The First Ten Workflows a Startup Should Set Up

At a startup, the founders are the sales team, the support desk, the finance department and the recruiter, often in the same afternoon. Each of those jobs comes with chores that happen every day, follow the same steps, and get dropped the week something urgent comes up, which at a startup is most weeks.

These are the ten we'd set up first. Each is a ready-made template in Lodol's library: add it to your workspace, connect the apps it uses, and it runs. They're built on the tools a young company usually has already, like Gmail, Slack, Google Sheets and Stripe, and each one is honest about what it can't know. Where AI writes something a customer will read, a person approves it first.

Sales

1. Hear about the big lead within minutes

Get a Slack alert when a high-value lead emails you works out which company each new email comes from, researches it, and scores it from 1 to 10 against what you sell. Anything at or above your bar becomes a Slack direct message with the company, the score, the reason and a link to the email. It saves checking your inbox between meetings. Newsletters, receipts and vendor pitches come back with no company, so no research is spent on them, and an AI answer that can't be read scores zero, so a glitch never sets off a false alarm.

2. Walk into every call briefed

At 7:30 every morning, Brief yourself on the people you are meeting reads the day's bookings from Cal.com, searches the web for each outside guest, and emails you one briefing. It saves the five minutes of searching before each call booked through Cal.com, whether the guest is a customer or an investor. Every note is followed by the search results it came from, with links, and someone the search finds nothing about is reported as having no public information rather than described from guesswork.

Customers and product

3. Answer support mail in your own voice

Every hour, Review and send replies to support enquiries writes a reply to each new support email from a description of your business that you write once, and asks you to approve it, shown next to what the customer wrote. It saves writing every first reply from scratch. Nothing reaches a customer that a person didn't approve: a rejected or unanswered reply is saved as a Gmail draft, and a question your description doesn't cover gets a short note that a colleague will follow up, not an invented answer.

4. Keep every feature request in one place

Turn emailed feature requests into Notion tasks reads each new email for things your product doesn't do yet and files them as a new page in your Notion database, with who asked, what problem it would solve and the email's own text. It saves the requests that otherwise live in one person's inbox. Bug reports, billing questions and newsletters are skipped, with the reason in the run log.

Money

5. Log every payment, and say thanks

Log Stripe payments and say thanks adds each new Stripe payment to your revenue sheet, as a number you can total rather than Stripe's cents, and emails the customer a short thank-you from Gmail. It saves keeping the revenue sheet by hand. A payment that hasn't gone through yet is neither logged nor thanked, and one with no customer email is still logged, with the run saying no thank-you went out.

6. Know your cash and runway every Monday

Start every week knowing your cash and runway reads your Mercury accounts and sends one email that leads with cash, monthly burn and months of runway, then last week's money in and out and where it went. It saves the spreadsheet you'd otherwise rebuild only when someone asks. If Mercury can't be read, no email is sent, so a partial figure never reaches you, and with less than a full month of history it says so rather than guessing.

7. Never miss a filing or renewal

Every morning, Never miss a filing or renewal deadline checks each license, insurance policy and tax filing in your tracker sheet, emails you as each one comes due, and books a calendar event on the due date. It saves the fine for a deadline nobody owned. It reminds you three times at most, not every morning, and a due date it can't read is marked for you to check rather than skipped.

Hiring

8. Every application on one sheet

Add every emailed job application to your candidate sheet reads each application and its attached CV, adds the candidate's details as a row in Google Sheets, and posts a short card in Slack. It saves copying CVs into a tracker. A detail neither the email nor the CV gives is left empty, never guessed, and the AI is told not to record age, gender, ethnicity or anything unrelated to the work. Who to interview is still your call.

9. Welcome each new hire

Every Monday, Welcome next week's new starters emails anyone starting in the next seven days and tells your team in Slack who's joining, in what role and when. It saves a first day nobody was expecting. The welcome is written from your roster, not by AI, and nobody is emailed or announced twice.

Investors

10. Have the numbers ready for the update

Every Monday, Weekly metrics briefing by email reads the measures in your metrics sheet and emails you a short note on what moved and by how much, with the numbers underneath. With the runway email, that's most of the figures a monthly investor update asks for. It saves pulling them together the night before. The note is told not to explain why anything moved, because a spreadsheet can't say, and neither workflow writes to your investors. The update is still yours to write.

What it costs

Lodol charges per run, however many steps a run takes. The Free plan includes 100 runs a month, which covers the five that run once a day or once a week, briefings, runway, deadlines, new starters and metrics, at about 75 runs. For all ten, for a founder whose inbox gets about 30 emails a day:

That fits Builder's smallest tier, 2,500 runs for $18 a month ($15 if you pay annually). Every plan has unlimited seats, so your first hires and your accountant can join at no extra cost. The research and writing steps run on your own accounts with the services they use, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity and Serper, which bill you at their own rates.

When a template doesn't quite fit, change it. Ask Claude or ChatGPT connected to Lodol for the change in plain words, or mention @Lodol in Slack. Our guides to small sales teams and finance chores go further on both.

Start with the lead you'd hate to miss.
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