The Automation Loop: From SEO to Startup

I started my career in the world of SEO linkbuilding. On the surface, it was a repetitive cycle of sending and receiving thousands of emails. It was the kind of work that can easily drain you, but I saw it as a challenge: how much of this can I make a machine do for me?

That curiosity is exactly how my Lead Generation project was born. At the time, my workload was split 50/50: half the day was spent hunting for specific professional leads on LinkedIn, and the other half was spent digging for general domain email addresses from lists of websites.

Because LinkedIn scraping is, to put it lightly, an ethical grey area, I kept that part of the process manual. But the other 50%? I saw an opportunity. Before the automation, I was manually opening websites, scrolling to the footer, copying addresses, and pasting them into a Google Sheet. It was a mountain of busywork. To fix it, I built a local crawler that could visit over 100 websites in less than five minutes, extracting exactly what I needed.

Of course, I could have just used n8n and Apify and finished the project in a single afternoon for a few pennies. But the developer ego is a funny thing. Why would I pay someone else to use their software and close the deal in a day, when I could spend three weeks building it myself from scratch? That obsession with building my own logic is how I managed to automate half my job, giving me the 'space and time' I needed to focus on the high-value, personal outreach that actually moved the needle.

The Move to 'Cool Tech'

Then came the offer from a startup. It was a 'real' technical position—the kind I thought I wanted. In the excitement of working with a modern stack and solving complex problems, I completely forgot about my old scripts. I stopped looking for ways to 'cheat' the clock because I was finally doing the "technical work" I thought mattered.

But recently, as the workload in this new position got more stressful than usual, I found myself in a strange headspace. I caught myself wishing for my old, routine work. I missed the days where I could automate whatever I wanted and it would just work. There was a safety in that predictability.

The Infinite Loop

The irony isn't lost on me. When I was back in SEO, I felt like every minute I spent not doing "hard tech" was a waste of time. I was desperate to escape the routine. Now that I’m in the thick of the technical stress, I’m romanticizing the routine I fought so hard to leave.

It makes me wonder: Did I just get myself into an infinite loop? We spend our time automating the "boring" stuff so we can do the "important" stuff, only to realize that the boring stuff was where we had the most control. Maybe the goal isn't to escape the loop, but to figure out which loop is actually worth running.