I automated my own studio
before selling it to anyone.
Motion designer in Paris, working alone. In eight weeks I built the pipeline that makes my films and the one that finds my clients. Here are the numbers, where they come from, and the three things that did not work.
What was built
A three step video pipeline
Cleaned reference image, generation, resolution upscale. One frozen production document: the only thing to rewrite per product is how the object reveals itself on screen.
| Project | Files | Max resolution | Span | Versions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wool & Oak | 17 | 3840×2160 | 42 min 51 s | 5 |
| Anima Mundi Herbals | 8 | 1280×720 | 56 min 14 s | 1 |
Durations and resolutions verified with ffprobe. The span is disk write time: it includes machine waiting and excludes the client brief, writing the shot list and the After Effects finishing pass. The five Wool & Oak versions are not decorative: the cut between v1 and v2 removes exactly one 6.08 s shot.
A sending engine that runs without me
Sourcing, address verification, personalisation, throttled sending, logging. 2,125 emails, 140 runs, 57.4 seconds of pause between two sends. That pause is a deliberate throttle, not slowness. For the 23 minutes a run lasts, I am not at the screen.
A deliverability governor that decides against me
On 26 June 2026 my DMARC authentication rate dropped to 78.1%. The program cut my daily sending cap in half, from 50 to 25, without asking me anything. It had even identified the cause as harmless. It kept the restriction anyway, because the threshold had been crossed.
It is the piece I am proudest of: a machine that protects the asset against the impatience of the person who wrote it.
What it is worth
At the measured monthly volumes, with manual durations cut by half to one ninth against public references, at €60/hour fully loaded, which is the national trade average divided by the French seven hour legal day:
| Task | Volume / month | Hours / month |
|---|---|---|
| Sourcing and verification | 1,432 prospects | 71.6 |
| Personalised sending | 1,201 emails | 39.6 |
| Video production | 1.1 film | 11.0 |
| Campaign reporting | 0.6 report | 1.1 |
| Launching the runs | 44 batches | −3.7 |
| Total | 119.6 |
What this number is not
These are not hours I got back. I never sent 1,200 personalised emails by hand in a month, and nobody has. This is the human cost it would take to produce the same output without a machine.
Automation did not free up time. It made a volume reachable that was not. Any page promising you "hours saved" without drawing that line is selling you a subtraction it never performed.
What did not work
24 attempts, 24 failures, 0 posts published
My Instagram publisher was meant to post a queue of ten items. Single session on 15 June: 24 minutes, 24 attempts, no success. Session cookie authentication against a platform that revokes it. I never restarted it.
The lesson holds for any agency: you do not automate against a platform that does not want to be. It was the official API, or nothing.
Volume does not produce conversion
2,125 emails sent. 2.2% reply rate on the ecommerce campaign, and 0.3% on a 298 email niche targeted sample. On the same engine, the same deliverability and the same sender, another campaign gets 11.3%.
The difference is not technical: recipients there are named, not generic. Automation made my inefficiency fast and repeatable before it made it profitable.
Three things I will not pretend to know
The hours I actually recovered: no timestamp of human activity exists anywhere, so it is unknown. The time spent building the tools: not measured, so the figure above is an annual flow, not a net return. And a 452 email gap between my tracking files and my logs, still unexplained. I used the lower figure everywhere.
What I do at your place
€2,000 on site audit, 3 days
- I map your repetitive tasks, desk by desk.
- I price them in euros, with the formula and the sources, as above.
- I leave having shipped one automation that runs, not a report.
- If I do not find 20 recoverable hours a month, you pay nothing.
Not to be confused with my €600 remote engagement: that one is a technical prototype on a task you have already identified. Here the work starts earlier: finding which task it should be.
One clarification on sending, if that is the subject
My 2,125 emails come from a domain created for the occasion, ramped from 10 to 60 sends a day over eight weeks. That is a floor, not a ceiling. What sets capacity is a domain's reputation history, not its age: a fifteen year old company that never sent at volume also goes through a ramp, shorter but real. And in every case, we send from your domain, under your identity. Never from mine.
Let's talk
Send me the name of one single task someone at your company redoes every week, and how long it takes. I will tell you whether it can be automated, and how. Free, whether you buy or not.