Anyone Can Make Their Own Automated Company... Skill Required
What is a automated company?
A automated company, which I'm going to call a AC for now; is a entity with one employee, you. With modern APIs, tools, programming, and possibly robotics, you can sell products without lifting a finger. After you create it that it.
Create your product.
This is the really hard part. This isn't a tutorial about how to make a product but I have a lot of experience building electronics products using the company MacroFab for prototyping and production. You need to get your product in a working, order-able form where you can just request a quantity of the product and they will take care of the rest. MacroFab will produce a PCB, assemble, test, and program products for you and provide a API where a program can make a request to start a order without having to visit the page or anything. This API can be replaced by a e-mail system in the upcoming section "Automation" below.
The Online Presence
Open your product to the world with social media, and a website. You can program your own, but many website creation platforms such as Weebly will have a API to write software to interact with the store and other features so you don't have to waste all your time programming a website. Facebook and Twitter pages are a good idea and their APIs will come in handy later. You can set up Google and Facebook ads to target your demographic and use a specified budget every n days/weeks/months which pretty much removes the need to advertise yourself minus occasional refreshes.
Automation
Tying those APIs together
Alright, I've mentioned APIs a lot and clearly APIs are a important component to ACs. You need to write a script, Python works well and has many libraries for making HTTP API requests as well as handling the data and even have specific libraries for the most popular APIs. What the script will be trying to do is keeping stock. You have a set number of units you start off with, the API will check Weebly every however long you programmed it to check for orders. When the script gets a order it should print out a label, create a shipping label with APIs such as UPS's business API, send e-mails automatically to customers for account notifications, and when the stock is getting low, contact your supplier's API (Such as MacroFab) for more and let your social media to get in on the low stock.
You can even do things like use AI for customer support, and have your script randomly create sales for amounts determined by sales figures.
FREAKING ROBOTS MAN!
Sometimes you need to make some robots. You have automated the whole ordering process, you have a automatic ad campaign, maybe you even have an AI customer support chat. There's one more area to automate which is taking the product delivered from MacroFab and putting it into customer's hands. Make a RFID lock or something to give the mailman entry into your commercial space (Oh yeah, a requirement for daily UPS pickup) to drop off your MacroFab order to a per-defined space. Give MacroFab special boxes with QR Codes and make robots to detect the package, unpack it, and repackage in smaller boxes with the correct shipping labels or storage. Have your mailman "Pick up the packages on the blue square" or something.
So "just" make a robot and "just" make a automation script?
Yeah, this isn't a tutorial, or a how to get rich quick scheme. It takes a lot of time, money, and effort to do this, but it can pay off. You will have a lot of challenges like tape on boxes, organizing how your mail service picks up your mail, etc. You will need skill in programming and hardware but if you put your mind to it your can. I work for a IoT company and we use the MacroFab and Weebly APIs to automate a lot of what I talked about. Here's some info to get started-
Robotics-
Adafruit and SparkFun have a lot of products, example code, and libraries to build your robots that move your product around.
API Stuff-
An article on how APIs work can help you understand what I'm talking about, then using python you can easily get started making API requests.