7-Day Challenge - Day 4: Deploying an Automation (a little long post)

Day 4 is done, and I built something I'm actually proud of!

But honestly, this challenge nearly broke me before I truly got started. This was because I spent the last four days trying to get everything set up on an external drive and kept hitting walls. None of the required dependencies would fire no matter what I tried.

Turns out the whole thing needed to live on my local drive. Once that clicked, everything opened up. From there, I worked with Claude Code to build out what I'm calling the "First Responder", an AI-powered lead response system built specifically for real estate agents.

Aside from Trigger Dev, VS Code and Claude Code, the tech stack that I used to complete this project was:

Twilio (SMS text)
Gmail / Nodemailer (email)
Google Sheets (lead logging)

Here's what it does:

The moment a lead comes in, within 60 seconds, it sends a personalized AI-written email and text (Twilio) to the lead, notifies the agent, logs everything to a Google Sheet, and kicks off a follow-up sequence. I use the Twilio 7-day free trial, so I couldn't confirm the text messages being sent to my phone; however I will upgrade after the trial ends and confirm that the texts are coming through.

I built this in roughly two hours. Compare that to the previous days I lost just on setting up the project up. But here's what really got me. I wasn't just clicking through steps and saying I completed the challenge. I was watching commits get written, pushed to GitHub, GitHub Actions trigger a Trigger.dev deploy, runs succeed and fail in real time.

I actually understand how this works now and it's a great feeling!😁

The dental leads finder and the Nate B. Jones video monitor that Nate demonstrated were great exercises, but they made me want to go further and build something that could actually be a working and profitable product.

"First Responder" is it.

Honest assessment: After verified testing and getting consistent results, I believe that this will be an MVP I could walk into a real estate office with and feel confident in landing an actual client.

I I adjusted the 60-day follow-up sequence to three weeks, so I have three weeks of follow-up testing ahead to validate end-to- end before I reach the definition of done and add it to my portfolio.

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