The Challenge: Investment Deal Distribution at Scale
Imagine you're managing an investment deal that needs to reach hundreds of potential investors. Each investor needs:
Researching startups and mapping corresponding markets was traditionally a very manual, time-consuming, and imprecise process, and the same holds for investment deal distribution. The M&A industry is known to be challenging, partially because of the amount of money at stake in each deal and the magnitude of change that comes with each transaction. My client was facing exactly this problem—manually composing emails, juggling spreadsheets, and coordinating across multiple platforms.
Before diving into the technical solution, let me talk about who I built this for, because that matters just as much as what I built.
This client runs a scrappy startup in the investment space. Everyone on their team—regardless of title—is a technologist at heart. They're self-hosting everything they can, from their data room to their document signing platform. They weren't looking for another SaaS subscription or a consultant to hand them a black box. They wanted someone who understood that infrastructure is strategy, not overhead.
This is the kind of client I want more of: builder-operators who understand that good technology compounds, not depreciates. If you're reading this and thinking, "we're also self-hosting most of our stack and everyone here codes,"—let's talk.
I built an end-to-end automation system that transforms a multi-day manual process into a guided, 7-step workflow that handles everything from deal selection to email dispatch.
What previously took:
Result: Reduced operations overhead by approximately 75-80%, allowing the team to run 3-4x more campaigns with the same headcount.
The real multiplier? By automating data entry, teams are freed from hundreds of hours of manual effort—and that time can be redirected to networking, connecting, and building relationships. That's exactly what happened here. Less time in spreadsheets means more time actually closing deals.
Backend Orchestration: n8n
Frontend: Appsmith
Infrastructure
The system guides users through seven distinct phases:
Intelligent NDA Logic: The system automatically determines whether each recipient has already signed an NDA for similar deals. If yes, they get immediate data room access. If not, they receive an NDA invitation first. This conditional logic happens seamlessly in the background.
Webhook Synchronization Rather than polling or complex state management, the frontend makes a single webhook call and waits for the complete response. The n8n backend handles all the complexity—API authentication, parallel processing, data transformation—and returns structured, ready-to-use data.
Flexible Data Import: The CSV import isn't just a simple file upload. It handles:
Real-time Email Editing. Each generated email can be edited in-line with instant preview updates. The system regenerates the HTML body while preserving the structure, ensuring consistency even with manual edits.
Self-hosting allows organizations to avoid recurring cloud subscription fees and unpredictable usage-based pricing, gaining stable, predictable long-term costs and full data control. For this client, that meant:
Self-hosting teaches you how to troubleshoot problems in the real world and gives you a mental model of how the internet works. The client's technical team could dive into the n8n workflows, understand exactly what was happening, and make changes themselves—no vendor support tickets required.
The entire system ships as a self-contained package with:
I even built a custom markdown viewer that serves the documentation through nginx, giving the client a professional reference they can access anytime—another self-hosted component that doesn't require external dependencies.
Low-Code Doesn't Mean No-Code By combining Appsmith's rapid UI development with custom React components, I got the best of both worlds: fast iteration and complete control where it mattered.
Workflow Orchestration Over Monoliths Using n8n allowed me to build complex business logic visually while maintaining the flexibility to inject custom code where needed. Data and technology advancements have made once highly manual and time-consuming strategies much faster, easier, and more reliable. It's easier for clients to understand and modify than a traditional codebase—especially when the whole team codes.
Configuration Over Customization Environment variables drive everything—API keys, endpoints, even template IDs. Deploy once, configure anywhere. This aligns perfectly with the self-hosting philosophy: own your stack, control your destiny.
Here's what I learned from this project: the "who" matters as much as the "what."
I could have built this same system for a large enterprise with a traditional IT department, but it would have been a different experience entirely. Procurement processes, security reviews, and change management committees—none of which are inherently bad, but they're optimized for different outcomes.
This client? They saw the value immediately because they understood:
For startups, core features should be as close to your control as possible, because too many external dependencies increase overall risk as companies evolve, change, get bought out, and get hacked. This client gets it.
If you're running a scrappy startup where engineers understand the business and business people understand the tech—where self-hosting is a deliberate choice, not a cost-cutting measure—we should work together.
Modern tooling enables sophisticated automation without massive teams or budgets. By thoughtfully combining low-code platforms, workflow orchestration, and strategic custom development, you can build systems that:
This project demonstrates that automation expertise isn't about writing the most code—it's about architecting systems that make complex processes feel simple while keeping control where it belongs: with you.
Building something scrappy and powerful? I specialize in helping technical teams automate complex workflows without vendor lock-in. If your team self-hosts and everyone codes, let's talk: spenpo@spenpo.com
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