Operations · workflow

Relocation startup — side project to six-figure business using full automation stack

Bordr helps people relocate to Portugal. Founders needed to automate service delivery to scale without hiring. Every new order required manual coordination between form processing, payment, email, and record keeping.

How it works

Common implementation structure

How this type of workflow is generally built, generalized across documented cases — not tied to any one vendor's stack. Click any stage to read what happens there. Specific products that implement these stages appear in “Tools commonly seen” below.

Stage 1 · Paperform

Customer submits order form with all relocation details.

Tools used

n8n · partnerPaperformPostmarkStripe · partnerAirtable

Outcome

Side project scaled to a six-figure online business in a handful of months. Order processing fully automated — no manual intervention as volume grew. Founders focused entirely on growth, not operations. Self-hosted n8n kept costs near zero as transaction volume scaled.

What failed first

Started with Zapier. Founders found it too limiting for multi-step logic: 'Zapier is really good if you do one-two steps, for very simple tasks' — Richard Lo, co-founder. Switched to n8n for complex conditional flows.

Results

Time savedFull automation

Volume$100k+ revenue

Running sinceOct 2024

Source

Bordr case study: Workflow automation to scale a relocation startup (n8n.io + Medium)Referenced in n8n official case studies and a detailed Medium article. Named company, named co-founder, outcome figures from original sources.

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