Stop Building Apps and Start Selling the Glue

While everyone else is burning through their savings trying to build the next ‘Uber for X,’ a quiet group of digital entrepreneurs is making $4,000 a month by simply connecting two apps that don’t talk to each other. Here is the reality: your local real estate agency or law firm doesn’t need a new software platform; they need their existing tools to stop wasting their time. By becoming a ‘Workflow Architect,’ you aren’t selling software; you are selling recovered hours, and businesses will pay a premium for that freedom.

📹 Watch the video above to learn more!

What Exactly is a Glue Software Business?

A ‘Glue’ business involves identifying friction points in a specific niche and building automated bridges between their favorite tools using no-code platforms. Instead of coding from scratch, you use visual builders to create a seamless flow of data. For example, when a new lead fills out a Facebook Ad form, your ‘glue’ automatically sends them a personalized SMS via Twilio, adds them to a specific Mailchimp segment, and alerts the sales team on Slack. You build this once, and it runs forever.

Why This Is the Most Under-The-Radar Opportunity of 2024

The beauty of this model lies in ‘App Fatigue.’ Most small to medium-sized businesses use an average of 15 different cloud applications, but none of them are integrated. This creates manual data entry nightmares that cost companies thousands in labor. When you show a business owner how they can save 10 hours of manual data entry per week with a single automation, the $500 setup fee becomes a no-brainer. You aren’t a freelancer; you’re a high-ROI efficiency consultant.

How to Build Your First Workflow Flip in 30 Days

Step 1: Pick One High-Friction Niche

Don’t try to automate everything for everyone. Focus on a niche where time literally equals high-ticket revenue, such as residential contractors, dental clinics, or boutique law firms. These businesses have high lead values but often lack the technical staff to manage their digital pipelines. Spend three days researching their most common complaints on industry forums—usually, it is about ‘leads falling through the cracks’ or ‘double-booking calendars.’

Step 2: Master the ‘Logic Stack’

You don’t need to be a developer, but you do need to understand logic. Spend a weekend mastering Make.com (formerly Integromat) or Zapier. These are your primary toolkits. Learn how to use ‘Webhooks’ to catch data and ‘Iterators’ to process lists. The goal is to build a ‘Master Recipe’ that you can duplicate and sell to ten different clients in the same industry with only minor tweaks.

Step 3: The ‘Loom-First’ Outreach Strategy

Forget cold calling or long emails. Find a potential client, identify a visible gap in their process (like a broken contact form or a slow response time), and record a 2-minute Loom video. Show them a visual map of the automation you built for their specific problem. Say, ‘I noticed your team manually handles X; I built a bridge that does this in 2 seconds. Want to see the live demo?’ This high-value approach has a significantly higher conversion rate than generic pitching.

Step 4: The Build and The Handover

Once they say yes, you build the workflow in their own account or a managed sub-account. Use Airtable as the central ‘brain’ for their data because it is user-friendly for non-techies. Ensure you include error-handling steps so the system doesn’t break if a user enters a typo. The ‘handover’ is where you provide a simple one-page PDF on how to monitor the system, which reinforces the value of what you’ve built.

The Math: Realistic Earnings and Scaling

The Setup Fee vs. The Retainer

A typical niche workflow setup ranges from $500 to $1,500 depending on complexity. If you land just two clients a month, that is $1,000 to $3,000 in upfront revenue. However, the real secret is the ‘Maintenance Retainer.’ Charge $99 to $199 per month to ‘monitor and optimize’ the workflows. With 20 clients on a $150 retainer, you have a $3,000/month baseline of passive income before you even sign a new contract. Most of these workflows require less than an hour of maintenance per month once they are stable.

Timeline to Your First Dollar

If you start today, you can spend week one learning the tools, week two building your master recipe, and week three doing outreach. It is entirely realistic to land your first $500 client by day 25. Unlike building a blog or a YouTube channel, you are selling a direct solution to a burning problem, which means the sales cycle is incredibly fast.

Essential Tools for the Workflow Architect

• Make.com: The most powerful and cost-effective automation engine for complex logic.
• Airtable: The perfect ‘low-code’ database to store and organize client lead data.
• Loom: For recording personalized pitch videos that show, rather than tell.
• Tally.so: A clean, simple form builder that integrates perfectly with almost everything.
• OpenAI API: For adding ‘AI Brains’ to your workflows (e.g., automatically summarizing lead inquiries).

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Don’t Over-Engineer the Solution

Beginners often try to build 50-step automations that are brittle and break easily. Start with a ‘Minimum Viable Workflow’ that solves one big problem. It is better to have a 3-step automation that works 100% of the time than a 20-step masterpiece that fails every Tuesday. Reliability is what keeps the retainer checks coming in.

Avoiding the ‘One-Off’ Trap

Never sell a workflow without a maintenance agreement. If you just sell the setup, the client will call you six months later when they change their password and the automation breaks, and they will expect you to fix it for free. Position yourself as the ongoing guardian of their efficiency from day one.

Ignoring Data Privacy

When you are moving client data, security is paramount. Always use two-factor authentication and ensure you are compliant with regulations like GDPR or HIPAA if you are working in the medical or legal fields. Being the ‘secure’ option allows you to charge 2x more than the ‘cheap’ option.

Your Next Move

The era of the generalist freelancer is ending, but the era of the specialized ‘Glue’ Architect is just beginning. Your immediate next step is to sign up for a free Make.com account and attempt to connect your own email to a Google Sheet. Once you see that data move automatically for the first time, you’ll realize just how much money is sitting on the table in the local business world.