Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoredPositron | Hacker News Reader

5000 n8n workflows that made me millions. 1 n8n workflow that made me 5k per hour...

It's an okay product I appreciate that it's selfhosted with good documentation but they absolutely destroyed their brand with excessive affiliate marketing and now nothing of substance is left if you search for it anywhere.

View on HN

When I think of n8n I think of the n8n subreddit of people posting about how their workflow is broken and they lost all their customers and don't know how to make it work and the obvious solution is that if they had written actual software with tests, fallbacks, etc. this wouldn't have happened.

I have written some stuff with n8n and I think it's is better than most no code platforms because it's debuggable. For example, it keeps all the historical executions so you can see what happened when the workflows failed and what all the data going in and out of each component in the system was during the failed run. It also has real detailed error messages instead of just vague "An Error Occurred" popup boxes that don't provide any information. Also, it's different from most nocode platforms in that it is self-hostable and you can easily export and import programs from it and share them with other people.

If you want to something similar to n8n but with a professional tool, better use NiFi

Worth noting for NiFi you end up with a bunch of integrations built-in via https://camel.apache.org/ which makes it easy to plug into some small portion of a task and then expand.

That subreddit is the new r/dropshipping. I joined to see what fun tooling people were building, and I found it mostly populated with people attempting to setup a "business" with a single feature solution.

It was a giant disappointment to me as well. I guess it’s reasonable that people want something for nothing otherwise the lottery wouldn’t make any money. But it is rather unfortunate that something that could be otherwise a cool community of people making automations is instead just get rich quick schemes. I suppose we could all try building a n8n community that is not focused on get rich quick schemes. But tbh anything I need automated is far easier in python especially when all the connectors in n8n that you may not know the particular python library for (e.g., some Reddit comment aggregator) you can easily convince Claude code to generate for you.

Can you share some examples of the workflows that you had success with?

They've been growing exponentially the last couple years because of affiliate marketing in large part

Any more details on how they made this work for them? Hard to pull off.

Is it hard to pull off? Give people a cut of the revenue from new paying customers who first visit by clicking their referral link. Everyone else does the work for you, but you lose control of the brand as people who only care about making a quick buck use your name to spam low-quality videos and medium articles.

Have a good product and then pay people a percentage when they sell it on your behalf. Works amazingly in some niches. I personally paid out affiliates around $1m for my SaaS

This.

I like n8n. It feels a little less rough around the edges for visual coding than something like huggin or nodered. The documentation is good, but finding examples and things like that offsite is impossible.

The documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Especially regarding custom node development. But also on the user side, for example the kaka trigger node has zero info on its doc page.

I'm currently dealing with some of the fallout of their marketing, could you explain a bit better what you mean? It was good but isn't any more?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com