The Smallest Workflow That Ships

The Perfectionism Trap

Every entrepreneur has a fantasy version of automation. It's the elaborate system that handles everything: capturing leads, nurturing prospects, processing orders, managing inventory, sending reports, analyzing trends, and making coffee.

Here's the problem: that system never gets built.

The gap between "basic automation" and "comprehensive system" feels so large that most people never start. They spend weeks planning the perfect workflow. They research every edge case. They design elaborate decision trees. And then... nothing ships.

Meanwhile, their competitors are automating one small thing at a time, learning as they go, and compounding those improvements over months.

Minimum Viable Workflow

Ask yourself: what's the one task you do repeatedly that takes 15 minutes each time? Not the most important task. Not the most complex. Just something repetitive that you do often.

Maybe it's:

• Summarizing customer feedback from your inbox
• Researching a competitor's recent blog posts
• Formatting data from one tool to use in another
• Generating a weekly status update from your project tracker

None of these are glamorous. None will transform your business overnight. But each one, automated, gives you back 15 minutes. Do that daily, and you've reclaimed over an hour per week. Do it for five tasks, and you've freed up an entire workday each month.

That's the minimum viable workflow: not a system that does everything, but a simple automation that does one thing well.

The Compound Effect

Here's what people miss about starting small: each workflow you build teaches you something that makes the next one easier.

Your first workflow will be awkward. You'll make mistakes. You'll realize halfway through that you should have structured it differently. That's fine — that's learning.

Your second workflow will be faster. You'll know what works and what doesn't. You'll have intuition about how to break down a task into steps.

By your fifth workflow, you'll start seeing patterns. You'll recognize when a new task can reuse pieces from previous workflows. You'll know immediately how to structure something that would have taken you hours to figure out before.

This is the compound effect of shipping small. Each workflow isn't just about saving time on one task — it's an investment in your ability to automate everything else.

Permission to Ship Imperfect

Let's be direct: your first workflow will be imperfect. It might miss edge cases. It might need manual cleanup occasionally. It might not handle every possible input gracefully.

That's okay. In fact, it's better than okay — it's correct.

Shipping an imperfect automation that works 80% of the time is infinitely better than designing a perfect automation that exists only in your planning documents. The 80% solution is saving you time right now. The perfect solution is saving you nothing.

Here's a secret from software engineering: most production systems started imperfect and improved over time. The best automation isn't the one that launched perfectly — it's the one that launched at all.

Starting Points, Not Endpoints

When you use Tentackl's examples gallery or describe a workflow in natural language, think of what you create as a starting point, not an endpoint.

The goal isn't to get it right the first time. The goal is to get something running that you can observe, learn from, and improve.

• Week 1: Build a basic workflow. Watch it run. Note what it gets wrong.
• Week 2: Adjust based on what you learned. Add handling for the most common failure.
• Week 3: Extend it slightly. Maybe add one more step or handle one more input type.
• Week 4: Consider: is this workflow good enough now? Or do you want to start a new one?

By the end of the month, you'll have a workflow that actually fits your needs — not because you designed it perfectly upfront, but because you shaped it through use.

So here's your permission: ship the smallest workflow that does something useful. Ship it today. Watch it work. Learn. Repeat.

The only workflow that fails is the one that never runs.