From my first Zap to Make.com Level 5: six years of building automation that runs businesses

I started six years ago with the smallest kind of automation: a form response landing in a sheet, an invoice that sent itself, a Zap that saved someone ten minutes a day. Client by client on freelance marketplaces, those ten-minute fixes turned into a company, Nex Automations, and into 1,200+ automations running in production today for 210+ clients across 12+ countries.

Somewhere along the way I learned what automation actually is. It is not robots replacing people. It is the invoice cycle of a US transport company dropping from 30 days to 7, a 77% cut, because the paperwork now moves itself. It is a lead reaching the right salesperson in under 2 seconds instead of sitting in an inbox overnight. It is an operations team getting 15 to 20 hours back every week for the work that actually needs a human.

The tools shape the work. Zapier is where most businesses should start, fast to build and hard to break for simple links between apps. Make.com is where the serious systems live, visual scenarios with routing, iterators and real error handling. Self-hosted n8n is where I put AI agents when the data cannot leave the client's server. Knowing all three means the problem picks the tool, not the other way around.

Along the way Make certified me at Level 5, the top of their ladder, and Nex Automations became an official Silver Partner, listed in both directories: make.com/en/partners-directory/nexautomations zapier.com/partnerdirectory/partner/nex-automations

Every build still ships the way the first one should have: error handling, logging, alerting and documentation, because an automation only counts if it holds at 2 AM.

Happy to answer any Make or Zapier questions in the comments.🚀