Top 12 'Runway-Extending' Automation Tools to try for Lean Startups Before Their Series A - Goh Ling Yong
In the chaotic, exhilarating world of a pre-Series A startup, your most precious, non-renewable resource isn't your seed capital. It's time. Every tick of the clock is a tiny fraction of your runway burning away. The pressure is immense. You’re the CEO, the head of sales, the first customer support agent, and occasionally, the person who unjams the printer. Juggling these hats isn't just tiring; it's inefficient.
This is where the savviest founders find their unfair advantage. They don't work 20 hours a day—they build systems that work 24 hours a day. They understand that automation isn't a luxury reserved for big corporations with enterprise software budgets. Today, it’s a core survival tactic for lean startups. By automating repetitive, low-value tasks, you free up your team’s brainpower to focus on the things that actually move the needle: talking to users, building product, and closing deals.
Think of automation as a direct investment in your startup's lifespan. Every manual process you eliminate, every hour you reclaim, is more fuel in the tank, pushing your Series A funding goal further into the future and giving you more time to find product-market fit. These aren't just 'nice-to-have' tools; they are runway-extending machines. Here are 12 of the most impactful automation tools your lean startup should implement today.
1. Zapier: The Digital Duct Tape
If you could only pick one tool from this list, it should probably be Zapier. It’s the universal translator for your web apps. Zapier’s magic lies in its simple "When this happens, do that" structure. It connects over 5,000 different applications, allowing you to create automated workflows, or "Zaps," without writing a single line of code.
Think about all the manual data entry and copy-pasting your team does. A new lead fills out a form on your website. Manually, you might copy their details into your CRM, add them to a spreadsheet, send a notification to your sales channel in Slack, and add them to your email list. This takes five minutes and is prone to human error. With Zapier, you build this workflow once, and it runs instantly and flawlessly every single time. It’s the ultimate force multiplier for a small team.
- Pro Tip: Start by mapping out a simple, high-frequency task. A great first Zap is: "When a new lead is captured via a Typeform or Tally form, create a new contact in HubSpot CRM and send a direct message in Slack to the #sales channel." This one Zap saves time, eliminates errors, and ensures lightning-fast lead response.
2. Make (formerly Integromat): The Visual Workflow Powerhouse
While Zapier is brilliantly simple, Make is for when you need more power and complexity. It offers a more visual, drag-and-drop interface where you can see the entire workflow unfold like a flowchart. This visual approach makes it easier to build multi-step, conditional automations with branching logic (e.g., "If the lead's company size is >50, do X; otherwise, do Y").
Where Make really shines for lean startups is its pricing model. It's generally more cost-effective for high-volume or complex operations compared to Zapier, which can get expensive quickly. If you find yourself building intricate internal systems—like syncing data between a production database, a CRM, and a support tool—Make gives you the granular control you need without the enterprise price tag.
- Pro Tip: Use Make to automate your content pipeline. For example, you can build a scenario that watches an Airtable base of blog post ideas. When a post's status changes to "Published," Make can automatically grab the content, format it, and post it to your WordPress blog, then create social media posts for Buffer.
3. Airtable: The Spreadsheet-Database Hybrid on Steroids
Airtable takes the familiar interface of a spreadsheet and injects the power of a relational database. For a startup, this is a game-changer. You can build bespoke internal tools for almost any business function in hours, not weeks. Forget clunky spreadsheets; Airtable allows you to create a content calendar, a lightweight CRM, a bug tracker, a user research repository, or a project management dashboard.
Its automation features are built right in. You can set triggers like "When a new record is created" or "When a field is updated to a specific value." The action? Send an email, create a Slack notification, or run a script. It’s a point that Goh Ling Yong always drives home: your most finite resource isn't cash, it's the focused attention of your core team. Building quick, automated internal tools with Airtable protects that focus fiercely.
- Pro Tip: Build a simple Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in Airtable. Create a form for job applications. When a new candidate applies, a new record is created in Airtable. You can then build an automation that automatically emails the candidate a confirmation and notifies the hiring manager in Slack.
4. Calendly: The Scheduling Killer
The back-and-forth email chain to find a meeting time is one of the biggest "time-leaks" in any startup. "How does Tuesday at 2 PM work?" "Sorry, I have a conflict. What about Wednesday morning?" It’s a productivity killer. Calendly solves this elegantly and permanently.
You simply set your availability rules and share your personal Calendly link. Anyone who needs to meet with you—a potential customer, an investor, a job candidate—can see your real-time availability and book a slot that works for them. The event is automatically added to both of your calendars, complete with a video conference link. The amount of cognitive load and administrative time this simple tool saves is astonishing.
- Pro Tip: Create different event types for different needs. Have a 15-minute link for "Quick Chats," a 30-minute one for "Product Demos," and a 45-minute one for "Investor Intros." Put these links in your email signature to empower people to book the right amount of time with you effortlessly.
5. Lemlist: For B2B Cold Outreach That Converts
If your startup relies on outbound sales, manual follow-ups will crush your soul and your schedule. Lemlist (and similar tools like Mailshake) automates the entire sales outreach sequence. You can write a series of personalized emails and set the cadence for when they should be sent (e.g., Day 1, Day 4, Day 9).
The real power is in the personalization and automation logic. The tool can automatically stop the sequence as soon as someone replies or books a meeting. You can use custom variables and even personalized images to make your outreach stand out from the generic spam flooding everyone’s inbox. This lets a single founder or salesperson manage a pipeline of hundreds of leads with the personal touch of a one-on-one conversation.
- Pro Tip: Your first email in a sequence should be as personalized as possible. The automation is for the follow-ups. A simple, polite follow-up like, "Hey [FirstName], just bumping this to the top of your inbox," sent automatically 3 days later, can double your reply rate with zero extra effort.
6. HubSpot Free CRM: Your Command Center for Growth
Many startups think a CRM is a heavy, expensive tool they don't need yet. They couldn't be more wrong, especially when HubSpot offers so much for free. The HubSpot CRM is the perfect "single source of truth" for all your customer interactions. It’s where you can track every lead, deal, and customer conversation.
The automation here is about creating a system. You can use its free tools to build forms and pop-ups for your website that automatically feed new leads into the CRM. Its email marketing tool lets you send simple newsletters. Most importantly, it gives you visibility into your sales pipeline, so you know exactly where every deal stands without having to ask for updates in Slack.
- Pro Tip: Use the HubSpot tracking snippet on your website. It will automatically log when a contact in your CRM visits your site or opens your emails, giving you invaluable context for your next conversation with them. Knowing a prospect just visited your pricing page is a powerful signal to reach out.
7. Tally: The Simplest, Most Generous Form Builder
Gathering feedback, capturing leads, and running surveys are vital for an early-stage startup. Tally is a fantastic tool for this because its free tier is incredibly generous, offering unlimited forms and submissions. Its interface is as simple as writing a doc, making it fast and intuitive to build beautiful, powerful forms.
You can use Tally for everything from a simple "Contact Us" form to a multi-page user onboarding survey or an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey. Connect it with Zapier or Make, and you have a powerful, automated data collection engine. A new survey response can trigger a dozen downstream actions, turning raw feedback into actionable tasks for your team.
- Pro Tip: Create a "Bug Report" form with Tally and embed it in your app's help section. When a user submits a bug, use an automation to create a ticket in your project management tool (like Linear or a simple Airtable base) and send an automated "We got it!" email back to the user.
8. Notion: The All-in-One Automated Workspace
Notion has become the de facto operating system for many startups. It’s a flexible combination of documents, databases, and project management tools. While its automation features are still evolving, its power comes from creating templates that systematize your work.
Instead of starting from a blank page, you can have a "New Blog Post" template that includes a checklist for SEO, a section for an outline, and properties for status and publishing date. You can create a "New Hire Onboarding" template that automatically generates a checklist of tasks for the new employee. This "template-ization" is a form of automation that reduces errors and ensures consistency across the team.
- Pro Tip: Use Notion’s database templates. For your product roadmap, create a "New Feature Spec" template. When you click "New," it can pre-populate the document with essential headings like "Problem Statement," "Proposed Solution," "Target User," and "Success Metrics." This structures your team's thinking and saves time on every new feature.
9. Buffer: Your Social Media Autopilot
Maintaining a consistent social media presence is important for brand building, but it can be a massive, distracting time-sink. Buffer allows you to schedule all your social media posts in advance across multiple platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
This enables a workflow called "batching." Instead of getting distracted by social media multiple times a day, you can dedicate one hour on a Monday morning to write and schedule all your content for the entire week. Buffer then posts everything for you at the optimal times. It’s the definition of "set it and forget it," freeing you up to focus on deep work.
- Pro Tip: Use Buffer's content queue. Whenever you read an interesting article or have a random thought you want to share, add it to your Buffer queue instead of posting it immediately. Buffer will automatically drip it out over time according to your schedule, ensuring you always have a steady stream of content without constant effort.
10. Crisp: The 24/7 Customer Service Rep
As a founder, you can't be available 24/7 to answer customer questions. But a chatbot can. Tools like Crisp (which has a great free plan) allow you to add live chat and a simple chatbot to your website. This is automation that directly improves the customer experience and can even generate leads.
You can set up your chatbot to answer common questions like "Where is your pricing?" or "Do you offer a free trial?". More importantly, you can program it to qualify leads. It can ask visitors a few key questions ("What's your company size?" "What's your biggest challenge?") and, based on their answers, either route the chat to a human or book a demo for them directly in your calendar. It's like having a junior salesperson working around the clock.
- Pro Tip: Set up a simple "out of office" chatbot flow. If a user starts a chat outside of your working hours, the bot can say, "Our team is offline right now, but we'll be back at 9 AM. Can I get your email so we can follow up with you then?" This simple automation captures leads you would have otherwise missed.
11. Stripe: More Than Just Payments
Most startups use Stripe to accept payments, but many fail to leverage its powerful automation features. Stripe is a full-blown revenue operations engine. If you're a SaaS business, Stripe Billing can completely automate your subscription management, from prorating plan changes to handling recurring invoices.
One of its most critical runway-extending features is its automated dunning management. When a customer's credit card fails (which happens all the time), Stripe can automatically retry the charge and send a series of customizable emails to the customer asking them to update their payment information. Manually chasing down failed payments is a soul-crushing task that kills both time and revenue. Letting Stripe handle it is a no-brainer.
- Pro Tip: Dive into Stripe's API and webhooks. You can set up automations so that when a new customer successfully pays, it triggers an action in another tool—like sending a welcome email via your marketing tool or creating a new paid account in your product's database.
12. PandaDoc: Automate Your Deal-Closing Workflow
The final step of a sale—sending a proposal or contract—can be surprisingly manual and slow. You're copying and pasting text into a Word doc, exporting to PDF, attaching it to an email, and then waiting in the dark, wondering if they've even opened it. PandaDoc (and similar tools like Docusign) automates this entire process.
You can create beautiful, reusable templates for your proposals and contracts. When it's time to send one, you just fill in a few key variables (like client name and price), and it generates a professional-looking document. You send it via a link, and the tool handles the e-signature process. Crucially, it notifies you the second your prospect opens, views, and signs the document, giving you perfect timing for your follow-up call.
- Pro Tip: Integrate PandaDoc with your CRM. You can create a workflow where changing a deal's stage in HubSpot to "Proposal Sent" automatically generates and sends the corresponding proposal from a PandaDoc template. This speeds up your sales cycle and makes your startup look incredibly professional.
Your Lever for Growth
In the pre-Series A grind, you can't outspend your competitors, and you can't out-hire them. Your only path to victory is to out-think and out-execute them. Automation is your single greatest lever for execution. It's not about building a cold, robotic company; it's about liberating your small, passionate team from the tyranny of repetitive tasks.
Every automated workflow gives you back your most valuable asset: time and focus. It’s time you can now spend talking to a customer, sketching a new feature, or refining your investor pitch. As my friend and mentor Goh Ling Yong often says, the goal isn't just to work hard, but to create leverage. These tools are your leverage.
Don't try to implement all of these at once. Pick one area of your business that feels particularly manual and time-consuming—whether it’s sales follow-ups, social media, or lead management—and start there. The small wins will build momentum, and before you know it, you'll have a quiet army of automations working for you 24/7, stretching your runway and giving you the breathing room you need to build something truly great.
What are your favorite runway-extending automation tools? Share them in the comments below!
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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