This isn't an expert tutorial from someone who's been automating things for years. This is me figuring things out, building something small that actually works, and writing it down so it might help someone else who's at the same stage.
With that said, here's what I built and why.
The problem
I follow Fabrizio Romano. If you're into football, you know him - the "Here We Go" guy, the most famous three words in transfers. His Instagram is the fastest source for confirmed deals.
But here's my issue: every time I opened Instagram to check his posts, I'd lose more time to reels, random stories, and content I never asked for. I wanted his posts. Nothing else.
So I built a bot that emails me his last 20 posts from the past 24 hours. Every morning. Without me touching Instagram at all.
The stack
Three tools, zero lines of code:
Apify : a web scraping platform with ready-made "actors" (pre-built scrapers). There's one specifically for Instagram that works out of the box.
Make.com : an automation tool that connects apps together visually, like a flowchart. Think Zapier but more powerful.
Gmail : just my inbox. Nothing fancy.
How it works
The flow is simple:
Every midnight at 12am, Make wakes up and triggers an Apify actor.
The Apify actor scrapes Fabrizio Romano's last 20 Instagram posts from the past 24 hours.
Make receives the results, formats them into a readable email
The email lands in my Gmail inbox.
That's it. Transfer confirmed. Inbox closed. No reels.
What surprised me
Apify actors are incredibly underrated. I expected scraping Instagram to be complicated - authentication issues, rate limits, blocked requests. The ready-made actor handled all of that. Setup took maybe 10 minutes.
Make's visual workflow builder is genuinely intuitive. I've tried to learn code-based automation before and always got stuck. Seeing the flow as connected boxes made it click for me in a way that code didn't.
Automating a personal problem is the best way to learn a tool. Every tutorial I've followed online felt abstract. This felt real because I actually cared about the output. The moment the first email hit my inbox, I understood what automation feels like - not just what it is.
I also want to try applying the same pattern to other sources — maybe a newsletter digest, maybe a specific Twitter/X account. The structure is reusable.
The bigger point
This project is niche. Like, really niche. A football transfer news emailer for one specific Instagram account is not going to change the world.
But I learned Apify. I learned Make. I learned how to connect two APIs without writing a single line of code. And I shipped something that runs every day without me thinking about it.
That's the point of building small things. Not to impress people - to get your hands on tools and actually understand them.
If you're early in your learning journey like I am, I'd encourage you to pick one annoying thing in your life and automate it. It doesn't have to be useful to anyone else. It just has to be real enough that you actually finish it.
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