In 2018, American Express's annual State of Women-Owned Businesses report estimated that women started roughly 1,821 businesses every day. Compare that to the numbers from 2012-2017 (~952), and you see an increase of nearly 100%. In fact, 40% of all businesses are now owned by a woman, and most of those are solopreneurs—a one-woman show.
Last year on International Women's Day (IWD), we celebrated some of the women we work with at Zapier. This year, we want to highlight on a few female business founders who are also automation experts.
How Automation Speeds Up Shipping for TinySuperheroes
"In my first 5 years, we shipped about 10,000 capes. Because of Zapier, we've shipped over 10,000 capes this year alone."Robyn Rosenberger, founder of TinySuperheroes
Even with all the tools that exist for eCommerce businesses, order fulfillment and management is still a complicated process. There's the online storefront, for one. Inventory numbers might be in one system, while label creation happens in another. And, of course, there's the physical act of shipping a product.
It's enough to slow any business down—and no eCommerce store was started because the founder enjoyed shipping things. That's especially true for TinySuperheroes and their founder, Robyn Rosenberger. TinySuperheroes provides capes to kids dealing with sickness and disabilities. Making sure the capes arrive fast is a top priority for Robyn.
"I used to have to create manual orders for every cape we shipped," Robyn explains. "Now that [app automator] Zapier does it automatically, it literally saves me hours and drastically increases how many capes we can ship."
About TinySuperheroes
Back in August of 2012, Robyn made a cape for her young nephew's birthday, due to his love of superheroes. Having enjoyed the process, she made a few more for kids and dogs alike. Serendipitously, she was reading a blog about a young girl who was born with a rare and severe skin condition.
"I became enamored with her story and was in awe at the strength that radiated from Brenna and her family," Robyn says. She had an a-ha moment: Brenna was a superhero and needed a cape of her own.
And so, TinySuperheroes was born. In order to reach as many children as possible, Robyn began seeking out apps and tools that would make her burgeoning business even more powerful.
"As we're growing our business, we use so many different applications to manage our data. I need no other resource to tie these together than Zapier."
TinySuperheroes's Tools
How Robyn Turns Form Responses into Orders
While Robyn automates tasks as disparate as creating contacts, tracking orders, and sending emails, at the heart of TinySuperheroes is one Zap—our word for a automated process created in Zapier. This Zap connects four different applications: form creator Typeform, Google Sheets, contact manager ActiveCampaign, and eCommerce platform ShipStation.
Here's how it works.
The Workflow
When a someone wants to nominate a kid for a cape, they fill out a form on the TinySuperheroes site:
The typeform's response kickstarts the Zap, sending the answers to Google Sheets, where Robyn and her team keep a database. You could use any spreadsheet app, like Airtable, for the same purpose.
Next, Zapier sends the responses to ActiveCampaign, creating a contact and populating different fields with all the relevant information from Typeform.
Finally, the Zap creates an order in ShipStation, where Robyn and the team can have a label printed and get the cape mailed out.
In four simple steps, Robyn created a process that saves hours of manual work—and more importantly, speeds up the time between ordering a cape and a tiny superhero receiving one.
"This Zap is our lifeline," says Robyn. "It's how we stay organized so our tiny superheroes can receive their capes in a timely manner."
While Robyn's Zap has four steps, we broke it up into its core pieces, so you can pick and choose the portions that work for you.
With Zapier, Robyn's been able to automate away some of the most time-consuming tasks that acted as a chokepoint for TinySuperheroes' growth. Now that Zapier handles order creation, Robyn's focus is where it ought to be: "Getting capes to kids!"
And for anyone who might be trying Zapier for the first time, Robyn recommends thinking ahead. "Take the time to set up Zaps correctly—the time you spend on the front end is worth every minute it saves you on the back end."
If you want to accelerate your business like TinySuperheroes, give Zapier a try for free.
All images courtesy of TinySuperheroes.
How a Solopreneur Built Her Back End on Automation
"Let Zapier do the behind-the-scenes work so you don't have to."Vanessa Prothe, founder of Speak English with Vanessa
As much as technology can help when you start an online business, it can also be a bit of a roadblock if you don't consider yourself immensely tech-savvy. If your expertise is in a specific subject matter, like teaching a language, dedicating a similar amount of time learning to code isn't the best use of time, especially as you try to launch a business.
Vanessa Prothe, founder of Speak English with Vanessa, could have spent her time teaching herself to code. She could have studied API endpoints and how to connect different apps to each other. But after a few years in South Korea teaching English, she knew her passion lay with education and making personal connections with students.
Instead of completely altering her career path, she instead embraced her strengths and sought tools that would make it easy to launch an online business that relies on multiple apps. She found Zapier and immediately got to work crafting a back end that runs on Zaps.
About Speak English with Vanessa
The key to learning a language? Conversation. At least that's Vanessa's philosophy—and one she tested while she learned French and taught English in South Korea for three years. Conversations are easy enough to foster in person, but when launching Speak English with Vanessa, Vanessa wanted to reach as many people as possible, which meant an online business.
To cultivate a community, Vanessa created a private Facebook group for her clients. There, they can all chat, ask each other questions, post videos, and help one another learn a language. And that's in addition to the free courses and resources Vanessa offers, as well as her paid courses and a YouTube channel with nearly one million subscribers.
With a few apps all connected to each other using Zapier, Vanessa automatically manages her courses, payments, and emails, enabling her to remain a one-woman show with a focus on her students.
Speak English with Vanessa's Tools
How Vanessa Automatically Manages Payments, Contacts, and Courses
At the heart of Vanessa's business, naturally, are her students. In order to learn a language, they have to sign up for specific courses. Both the free and paid courses are housed in Teachable, so when a student creates their Teachable account, Vanessa has them added to ActiveCampaign with a Zap. In ActiveCampaign, Zapier creates a contact and adds tags to the new contact, which in turn makes sure the new student is added to specific email lists and campaigns.
The same thing happens when a payment is made through Stripe: When a student purchases a new course or lesson, Zapier creates a contact in ActiveCampaign or, if a contact already exists, Zapier finds and updates the contact with the new purchase information.
It'd be a lot of work to do by hand, each time a new student registers or pays. In fact, it might not get done at all:
"Thankfully, I found Zapier when I first started my business, but if I had to do all those tasks manually, it would take me several hours per week," says Vanessa. "And honestly, I probably wouldn't do them because I don't have time."
The Workflow
Three simple Zaps power the bulk of Vanessa's work. First, Zapier brings new students into ActiveCampaign and adds tags—these tags play a big role in what emails and marketing campaigns each student is exposed to. By automating this, no student misses out on vital emails about new courses or missed payments, and Vanessa can focus on course content and her community.
Similar Zaps run for Stripe payments, either creating contacts and adding tags, or searching for a contact and then adding tags and payment information.
Give these a try for yourself and see just how much time you can save by automating manual work:
You don't have to be a tech expert to run a successful online business by yourself. If you follow in Vanessa's footsteps, you just need energy, passion, a great idea, and the right tools.
All images courtesy of Speak English with Vanessa.
How a Boss Mom Gave Out Free Books with Automation
"When I discovered Zapier, I stopped trying to find a one-stop shop and have instead invested in the right tools."Dana Malstaff, founder of Boss Mom
What customer doesn't love free? Sure, everyone has heard there's no such thing as a free lunch, but there can be—when someone other than the consumer absorbs the cost. So if a business offers something for free, like a physical copy of a book, the folks behind the scenes are working to keep costs low.
That's what happened for Dana Malstaff, founder of Boss Mom. Boss Mom brings together moms with an entrepreneurial spirit, providing free resources, a community, a podcast, and even a conference.
The Boss Mom team decided to release Dana's third book for free. All a customer had to do was fill out a form and pay for shipping. To keep that process affordable and running smoothly, Dana and Boss Mom relied on Zapier to power their fulfillment process.
About Boss Mom
In 2013, Dana became a mother for the first time. As you might expect, she found herself split between her budding family and her work, and this divide led her to feelings of guilt and isolation. After a couple of years, Dana began to surround herself with other mom entrepreneurs, and with the release of her first book, Boss Mom: The Ultimate Guide to Raising a Business & Nurturing Your Family Like a Pro, Boss Mom launched.
"Boss Mom isn't just about having business & babies," Dana explains. "It's about embracing the complexity of our lives and not feeling guilty that we not only want to be amazing parents but amazing entrepreneurs and leaders."
From the book came a community, and from there, an academy and conference where Dana gathered the entrepreneurial mothers who learned from each other and helped support one another—personally and professionally. With two more books released, and the last one for free, managing these different avenues has meant creating efficiencies and processes that do more work with less touch. Here's how they do it.
Boss Mom's Tools
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Trello |
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Ontraport |
Contact & purchase management |
How Boss Mom Automated Book Fulfillment
Most of Boss Mom's task management is handled in Trello, a project management app. Scheduled podcasts, ambassador applications, book orders—all of these and more are automatically sent to Trello through multiple Zaps.
In fact, the Boss Mom team has been using Zapier to power these and other tasks since early 2017, so when the Boss Mom team decided to release Climb Your Own Ladder for free, they knew exactly how they were going to handle their process.
First, they built a landing page and order form with Ontraport. The landing page is there to sell—get the customer hooked and filling out the form.
Once the form has a response, Zapier takes over. In Dana's own words:
"Basically, when someone fills out a form to get the book, they get Zapped over to Trello for our fulfillment office to manage to make sure they get the book shipped."
This form bypasses the usual order workflow—book order is placed, payment received, order is sent to fulfillment, book is shipped—and sends orders directly to Boss Mom's fulfillment board and list in Trello for quick shipment.
The Workflows
Sounds simple, right? That's because it is. Dana and the Boss Mom team have built a back end full of simple Zaps that turn complicated and manual workflows into easy, automated processes.
For this Zap, Dana connected Ontraport to Trello:
With the right tools, Dana turned painfully manual processes—like managing specific orders—and made them simple and easy automated workflows.
All images courtesy of Boss Mom.
Our stories explore how Zapier's users solve common problems. From marketers to CEOs, educators to real estate agents, millions use Zapier to automate their most tedious tasks. If you haven't yet, try Zapier for free to see what we're all about.
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