32 years in marketing taught me nothing eliminates menial work except actually eliminating it

Lefteris V — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:52:55 +0000

I've spent 32 years in marketing. In that time I've built more UTM links by hand than I'd care to count, previewed more ad copy by eyeballing it in
a doc, and reformatted more JSON exports than any one person should. None of that is expertise — it's just repetition. The actual expertise is
knowing which of it is worth automating and which isn't.

So I built ZeroMenial: 117+ free, instant, browser-based tools across 11 categories — coding, marketing, SEO, Microsoft, productivity, text, data,
design, finance, time/date, and HR. A few examples from the marketing side specifically: a UTM Link Builder, a Google/Facebook Ad Previewer, an
Email Subject Line Tester, a Hashtag Counter that actually knows each platform's limits. None of them are groundbreaking. That's the point — they're the boring parts, done properly, so the meaningful work (the actual strategy, the actual writing) gets more of your time.

Everything runs client-side. Nothing you paste is sent to a server — that was a deliberate design choice, not a compliance checkbox. Free tier is 12 executions/day, no account required. Pro/Business ($7–15/mo) removes the cap and adds copy/export and bulk processing, for people who end up using it daily — Business also adds team seats and a lightweight admin panel, if a few people on your team end up relying on it.

Two quick examples, since "boring parts done properly" is easier to show than describe:

UTM Link Builder — instead of hand-typing ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign=... and hoping I didn't typo a parameter, I fill in five fields and get the tagged URL back instantly, with a one-click copy:

Brain Dump Cleaner — paste a raw list of whatever's rattling around your head about a campaign, and it sorts each line into Tasks, Ideas, or Worries
automatically, so the actual thinking (what to do about the worries, which ideas to greenlight) gets your attention instead of the sorting:

Neither tool is complicated. That's deliberate — the value isn't cleverness, it's that they exist and are one click away instead of a re-typed template or a mental sort every time.

What's next: more tools, driven by what people actually ask for rather than a fixed roadmap. If there's a specific menial task you're still doing by hand, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.

DEV Community: Lefteris V

32 years in marketing taught me nothing eliminates menial work except actually eliminating it