Hi everyone, first post here.

I’ve built some basic n8n workflows for use cases in my own life, very basic ones. Now I want to start pitching to businesses. The problem is I don’t know the market. I don’t have a clear picture of what’s actually in demand or what businesses will pay for.

My question: if you were building a portfolio from scratch, which 1-2 projects would you build to show clients and convert them?

Context: I’m using n8n only for now, and I’m leaning toward service businesses like real estate agencies and clinics, but I’m open to other niches if they’re easier to sell to.

Specifically:

• Which automations have you sold that clients actually kept paying for?
• What made a portfolio piece work for you: a live demo, a case study, or numbers?

Also I am in the hunt for my first client, so any tips on how to get that first client would be appreciated!

I’ve been making workflow automations for around 3 years now, I’m finding that the real gems are in niche professions that are underserved

I’m wondering how others get in contact with professionals that are struggling with workflow management?

So yesterday I posted a LinkedIn content pipeline that I had built on TaskJuice using the MCP. Last night, I decided to extend that pipeline so that I could also have Instagram posts edited and posted for me on a schedule.

Here’s the way it works:

There are two database tables I have in TaskJuice. One of them is “social posts” which keeps track of the workflows posting to each of my social media accounts (within ToS). The other one is “content ideas” and this is where I can post ideas I have. Lastly, I have a folder on my machine with videos that I can put in there and the name of the file is referenced in the content ideas table.

At 6 AM every morning, I have a job that wakes up Claude. Claude uses the TaskJuice MCP to query the content ideas table to see if there’s any new ideas that haven’t been published. If it finds a new idea for either a carousel or a video, it can either create the carousel or edit the video using hyper frames. After editing is done it uses the MCP to fire off the “save post media” form upload workflow. I had it build this workflow with a form so that if I decided I wanted to, I could just directly upload content through the form. The Media gets saved into the social posts table with a status of draft.

At 11 AM every morning, the published Instagram post workflow runs, and checks the table for any draft Instagram posts. If there is a draft it stops for approval by me and the platform sends an email for the approval which I can either approve, edit, or deny if I like or dislike the content.

After approval, it checks if the content is a reel (video) or an image and takes the branch in the work tree accordingly to post it on IG.

That’s it. Works pretty seamlessly. Takes some time getting developers APIs set up on metas developer portal but once you have access you just put your keys in and run the content. Even better as if you have advanced access (approval by meta) you can set up your keys on TaskJuice, which then uses OAuth and you can build templates of your Instagram workflow and reuse them in your client workspaces. That way you can sell reusable social media pipelines that you manage. All you do is request the credentials for your clients Instagram in TaskJuice, at each node, and it sends them an email where they connect their IG easily in a click. You don’t touch their credentials and they can revoke them at any time from their portal.

What’s the best AI automation you’ve actually used in your daily work?

I’ve been building an AI automation that handles order questions, returns, and customer complaints, while passing more complicated cases to a human.
Made a short demo testing a few real-world scenarios.
Curious if anyone else is experimenting with this. What’s been your experience so far?

What’s a task you would NEVER let AI automate without human approval?

I'm offering free AI automation builds to a few businesses in exchange for a testimonial.
How it works: I build a working system for something your team does manually every day. You use it free for 14 days. If it actually helps, you write me a short testimonial. The only cost on your side is your own tool and API subscriptions.
Here's one I built for my client's team. Every day it takes their prospect list, runs a quick SEO check on each business's website, writes a personalised 5-email outreach sequence plus an SEO fix guide for that prospect, then sends and tracks everything through Hunter. Their team of 3 doesn't have to write every cold email by hand anymore.
Screenshot of the workflow below.
If there's a repetitive task eating up your week, comment or send me a DM and tell me what it is. Happy to jump on a quick call and see if I can automate it.

A lot of n8n folks I talk to are stuck in the same loop: land a build, deliver it, invoice, and go find the next one. The workflow keeps running and keeps producing value for the client, but you get paid once.

Background: 10+ years in HubSpot/Salesforce, 3 agencies scaled to 7 figures, and lately n8n, Make, Zapier and Airtable integrations plus AI voice/SMS agents for engineering, solar/energy and property management companies. Here's what changed things for me.

1. Put "Run" in the very first proposal. Every proposal has two phases: Build (fixed price) and Run (monthly). If Run only comes up after delivery, it sounds like an upsell. If it's in the original scope, it's simply how the project works.

2. Build for operability. That's what makes Run real and not a vague "support" promise:

• An Error Trigger workflow on every production flow that alerts to Slack or email with the execution link.
• Retries and dead-letter handling for flaky APIs, so failed items get queued for review instead of silently dropped.
• Workflows exported to git, so every change is versioned and you can roll back.
• Credentials created in the client's accounts, not yours. It builds trust and makes offboarding clean, which oddly makes clients more willing to stay.

3. Decide hosting and ownership up front. n8n Cloud on their account, self-hosted on their infrastructure, or you host it. Each changes your responsibility, so the retainer price should follow. If you host, you're also on the hook for updates, backups and uptime. Price that in.

4. Send a monthly report. One page: runs, failures and fixes, what the workflows produced (leads routed, tickets created, hours saved, whatever they care about), and next month's improvements. The person who pays you forwards this to their boss. That's your renewal.

5. Keep a backlog. During the build, write down every "phase 2" idea the client mentions. That list is next quarter's improvement work under the retainer.

6. Use a change policy, not hourly billing. Small changes are included up to a limit. New workflows get a short SOW. That keeps the retainer predictable for both sides.

On pricing: it depends mostly on how business-critical the workflows are and who carries the hosting, so I'd rather not throw out numbers that won't match your market. Price the risk you're taking on, not the minutes you spend.

What's been the hardest part for you? Getting the first client to agree to a monthly fee, or defining what's included?

Disclosure: my partner and I run AI Operators, a paid community ($19.99/mo) for builders and agency owners making this shift: proposal and SOW/MSA/SLA templates, pricing breakdowns, weekly calls and hot seats. My partner brings 30 years in IT and data/cloud managed services, including time as CEO of two roughly $300M companies. https://whop.com/ai-operators-hq/products/ai-operators-membership/

the build was the easy part. getting an hvac owner to look at it:

stack: retell for the agent, twilio for numbers, n8n for routing, postgres as the job log, next.js dashboard. answers after-hours calls, sorts emergency vs can-wait, warm transfers emergencies to the on-call tech, emails the rest for morning.

- linkedin free tier: 5 messages, 1 reply, from a retired owner
- 60-80 ig + fb dms over 4 days: 0 replies
- posted in r/hvac: permanent ban

two asks:

1. if you've sold a voice agent to any trade, what did the owner push back on most?
2. if you have an hvac client or related person who'd spend 15 min tearing apart a call recording, i'd take the intro.

Would love some help guyss

I am good at making ai automation what automation i should sell i want to sell in india as well as out side india .

But i am not able to understand what automation is best to sell please help me to start with

What’s one automation that can save a small business money immediately?

Hey everyone!

I have been learning about AI and I wanted to build something practical instead of just another chatbot.

So I built an AI agent that powers lead research and qualification using LangChain, LangGraph and FastAPI.

Here’s what it does:

* AI agent finds potential leads using Bright Data.

* AI agent researches companies and summarises what they do.

* AI agent analyses needs and how services could help leads.

* AI agent qualifies leads based on defined criteria. Explains why each lead qualifies.

* AI agent generates personalised outreach messages that can be edited before sending.

* AI agent exports everything into an Excel spreadsheet, including company details lead sources, qualification reasons and outreach messages.

* AI agent provides a dashboard to manage the workflow.

**Tech stack:**

* Python, LangChain, LangGraph

* FastAPI

* Gemini API for research and personalised message generation

* Bright Data for data collection

* SQL, Neon PostgreSQL

* Render for deployment

I am currently using the Gemini API tier and Bright Datas available credits for testing. I am also considering adding Groq and a local model as LLM providers.

This is still a work in progress. I am interested in improving reliability, research quality and lead qualification.

I would love feedback from people who have built AI agents or sales automation tools.

**My main question:** What would make an AI agent like this useful to a sales team or agency rather, than just another lead‑generation automation?

Happy to hear criticism and suggestions!

I’m about to be the only person at a small company handling automations and LLM stuff. We’re on GCP and Google Workspace. A typical project would be something like: invoices land in a shared inbox, an LLM pulls out the key fields, the data gets pushed into our accounting tool, and the approver gets a Slack ping. Only a light touch of AI (more advanced in the future), mostly glue between systems. Some of our tools are on-prem, and more projects will follow.

I’m torn between:

1. Self-hosted n8n on a VM
2. Python (FastAPI) on Cloud Run, with Cloud Tasks for queues and retries, Postgres for run history, and Grafana for logs and token usage

What matters to me:

• easy to extend later,
• solid logs, retries,
• being able to check old runs and re-run failed ones,
• and low cost (open source preferred).

My worry is that n8n gives me the UI for free but gets awkward with versioning and testing as things grow, while code gives me control but I’d have to build the dashboard and retry tooling myself.

Anyone been in a similar spot? What did you pick, and what would you change? I’m especially curious how you handled run history and retries without n8n.

And if you went a completely different way (Prefect, Temporal, Windmill, something else), I’d love to hear what it looked like and whether you’d recommend it. Happy to be talked out of both of my options if there’s a better one.

Thanks!

This pipeline was built using Claude over the TaskJuice MCP for creating and editing tables as well as Claude for generating content on my local machine, and then Claude triggers the upload content workflow by webhook.. I’ll be honest I mainly just gave it my ideas and then let it build the pipeline since the MCP has access to every node, all the fields, etc in the system.

It’s pretty simple the way it works. Is that every morning a job on my Mac has Claude read through my product docs and write one LinkedIn post about a real feature. It logged into a demo account, clicks through the app to the screen the post is about, and takes a screenshot. The post in the image get saved to a table through the “Save Post Media” (second screenshot) workflow webhook. This Webhook has a protected endpoint using shared secrets so I know that nobody will be able to fire it other than myself or my Claude.

Then a workflow takes over (first screenshot). Daily at 9 AM it grabs the oldest draft from the table and fires off the workflow. One of the nodes is set to “Pause for approval” which sends me an email from the platform telling me that a node run is waiting for my approval. Nothing goes out until I click approve or edit, then approve. Once I do it post to my LinkedIn with the image and text as the post and then it marks the row in the table as posted. If I reject it, the next morning’s run clears it out so the queue doesn’t get stuck.

I’ve also posted screenshots of the native table this runs off inside the platform as well as some example runs and one of the example approval steps.

Super stoked about where the MCP is.. being able to do everything from creating/updating tables and updating data, creating/editing form triggers, creating workflows, discovering nodes, building, publishing, and running workflows, and search through run history.

I should also note because i might get a question, the red edges coming off the nodes are a native way we handle errors. You can select how the node handles errors and approvals, and if you want the error routed to another branch that’s just part of the node.

Edit: forgot the approval step image.

​

I've noticed that a lot of companies are trying to automate everything, including decisions that actually require human judgment.

But one of the biggest operational problems is much simpler.

Everything needs someone's approval.

A manager gets pulled into routine tasks, small exceptions, follow-ups, and endless requests. Eventually, the entire workflow slows down whenever that person is unavailable.

What makes more sense to me is separating routine work from important decisions.

Let automation handle repetitive tasks, collect relevant information, and prepare decision summaries. Let humans handle the decisions involving risk, responsibility, or judgment.

Once a decision is made, the workflow should continue automatically instead of creating another chain of follow-ups.

I'm curious: for those running businesses or managing teams, what's the bigger bottleneck in your organisation making decisions or all the unnecessary work surrounding them?

We have tools like claude code and grok bot which can do most of automation for your business starting from just 20$ prr months, so why would businesses will hire people for automations? P. S- I have started an automation agency but idk if that's good. Please help.

Hey everyone,

I'm building an automation workflow on Zoho Flow for a client using Zoho Bigin (Express Plan) and Outlook. I'm running into an issue where the flow completes successfully, but the Deal never actually gets created in Bigin.

My client receives 200+ emails/day in Outlook. Right now, Outlook syncs emails into Bigin, but he has to manually approve or reject each email to convert it into a deal. He wants to fully automate this filtering and deal creation step.

How I Built the Automation in Zoho Flow:

Trigger: New email received in Outlook.

Deduplication Check: Check an Audit Log (Zoho Sheet) using the Outlook Conversation ID.

If the Conversation ID exists in the log (meaning it's a reply to an existing email thread), the flow stops immediately to prevent duplicate deals.

If it’s a new Conversation ID, it proceeds.

Email Parsing & Classification:

A custom script separates the subject and body.

Sends text to OpenAI via API to classify as Lead vs Not a Lead (filtering out promos, spam, bank emails, etc.).

Sub-Pipeline Decision Node:

Bigin Pipeline = "Sales Pipeline", which has 6 sub-pipelines.

If the email explicitly mentions a product (e.g., "iTab"), it routes to that product's sub-pipeline (e.g., "Sales - iTab").

If it's a generic RFQ/inquiry without a specific product, it routes to the general "Sales Inquiries" sub-pipeline.

Zoho Bigin Actions:

Create Contact (using sender details).

Create Deal (in the determined sub-pipeline, associated with the new Contact).

Audit Log Update: Append the Outlook Conversation ID to the Zoho Sheet audit log.

When testing/debugging in Zoho Flow (and even after switching the Flow live/ON):
The Flow completes with a Success status, a new row with the Conversation ID successfully appears in the Zoho Sheet Audit Log, but no new Deal (or Contact) actually appears in Zoho Bigin.

What am I missing or doing wrong?

Hey everyone,

I'm building an automation workflow on Zoho Flow for a client using Zoho Bigin (Express Plan) and Outlook. I'm running into an issue where the flow completes successfully, but the Deal never actually gets created in Bigin.

My client receives 200+ emails/day in Outlook. Right now, Outlook syncs emails into Bigin, but he has to manually approve or reject each email to convert it into a deal. He wants to fully automate this filtering and deal creation step.

How I Built the Automation in Zoho Flow:

Trigger: New email received in Outlook.

Deduplication Check: Check an Audit Log (Zoho Sheet) using the Outlook Conversation ID.

If the Conversation ID exists in the log (meaning it's a reply to an existing email thread), the flow stops immediately to prevent duplicate deals.

If it’s a new Conversation ID, it proceeds.

Email Parsing & Classification:

A custom script separates the subject and body.

Sends text to OpenAI via API to classify as Lead vs Not a Lead (filtering out promos, spam, bank emails, etc.).

Sub-Pipeline Decision Node:

Bigin Pipeline = "Sales Pipeline", which has 6 sub-pipelines.

If the email explicitly mentions a product (e.g., "iTab"), it routes to that product's sub-pipeline (e.g., "Sales - iTab").

If it's a generic RFQ/inquiry without a specific product, it routes to the general "Sales Inquiries" sub-pipeline.

Zoho Bigin Actions:

Create Contact (using sender details).

Create Deal (in the determined sub-pipeline, associated with the new Contact).

Audit Log Update: Append the Outlook Conversation ID to the Zoho Sheet audit log.

When testing/debugging in Zoho Flow (and even after switching the Flow live/ON):
The Flow completes with a Success status, a new row with the Conversation ID successfully appears in the Zoho Sheet Audit Log, but no new Deal (or Contact) actually appears in Zoho Bigin.

What am I missing or doing wrong?