Six months ago, I was spending 3+ hours every day on marketing tasks for my SaaS product: hunting leads on Reddit, copy-pasting emails, writing blog posts, scheduling social content. All manual. All repetitive. All soul-crushing.
So I built an n8n automation system to do it for me. Now I have 15 workflows running in production, handling everything from lead generation to content publishing — with zero manual input.
Here's what I built and how it works.
The Architecture
Everything flows through a Google Sheets data hub — a 37-column master leads database that acts as the source of truth for the entire system. Every workflow reads from or writes to it.
The system has four pillars:
1. Lead Generation (5 Sources)
Five separate workflows scrape different platforms for potential customers:
- GitHub scraper — finds developers actively building in your target niche by searching repos and issues
- Reddit scraper — monitors specific subreddits for posts where people describe their pain points
- Hacker News scraper — catches "Who's hiring" threads and Ask HN posts
- YouTube scraper — finds creators in adjacent spaces who might need your product
- ProductHunt scraper — identifies newly launched products for partnership/integration opportunities
Each scraper extracts: name, email (via Hunter.io), company, GitHub/social profile, and the exact post/content that triggered the lead.
2. AI Qualification
Every lead goes through a GPT-4 scoring workflow before entering the pipeline:
Input: lead profile + extracted content
Output: score 1-10 + qualification notes
Only leads scoring 7 or above proceed. This filters out noise — no more emailing people who clearly aren't a fit. The qualification prompt evaluates: relevance to your ICP, signal strength (are they actively looking for a solution?), and company size fit.
3. Cold Email Outreach
The email workflow is the most complex piece:
- Email verification via MillionVerifier before any send (protects sender reputation)
- IP warmup — starts at 20 emails/day, scales to 200 over 3 weeks using a Postal self-hosted mail server
- Personalization — GPT-4 writes each email referencing the specific content that triggered the lead
- 3-sequence follow-up — automated follow-up emails at day 3 and day 7, each with different angles
- Reply detection — stops sequences when someone replies
All tracked in the Google Sheet: sent date, open status, reply status, sequence position.
4. Content Generation & Publishing
Two blog generators (SEO-focused and founder-voice) that:
- Pull topics from a content calendar in Google Sheets
- Generate 1500–2500 word posts with GPT-4
- Auto-publish to Ghost or WordPress via API
- Trigger a social media workflow that creates platform-specific content (Twitter thread, LinkedIn post, Instagram caption) and schedules them
What This Actually Looks Like Day-to-Day
My morning routine used to involve 2+ hours of manual work. Now I open my Google Sheet, review the overnight leads (usually 20–40 qualified ones), spot-check a few emails that went out, and move on.
The system runs on a VPS with n8n self-hosted. Total infrastructure cost: ~$20/month. The ROI was immediate.
Lessons From Building This
1. Deduplication is critical. Without it, you'll email the same person 3 times from different scrapers. I use a hash of email+domain to deduplicate before anything enters the pipeline.
2. Email warmup can't be skipped. I burned a domain early on by sending 200 emails on day one. Start slow. The warmup workflow gradually increases send volume while monitoring bounce rates.
3. AI qualification changes everything. The quality difference between "all scraped leads" and "AI-qualified leads scoring 7+" is dramatic. Your reply rates will be 3–5x higher because you're only reaching people who actually have the problem you solve.
4. Google Sheets as a data hub works surprisingly well. I considered a proper database, but Sheets gives you a visual interface for free, easy filtering, and it's accessible to non-technical teammates. For this volume (<10k leads), it's perfect.
5. n8n > Zapier/Make for this use case. Self-hosted means no per-task pricing. Complex branching logic and custom JavaScript nodes make it possible to build things that simply aren't possible on no-code platforms.
The Tech Stack
| Component | Tool |
|---|---|
| Workflow orchestration | n8n (self-hosted) |
| AI/LLM | OpenAI GPT-4 |
| Email infrastructure | Postal (self-hosted SMTP) |
| Email verification | MillionVerifier |
| Email finding | Hunter.io |
| Data hub | Google Sheets |
| Blog publishing | Ghost / WordPress API |
| Social posting | Twitter API v2, LinkedIn API |
| Lead sources | Reddit, GitHub, HN, YouTube, ProductHunt APIs |
Building This for Others
After running this for my own SaaS for 6 months and iterating until it actually worked, I started packaging this as a service on Fiverr.
If you want the full system — or just specific pieces like the lead scraper, email sequence, or blog generator — I've opened a gig: Build complete n8n marketing automation for leads, email & content
Packages start at $150 for a single workflow, up to $700 for the complete stack.
Happy to answer questions about any specific workflow — the Reddit scraper and the email warmup logic get the most questions, so drop them below.
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