Headcount Zero

Solo automation consultants waste hours writing custom proposals for projects that follow the same patterns. Jordan breaks down the 3-2-1 portfolio framework: three service tiers (Starter, Pro, Enterprise), two standardized add-ons, and one hard scope gate that lets you price any project in sixty seconds. Using real boundary language from nine automation shops, you'll learn to constrain workflows,...

Jordan breaks down how to package your security posture, questionnaire automation, and SSO capabilities into a named, priceable Enterprise Solo Pack that gets procurement teams to yes faster than larger agencies. Learn to build a Trust Center backed by CAIQ-Lite answers, price SSO as a scoped add-on, structure SLA tiers, and run the 10-minute demo that closes enterprise deals without anyone asking...

Solo operators expose dozens of public endpoints—webhooks, client portals, form handlers—but unlike companies with security teams, nobody's checking if they're properly configured. This episode walks through setting up OWASP ZAP's passive baseline scan in Docker, scheduled weekly with cron, to catch missing security headers, CORS misconfigurations, and cookie issues before they cost you a client o...

Every proposal Jordan sends includes an SLA section promising 99.9% uptime and 20-minute update cadences. But for eight months, he had no way to prove it. This episode builds the complete SLA monitoring automation: your monitor fires, a draft status update appears for approval, Slack enforces update cadence, and credit calculations run automatically when incidents close. Learn to connect Statuspag...

If you have SLA commitments in your contracts and you're still calculating credits manually — or worse, waiting for a client to ask before you even check — you are one bad month away from a trust conversation you can't win. This episode shows you how to automate the entire trust paperwork stack: credit math, ledger tracking, status page updates, and incident communications. Jordan walks through bu...

Jordan walks through the exact migration playbook he used to move a revenue-critical 12-step Zapier workflow to Make without losing a single lead. Learn the 14-day shadow-run methodology with correlation IDs and parity checks, the three Gate Zero checks that determine migration feasibility, and the 15-minute cutover process with a tested 60-second rollback. Includes current 2026 cost models compar...

Jordan challenges the default assumption that agents are the sophisticated choice for automation workflows. Using side-by-side testing data, he demonstrates that deterministic flows outperform agents on reliability and cost for 80% of production work. For the 20% where agents are justified, he shows exactly how to box them with tool allowlists, hard timeouts, per-run budgets, checkpoints, and appr...

After losing a $14K/month deal because he couldn't answer a 48-page security questionnaire, Jordan built a system that turns vendor security reviews from deal-killers into 40-minute tasks. In this episode, he walks through building a public Trust Center in Notion, creating a reusable answer library mapped to CAIQ-Lite and SIG Lite standards, and automating questionnaire responses with a Make flow...

Most private RAG deployments fail not because of the model, but because of three fixable infrastructure problems: stale embeddings from unchanged source documents, unbounded corpora that contaminate results with irrelevant content, and no retrieval guardrails to catch bad matches before they reach the LLM. This episode walks through building a production Supabase pgvector RAG system that solves al...

When a two-word prompt change can approve fourteen spam submissions in one weekend, you need more than eyeballing outputs. This episode builds a regression gate—a frozen test set, three types of automated checkers, and a pass-fail threshold that blocks deploys when something breaks. The whole system runs inside Promptfoo, triggered from Make or n8n, and takes about forty-five minutes to set up fro...

Most solo operators assume they need to self-host LLMs when enterprise prospects mention "on-prem" requirements. But you can satisfy 90% of enterprise security questionnaires without touching a single GPU driver. Jordan walks through the four controls that replace self-hosting: BYO API keys per tenant, region-pinned endpoints, structured logging with correlation IDs, and a visible kill switch in t...

When clients text you at midnight asking to turn off automations, you've hit the client proof problem. This episode walks through building a minimal control surface—not a full portal—that gives clients on/off toggles, SLA status chips, and a panic switch using Airtable + Softr + Make. Total build time under a day, total cost under $140/month. You'll get the exact schema, webhook wiring, and role-b...

Solo automation consultants running Make, Zapier, or n8n in production face a hidden risk: every platform has version history, but each has gaps that will cost you time, money, or client relationships during an actual incident. This episode delivers semantic versioning for no-code workflows, Git-backed exports that work on free tiers, and practiced 60-second rollback drills for each platform. Jord...

Learn to build a complete data lineage automation system using correlation IDs, append-only logs, and exportable evidence. Jordan covers three implementation stacks - Airtable with permissions and interfaces, Notion with integration-only writes, and Postgres/Supabase with hash-chained tamper evidence. Plus a Slack slash command that answers "what happened on this run" with timestamps and status co...

Solo operators running Make or n8n workflows that touch client data face a hidden risk: PII and secrets leaking through LLM calls, API requests, and workflow logs. While vendors offer inconsistent protection—Vertex AI has non-configurable filters, Bedrock Guardrails cost per request, and Anthropic relies on prompt patterns—you need a solution that works everywhere and proves it's working. This epi...

Turn your compliance policy from a PDF promise into executable rules that gate every API and LLM call in your Make and n8n workflows. This episode shows you how to encode consent flags, data residency requirements, and tool allowlists as JSON, then evaluate them at runtime using JSONLogic or json-rules-engine. Jordan walks through the complete implementation—from policy file structure to Code step...

When enterprise buyers require SSO for your portal builds, you can ship SAML and OIDC authentication in under a week using a hosted identity provider. Jordan walks through the exact setup for Softr portals using Auth0 or Clerk as the authentication layer, including the critical ACS URL configuration that trips up most first attempts, a complete test plan for both SP-initiated and IdP-initiated flo...

Solo automation consultants face a growing secrets management problem: API keys scattered across Make connections, n8n credential stores, and personal vaults with no audit trail or rotation strategy. Jordan breaks down the 1Password vs Doppler decision for teams of one, showing how to implement per-client scoping, automated rotation reminders, and centralized access logging. Learn the two-tier rot...

Solo automation consultants pursuing enterprise clients face a hidden deal-killer: vendor security questionnaires. When procurement sends you 261 questions about your encryption policy, subprocessor list, and AI data handling, you need artifacts, not explanations. This episode builds the complete trust surface that prevents deals from dying in procurement — a one-page Notion Trust Center, a living...

Jordan shares the exact guardrail system he built after a $230 Zapier overage nearly cost him $700 in margin. You'll get a unified cost ledger that tracks LLM tokens, Zapier tasks, and Make credits per client, with Slack alerts at 60/80/100% of budget. Plus auto-throttle rules using Delay After Queue, n8n concurrency caps, and Make's built-in backoff—and kill switches on all three platforms that s...

Turn messy client paragraphs into validated, build-ready specs using LLM JSON schema workflows. Jordan walks through the complete system: generate structured specs with OpenAI/Claude/Gemini Structured Outputs, enforce them with JSON Schema validation before any build begins, and auto-create Notion checklists from validated specs. Covers implementation paths for Make (external validator via HTTP) a...

Build a production-grade AI email triage system that safely automates 80-90% of your inbox while protecting against costly misroutes. Jordan walks through the Extract → Classify → Route pattern with confidence thresholds, deterministic overrides for high-risk emails, and provider-specific rate limiting across Make, Zapier, and n8n. Learn to respect Gmail's 15,000 quota units per minute and Exchang...

How many of your automations are one rate-limit change away from breaking? Jordan breaks down the decision framework for choosing between Airtable, Notion, and Postgres (Supabase) based on workload shape—not hype. Learn the exact throughput ceilings, concurrency limits, and cost breakpoints that determine which tool is right for your automation stack. Includes real client examples and a calculator...

Build a universal automation monitoring system that catches failures before your clients do. Jordan walks through creating a Notion run log database that every workflow in your stack writes to, plus a Slack alerting layer that respects rate limits and only pings you on actual failures, duration spikes, and consecutive error patterns. The complete build takes 90 minutes, works across Make, Zapier,...

If you're running ten or more Zaps, scenarios, or n8n workflows across client accounts without production-safe controls, you're one API hiccup away from a weekend you can't get back. Jordan walks through the four essential controls every automation consultant needs: idempotency keys to prevent duplicate runs, explicit retry logic that works when platforms fail you, a dead letter queue for clean er...