I did the math on my own week once and it stung. Two hours a day moving leads from my inbox into a CRM, roughly $26k/year of founder time if you price it like you'd pay someone else to do it. And it's not even the hard part of the business. It's the easy part eating the hours that should go to the hard part.
What clicked for me is that almost every repetitive task has the same shape: something triggers it, you process some info, you take an action. Lead comes in, you qualify it, you log it. If a task has all three, a machine can usually run the loop for a few dollars a month in API calls.
I started treating "where does my time leak" as a source of micro saas ideas, not just chores to grind through. That's part of why I built SoloVault to spot those overlooked loops and markets worth building for.
https://solovault.info/