Routines and Autopilot

What it is

Most businesses have chores that come back every week. Someone reads the inbox, chases unpaid invoices, writes the Monday report. Nobody is bad at them, and they still get skipped on the busy weeks.

You write the chore once, the way you would tell a new colleague, and pick when it runs. A job is called a mission in ShipItFam, and a routine is a mission that the crew starts by itself. Maria, who runs a bakery, writes one that reads yesterday's Stripe payments and sends her a short note in Slack. After that it happens every morning.

Routines use the apps you already connect, such as Gmail, Slack, Stripe, HubSpot, Notion and Google Sheets. A connection is read-only until you allow writing, so a routine that only needs to read can only read.

What happens on a run

Nobody watches a routine run, so it never stops to ask you a question. If it would need you, the run fails and says what it needed. A run is skipped when the previous one is still going.

Each run leaves a report you can read in the app: what it looked at, what it did, and where it stopped if it did. Open the report on Tuesday morning and you know what happened on Monday night.

Several of the starter projects are routines waiting to happen: Weekly business report, Daily team digest, Support inbox triage, Meeting notes to action items, Competitor watch, Recurring research brief, Content calendar and drafts, Spreadsheet cleanup and Invoice reconciliation. Start from one and change the wording to fit your business.

Routines people set up

These are written the way you would type them. Copy one and change the names.

Sales

• Find the deals in HubSpot nobody has touched in 10 days and post them in Slack, one nudge per owner.
• Read today's Google Calendar, look up each guest in Salesforce, and leave a one-line brief per meeting in Gmail.

Support

• Sort the overnight tickets in Zendesk by urgency, draft replies for the easy ones, and post the scary ones in Slack.
• Find Zendesk tickets that have waited three days for a reply and ping their owners.

Marketing

• Pull last week's traffic from Google Analytics and signups from HubSpot into one plain-English report in Slack.
• Check three competitor sites for changes and write a short what's-new brief.

Finance

• Pull the unpaid invoices from QuickBooks, write a polite nudge for each customer, and leave the drafts in Gmail.
• Match the week's Stripe payouts to your Xero invoices and post whatever doesn't add up in Slack.

Founders

• Read yesterday's money in Stripe and new leads in HubSpot, and send yourself one short note in Slack.

Product and dev

• Read the overnight issues on GitHub, label the bugs, and file them in Linear.
• Turn the week's merged GitHub pull requests into plain-English release notes.

Autopilot

A routine does one chore on a schedule. Autopilot is for the queue of missions you have lined up and want done while you are away.

You give the crew two things. The first is the hours it is allowed to work: a start, an end, the days and a time zone. The second is a spending cap in dollars, per hour, per day, per week or in total. Inside those limits the crew works through your queue alone, one mission after another.

Outside the hours, or over the cap, it takes no new step. A step already running finishes. Autopilot needs the always-on server, which is why it comes with Fleet.

Board sync

If your to-do list lives on a Trello board, connect the board. Each card becomes a mission, the crew writes the status back onto the card, and a card you move to done cancels its open mission.

Jira and Monday are on the roadmap.

On each plan

Every run uses your own Claude subscription, and ShipItFam adds no markup on it.

Related

• Connected apps The apps a routine reads from and writes to
• The Helm Where a failed run asks for you
• The crew Who does the work on each run
• Pricing What each plan costs