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Oct 15 • General Discussion 💬
From Fax Machine Chaos to $3,800/Month Recurring Revenue
40-year-old construction company client. Their document sources made me cry.
THE FRANKENSTEIN INPUTS
Fax machine from 1997 still receives quotes
Email attachments in 12 different formats
Photos from job sites with handwritten estimates on napkins
Scanned contracts from the 90s
Modern PDFs from new suppliers
Excel sheets with bizarre macros
Built the ugliest n8n workflow ever. 23 nodes of pure chaos.
THE MONSTROSITY ARCHITECTURE
5 input nodes: Email, fax server, Dropbox, API webhook, manual upload
7 document detection types: Fax quality, photo, scan, PDF, Excel, Word, other
12 different processing paths based on document characteristics
Fax documents get noise reduction plus OCR enhancement
Photos get perspective correction plus handwriting OCR
Scans get deskew plus quality improvement
PDFs get standard extraction
Tables get structure preservation
Legacy formats get conversion first
Validation layer with confidence scoring, human review queue, retry logic
Output integration to their ancient ERP system using SOAP API from 2003
Email notification system with color-coded status reports
IT'S HIDEOUS BUT PROFITABLE
Monthly processing volume:
847 fax documents (yes really)
1,230 email attachments
456 job site photos
2,100+ total documents
Results after 8 months:
97.3% processing success rate
Saved 3 full-time data entry positions
Client fee: $3,800/month
API costs: $127/month
Profit: $3,673/month
THE UGLY TRUTH
My prettiest 6-node workflows: Average $900/month
My ugliest 23+ node monsters: Average $3,200/month
Clean workflows impress developers. Working workflows impress clients.
Current ugly workflow revenue: $14,800/month across 4 clients
Pretty workflows: $4,200/month across 7 clients
The construction client just referred me to 3 competitors. All have similar document chaos.
What's your ugliest automation that somehow prints money?
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From Fax Machine Chaos to $3,800/Month Recurring Revenue
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