The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
A roofing company was spending $70,000 a year on a 4-person manual inventory and procurement operation.
I replaced it with a zero-touch pipeline. No human data entry. No spreadsheet handoffs. No "did we order that?" Slack messages at 9pm.
The system runs on Airtable, Python, and OpenAI. It took 3 weeks to build. It paid for itself in the first month.
Here's what I've learned after 20+ years of operations work and building these systems across hospitality, e-commerce, SaaS, and construction:
The expensive problem is almost never the one you think it is.
It's not the software. It's the 6 spreadsheets nobody wants to touch. It's the workaround that became company policy. It's the process that only works because one person memorized it.
I build systems that replace all of that: the CRM, the automation, the AI agents, the dashboards, the content pipelines. One architect, one connected system, everything built to work together from day one.
Recent builds:
Recovered 20 hours/week for a multi-venue hospitality operation
Unified 5 e-commerce storefronts into one automated command center
Built an AI system that replaced 8 improv actors per venue per night (yes, really)
Turned a hiring round into a one-button AI content pipeline
What's the one manual process in your business that you know is costing you the most time, but you haven't fixed yet?
#BusinessAutomation #AI #Operations #SystemsArchitecture #Airtable #Python #WorkflowAutomation #NoCode #ECommerce +1
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Related posts
Amazing🔥
What it actually takes to build a multi-tenant edtech SaaS from scratch
Everyone wants to build a SaaS. Few people talk about what happens when 500+ schools hit your system at the same time, each expecting their data to be completely isolated.
I built EduPilotPro, an AI-powered school operating system serving schools across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Here's what the "multi-tenant SaaS" part actually looked like:
Tenant isolation is the first real decision. Every school needs to feel like they own the platform. Their data, their config, their branding. But you're running one codebase, one database cluster, one deployment. We used PostgreSQL with row-level isolation on self-hosted Supabase. Each school gets its own logical boundary without the cost of spinning up separate infrastructure per tenant.
The 8:45 AM problem. Schools don't use software evenly throughout the day. At 8:45 AM, every teacher in every school marks attendance simultaneously. That's a traffic spike that would embarrass most startups. We used Redis + BullMQ to queue attendance writes and process them asynchronously, so the UI stays responsive even when thousands of classrooms hit the system at once.
AI agents, not AI features. We didn't bolt a chatbot onto a school ERP. We built 6 purpose-built AI agents: attendance, admissions, fees, communication, reporting, and scheduling. Each one handles a specific administrative function end-to-end. A teacher types "All students present except Ali who is sick and Ahmed who is 10 minutes late" and the attendance agent parses it, records it, and notifies parents. No forms. No checkboxes.
The stack: Next.js + React + TypeScript on the frontend. Node.js + self-hosted Supabase on the backend. PostgreSQL + Redis + BullMQ for data and queuing. Railway for cloud infrastructure.
What I'd tell any founder about to build multi-tenant SaaS:
Design your tenant model before you write a single feature. Retrofitting isolation is painful.
Assume your traffic will be spiky, not smooth. Queue everything you can.
If you're adding AI, make it do the whole job, not half of it. A half-automated workflow is worse than a manual one because now nobody knows who's responsible.
→ Full case study: EduPilotPro on Contra
Perfect
I've been exploring Emergent recently, and it's been one of the most impressive AI development tools I've used.
In just a short time, I built a modern dental clinic website with an appointment booking system, admin dashboard, responsive UI, animations, and backend functionality—all by iterating with natural language prompts.
A few things I really like:
🚀 Fast full-stack development
🤖 AI that understands context and iterates well
🎨 Beautiful UI generation
⚡ Backend, database, and APIs in one workflow
🧪 Built-in testing and debugging
🔄 Easy refinement through conversation
It's definitely changing how I prototype and build products. Looking forward to exploring it even more.
#AI #WebDevelopment #FullStack #Emergent #BuildInPublic
Trending
Claude
Claude has entered the design space. How are you using Claude Design?
Contra University
Learn from expert creatives how to earn more using next-gen AI tools.
fifaworldcup2026
The World Cup is here and the whole world's watching. How are you designing for the world stage?
creativeaiflow
Creative AI workflows are evolving. What tools do you use, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?
freelancerlife
Freelancer life is wins, pivots, and everything in between. What’s yours right now?
