be done by… Tags, tagged group.
Brady Hugins: You can have your different brands or products.
Brady Hugins: That people are associated with, that you can… Connect in with, so…
Brady Hugins: All of these can be based on… Individual product tag, or… type of person reporting engine.
Brady Hugins: A daily poll?
Brady Hugins: This could be sales, it could be leads, could be form ingestions, could be errors.
Brady Hugins: Anything.
Brady Hugins: render… you can render it into a small brief markdown file.
Brady Hugins: And deliver it as you'd like.
Brady Hugins: Via email, if you'd like, to yourself.
Brady Hugins: So you design the dashboard, And…
Brady Hugins: Have it come to you and decide what you want. What's most effective for you.
Brady Hugins: So here's a real intake engine.
Brady Hugins: We'll go and show you, Nation, what that looks like.
Brady Hugins: But commonly, a trigger?
Brady Hugins: This is a f- a form.
Brady Hugins: posts to a webhook URL.
Brady Hugins: With the payload of the information.
Brady Hugins: It's validated, the email format's validated. Honeypot, smoke test filters, these are all tests, tests and security testing, and…
Brady Hugins: data cleanup.
Brady Hugins: Up search, right to your database.
Brady Hugins: New row of new updated existing, so that way that you have a central… form.
Brady Hugins: That your information is… Or row, that your information is…
Brady Hugins: Saved and allocated towards. Tagging? Brand tagging.
Brady Hugins: Could be product tagging, sourcing, tagging, where they come from.
Brady Hugins: So that we can better understand how to interact with this person.
Brady Hugins: Confirm, send the customer the confirmation email. Subject, body, call to action.
Brady Hugins: Any sort of customization or custom messaging?
Brady Hugins: Log, note what happened.
Brady Hugins: Discord paying error cue if failed, and audit trail.
Brady Hugins: So you can see all the various steps that… If someone were to… Take in a form.
Brady Hugins: and then see that. They would go and look and validate all the information just by reading the form.
Brady Hugins: See, humans do a lot of these steps implicitly, but the computer needs to be explained exactly what needs to be done in order to understand where the information goes.
Brady Hugins: Okay…
Brady Hugins: So, there's sometimes some issues with customization, speed, implementation process.
Brady Hugins: what that looks like with vendors and SaaSes.
Brady Hugins: There's quite a bit that's told about what can be done, and there's quite a bit that can be done, but, sometimes the tools and resources aren't always available.
Brady Hugins: or are expensive.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: There's a number of different things that you can buy, and that you have to buy in some cases, like email senders, like a payment processor, these are…
Brady Hugins: Things that you do, probably most likely do need to purchase in some cases, or at least access to.
Brady Hugins: Whereas the… Coordination software, the dashboarding, the workflows, the more custom organization with
Brady Hugins: your own organization. That's definitely the most important data.
Brady Hugins: And the… Needs of orchestration are much higher
Brady Hugins: Than in these individual-use tools that are important, but they're more individual use.
Brady Hugins: Okay.
Brady Hugins: So… What you'll see here, I have a payment,
Brady Hugins: Oh, I'll show you a workflow.
Brady Hugins: And what workflows look like in…
Brady Hugins: My system, and what they would most likely look like in yours, or very similar to, if you had a similar setup.
Brady Hugins: That's mine.
Brady Hugins: So what you'll see in some of these is a visual interface With the visual layout.
Brady Hugins: These are all unique. Every workflow is unique. They're often copies of each other that are used in different places, and then you'll notice that the canonical naming has to do with some of the branding, so I have the branding, as well as the different workflow tools.
Brady Hugins: There's validation steps in order to drop bad inputs.
Brady Hugins: Insert… upserts for loading in data.
Brady Hugins: Spots to close in and loop in the customer.
Brady Hugins: And then error checking, as well.
Brady Hugins: Okay…
Brady Hugins: Okay.
Brady Hugins: So, I will show you… now, this is one of the most complicated,
Brady Hugins: Complex ones. This is a Stripe payment.
Brady Hugins: And… but this is a good example of showing what a workflow would look like, and a complex one would look like.
Brady Hugins: So, it starts here on the left.
Brady Hugins: We have a webhook.
Brady Hugins: Or a striped pavement coming in?
Brady Hugins: A verification or validation step.
Brady Hugins: An extract payment data step.
Brady Hugins: And then a split that goes into…
Brady Hugins: Payment events, and then logging.
Brady Hugins: A number of different logins. These are notifications to Discord.
Brady Hugins: Here's some updates to the unified data profile.
Brady Hugins: Here's various types of purchases, and… Steps for each.
Brady Hugins: If we look at the overview.
Brady Hugins: We can see a number of different executions. These are for the week, or on a weekly basis.
Brady Hugins: And we've had 761 designed now, we've…
Brady Hugins: gone through a number of them, and I think we actively use about 300 or so at the moment.
Brady Hugins: You can see we have, number of different successes.
Brady Hugins: And… I've been…
Brady Hugins: Around less than 2,000 executions on a day, and then I need some cleanup, like, these are over-executing as well.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: Put the number of different… these are all processes, so we can break down… There's a synthetic heartbeat monitor.
Brady Hugins: So this is 2… Determine every 15 minutes, And check.
Brady Hugins: To see the status of various, systems.
Brady Hugins: These are… to check… I think our websites, and some of the… Yeah, various systems.
Brady Hugins: It's a heartbeat.
Brady Hugins: Three 15 minutes.
Brady Hugins: With failure alerts.
Brady Hugins: And then a number of different areas to look at for your failed executions, if you have any executions.
Brady Hugins: So I do… you can tell when I'm doing…
Brady Hugins: Development work, because you'll get a spike sometimes in failed production executions, and then a cleanup process.
Brady Hugins: I'll go through cleanup, like I was just doing some cleanup today.
Brady Hugins: Webinar reminders…
Brady Hugins: There's a reminder schedule… Registration… Sending out a different reminder.
Brady Hugins: In various areas.
Brady Hugins: Discord or through emails?
Brady Hugins: Okay…
Brady Hugins: So, it gives you a good idea of what a active… Very active.
Brady Hugins: Workflow engine looks like.
Brady Hugins: That's what would I be called a developer.
Brady Hugins: Sizing and volume?
Brady Hugins: A lot less expensive to run than renting a SaaS stack.
Brady Hugins: to get that on a SAS stack.
Brady Hugins: It'd be in the tens of thousands, maybe, a month?
Brady Hugins: I haven't done the math on that.
Brady Hugins: So… Now that you've seen a number of different manual steps and workflows that I've put together.
Brady Hugins: If you could go and put your own workflow together and have that all handled.
Brady Hugins: If there was some sort of, form, or something that was taking up quite a bit of time, or…
Brady Hugins: You had a number of different information from different areas that needed consolidating.
Brady Hugins: Take some time to write that down this week.
Brady Hugins: And what a good workflow would be to test out.
Brady Hugins: What might be some tools or questions that you would have in regards to that?
Brady Hugins: So, where are you mixing Trigger and Logic in the same SaaS tool, and what would it take to separate them? So…
Brady Hugins: Instead of thinking more about
Brady Hugins: the middle, which is the process, try to think more about what is you need to input, and then…
Brady Hugins: think of some… in some ways, a black box in the middle, and then what is the output? And be really clear about what are the inputs and what are the outputs, and then…
Brady Hugins: A lot of the… middle work. There's quite a bit of syntax and interactivity that's needed across databases.
Brady Hugins: So… Look at triggers, and then where you would want to send information and why.
Brady Hugins: Rather than figuring out all the process.
Brady Hugins: But what rules that you want.
Brady Hugins: which engine, if it broke silently for a week, would cost you the most? So, if you had, like, an…
Brady Hugins: Workflows can need testing for silent error, so there may be some sort of error where it says it's functioning, but it's not functioning the way that it… you would need it to be productive.
Brady Hugins: So it's like green light when everything's not green lights.
Brady Hugins: It's a silent error.
Brady Hugins: So, if something broke, what would it be? It usually has something to do with, like, a product sale.
Brady Hugins: Sometimes cash flow… Some sort of production or operating need.
Brady Hugins: So, if you have needs, and you need someone to talk through those, I'm happy to help, and have options available for people that have need for that.
Brady Hugins: So, if you're part of the course, this is part of the data sovereignty course package.
Brady Hugins: We do have a number of different systems that I'm designing in and putting together for different use cases in different industries.
Brady Hugins: We do have the membership available. That's the package for… it's more of a personal membership, or an individual developer membership, but I will have some…
Brady Hugins: Pro-style memberships available for small teams, as well, and for any one Company or enterprise-level companies.
Brady Hugins: So, and then I'm happy to sit down with someone over a 60-minute session. We can go and design something, pen and paper even.
Brady Hugins: To design your first engine and workflow together. What that would look like, what potential tools you could use.
Brady Hugins: How would you go about that?
Brady Hugins: Happy to help.
Brady Hugins: So…
Brady Hugins: Thank you for today. That's all that we have for today. Workflows and work engines are… and engines are… and automation… automators are an important component.
Brady Hugins: In some ways, they're very simple, in the sense that they go from A to B to C, and finish everything when they're working.
Brady Hugins: But setting them up, or understanding them, and understanding the various components of them.
Brady Hugins: That can be more tactical and important to…
Brady Hugins: Work from a development capacity, so…
Brady Hugins: Happy to be available for any help with that, as well.
Brady Hugins: Again, this is Brady Hugans, this is May 22nd, and I appreciate you all. Have a good day.