I’m not a developer, but working at a startup taught me that sometimes, you don’t need to know everything. You just need to know what problem you’re trying to solve.
And one of those problems was sending emails. A lot of emails.
More than 600 cold outreach emails.
Sending them manually meant opening an email, copying the recipient’s information, personalizing the message, sending it, and then doing the exact same thing hundreds of times.
We could have also paid for a mailing platform. But this wasn’t something we needed to do regularly, so paying for another subscription for something we would only use occasionally didn’t make much sense.
There had to be another way.
So I found one.
The solution ended up being surprisingly simple: Google Sheets + Google Apps Script.
The spreadsheet held the information for each recipient, while Apps Script handled the repetitive work. It could pull the information from each row, personalize the email, send it through Gmail, and record its status so I could see which emails had already been sent.
Instead of manually creating 600+ individual emails, I could prepare the data once and let the script handle the repetitive part in batches.
And we could do it using tools we already had.
Courtesy of YouTube University.
And no, I didn’t magically become a developer while doing it. 😂
This was way before AI could help me write or debug code. I built it through what I like to call YouTube University, watching tutorials, Googling things I didn’t understand, testing things, breaking things, and figuring out why they weren’t working.
I didn’t need to understand everything about Apps Script.
I just needed to understand enough to solve the problem in front of me.
Eventually, it worked.
And years later, I recreated a simplified version using dummy data to demonstrate how the workflow worked without exposing any company information.
See it in action.
I recreated a simplified version of the workflow using dummy data, so I could demonstrate how it works without exposing any company information.
The demo is intentionally simple. The point isn’t the email itself, it’s what happens behind it.
One spreadsheet. Multiple recipients. Personalized emails sent through Gmail, with the spreadsheet automatically tracking what was sent.
The original workflow was built for 600+ outreach emails. This recreated version shows the same idea on a smaller scale.
The 80/20 rule.
Years later, I learned about the 80/20 rule, the idea that a relatively small portion of our effort can sometimes create a large portion of the result.
And it reminded me of things like this.
I could spend my time repeating the same steps hundreds of times, or spend some of that time figuring out how to make the process handle the repetitive work for me.
That doesn’t mean everything needs to be automated. It also doesn’t mean every problem needs another subscription.
Sometimes doing something manually is faster. Sometimes paying for a specialized tool makes sense. And sometimes, you already have everything you need to create a simple solution yourself.
The important part is knowing the difference.
Work smarter, not harder.
Looking back, Apps Script itself isn’t really the lesson.
The bigger lesson was learning to recognize when a manual process no longer makes sense and being curious enough to look for another way.
Sometimes the solution is automation. Sometimes it’s a better process. Sometimes it’s just a spreadsheet.
The tool doesn’t really matter. What matters is solving the problem.
Now, whenever I find myself doing the same thing over and over again, I stop and wonder if there’s a better way. Sometimes there is. Sometimes there isn’t.
But it’s always worth asking.