Elio Merhej

The jobs you keep meaning to get around to. Small enough to be worth trying on a hunch, and they tend to pay for themselves inside the first month.

• 01SchedulersSomething that has to happen every Monday at six, whether or not anyone remembers it is Monday.
• 02AutomationsA form arrives, the sheet updates, the right person gets an email. Nobody touches it in between.
• 03BotsWhatsApp, Telegram, Slack or Discord — answering, booking, reminding and nagging on your behalf.
• 04Scrapers and data pullsPrices, listings, stock, competitors: collected on a schedule and left somewhere you can actually read them.
• 05Small IoTA sensor, a button, a relay. The freezer warms up at three in the morning and your phone knows before you do.
• 06Repetitive manual workThe two hours a week you spend renaming, exporting and pasting between two windows. That is a script.

Something other people log into and depend on. It has to look finished, survive a busy Friday, and be runnable day to day by someone who is not a developer.

• 07Online storesProducts, payments, stock and shipping, with an admin panel you can genuinely run yourself.
• 08Booking and schedulingSlots, calendars, deposits and reminders. Fewer phone calls, and no more double bookings.
• 09Websites you can editFast, on brand, and wired to a CMS so you are never waiting on someone else to change a price.
• 10Dashboards and internal toolsThe numbers you keep asking for, on one screen, pulled from the systems that already hold them.
• 11IntegrationsTwo systems that refuse to speak to each other — the till and the accounting, say — made to.
• 12Mobile appsThe same product in a pocket: a web app that behaves like one, or the real thing in the stores.

The part most plans underestimate is the day after launch. Drawn before it is written, built as code, watched while it runs, and kept cheap enough to stay alive on purpose.

• 13SaaS platformsSign-ups, roles, tenants, trials and billing: a product you can sell seats of, not a site with a login.
• 14Cloud architecture on AWSThe whole environment described as code, so it can be rebuilt exactly instead of remembered approximately.
• 15Pipelines and releasesPush a change and watch it test itself and ship. Rollbacks that are a button rather than a phone call.
• 16Monitoring and on-callYou hear it from a graph, not from a customer, and the alert already says which part broke.
• 17Migrations and rescuesOff the server under someone’s desk, out of the platform that priced you out, into something you own.
• 18AI where it earns its placeAn assistant that answers from your own documents and refuses to guess. There is one further down this page.