I had tons of startup ideas that I'd always wanted to give it a try. After a point, it became frustrating to test them out one by one, either by writing custom applications in Rails or use Wordpress. But, both costed me a significant amount of time.

For example, I had this idea for a travel startup for a very, very long time and I decided to build it on Wordpress. The monetization model was selling some E-Commerce items, so I naturally tried out some of the plugins and was shocked at how long it took for me to get a simple task done. I had such a terrible experience that I'd never recommend it to anyone. Wordpress by itself is fine, but when you try to extend it, you face so many hiccups.

That's when I realized there's no use blaming the tool. It's because of the differences in philosophies between me and the core Wordpress team. So, I naturally spent another 4 months writing a Rails app for this travel startup and still wasn't satisfied with my time to market. Clearly, there had to be a better, faster way?

In essence, I realized every online startup requires these components:

1. Authentication / Authorization

2. CMS - To manage content on the site, including home page, landing pages, blog, etc.

3. Analytics - To help track pageviews, campaigns, etc

4. CRM - To manage a sales pipeline and sell to customers. Also to know very well who your customers really are.

So, I went ahead and wrote this mammoth of an application in phoenix (using DDD's architectural patterns), that has all the modules above. Now, everytime I have an idea, I just login into my interface, setup the content and the theme/design and launch a campaign...bam! My idea is now live and I can test it out there on the market.

You can think of it like a complete combination of all the startups out there:

1. Mailchimp - I can send unlimited emails, track opens, analyse them. Handled by my marketing module. I can customize the emails too, of course.

2. Unbounce - I can design my own landing pages. Handled by my CMS.

3. Buffer - I can schedule shares from within my interface based on best times by engagement. Handled by my marketing module.

4. Hubspot - My system has a full, hubspot/zoho clone of CRM.

Here are some of the key highlights:

1. All my data is collected on BigQuery and I own it instead of sending to third parties.

2. There is no forced limitation on my marketing - For example, if you used mailchimp, you know you're limited to just 2000 recepients. If anything more, it quickly gets expensive. But my system is my own, no limitations whatsoever.

3. I can spend less time developing my idea and more time executing it.

4. I have my own custom business dashboard for each of my idea, that tells me how good/bad it's performing, so that I can turn it off when needed.

Probably not the kind of automation you were expecting, but yeah.

EDIT: Added more details.