DEV Community: Ankur Saini

How I Consistently Find High-Impact Ideas to Build and Write

Ankur Saini — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:11:01 +0000

There was a time when I trusted instinct too much.

If something felt like a good idea, I would:

Start writing
Plan content
Think about features
Even consider running ads

Then a few weeks later, I would realize no one was actually looking for it.

That changed when I started using a simple keyword workflow inside MCP360.

Now, before I commit time to anything, I run one process that tells me if the idea is worth it — and more importantly, what direction to take.

It Usually Starts with a Simple Idea

A few days ago, I was thinking about writing something around AI chatbots for ecommerce.

Earlier, I would have just opened a doc and started writing.

This time, I didn’t.

I opened MCP360 and checked if people were even searching for it.

Within seconds, I could see the numbers — search volume, competition, and even how much advertisers were paying for those terms.

That was enough to answer my first question:

This is not just an idea. There is actual demand here.

Tools Behind This Workflow

This workflow runs on a small set of keyword tools available inside MCP360:

search_keyword_volume

Used to check demand, competition, and CPC for specific keywords.
related_keyword_suggestions

Used to expand a topic into real user queries, use cases, and long-tail ideas.
global_keyword_volume

Used to compare demand across countries and identify better markets.

Then the Idea Starts Breaking Down

But demand alone isn’t useful.

“AI chatbot for ecommerce” is too broad.

So I pushed it further inside MCP360.

I expanded it to see what people actually search around it.

That’s when things got clearer.

Instead of one big topic, I started seeing patterns:

People searching for support automation
Others looking for order tracking bots
Some focused on lead generation

Now I wasn’t looking at a topic anymore.

I was looking at specific problems.

And that changed how I approached everything.

The Part Most People Skip

At this point, most people would jump into creating content.

I used to do the same.

But now I pause and ask one more question:

Is this just traffic, or is there real value here?

So I look at signals like CPC and competition.

When businesses are paying to target these keywords, it tells me something important:

This space has money flowing into it
People are not just browsing, they are buying

That’s when I know it’s worth going deeper.

Where It Gets More Interesting

Then I check something I used to ignore completely.

I look at where the demand is coming from.

Inside MCP360, I can see how interest changes across countries.

Sometimes the demand is concentrated in places I didn’t expect.

That changes decisions quickly:

Should I target a different audience?
Should I adjust messaging?
Should I expand beyond one market?

This step alone has saved me from making wrong assumptions multiple times.

Timing Changed Everything for Me

Another thing I learned the hard way: timing matters.

Earlier, I would publish content whenever it was ready.

Now I check how search interest behaves over time.

For certain topics, demand spikes at specific moments.

Once I started aligning content and campaigns with those peaks, results improved without changing much else.

Same effort. Better timing.

What This Workflow Actually Did for Me

The biggest shift is not the data.

It’s the clarity.

Before:

I worked on ideas that felt right
I created content without validation
I spent time figuring things out after starting

Now:

I validate before I begin
I understand intent before execution
I focus only on ideas with real demand

Final Thought

I didn’t need more tools.

I needed a way to stop guessing.

This workflow with MCP360 gave me that.

Now every idea goes through the same filter.

And most importantly, I don’t waste time on the wrong ones anymore.

I Connected OpenClaw to MCP360 to Give My AI Agent Tools

Ankur Saini — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:40:21 +0000

AI agents are getting smarter, but most of them still have the same limitation.

They can reason about tasks, generate plans, and produce convincing answers, but they cannot actually execute actions. They can explain how to search Google, fetch data from an API, or trigger a workflow, yet they cannot perform those operations unless they are connected to real tools.

While experimenting with OpenClaw, I ran into exactly this problem.

OpenClaw is designed to build goal-driven agents that can break down tasks, decide what to do next, and even configure additional agents when needed. The reasoning worked well, but without access to external systems the agent was still limited to generating explanations and text responses.

Since I had already worked with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and MCP360 before, the solution became obvious. Instead of building custom integrations from scratch, I could expose tools to the agent through MCP and connect everything through the MCP360 gateway.

In this article, I’ll show how I connected OpenClaw to MCP tools using MCP360 so the agent can access real data and interact with external systems instead of just describing what should happen.

What Is OpenClaw?

OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework designed to build and run autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs). The project was created by Peter Steinberger with the goal of making it easier for developers to experiment with agents that can reason, plan, and interact with external systems.

It is built around the idea of goal-driven agents. Instead of producing a single response to a prompt, the system receives a task and the agent works out the steps needed to complete it.

When I started exploring OpenClaw, one thing stood out right away: it can set itself up and create new agents for tasks on its own. The language model’s job is to read the instructions, understand what needs to be done, and decide the next step. The framework around it then carries out those decisions, turning them into real actions.

In practice, an OpenClaw agent can:

• analyze a task or objective
• break the task into steps
• determine which capabilities or tools are required
• perform those actions
• observe the results and continue the process until the task is complete

Because of this, OpenClaw moves beyond the typical chat interaction pattern. The agent is not just responding to prompts. It is actively working through a problem, making decisions along the way.

Another important aspect of OpenClaw is its emphasis on tool integration. The framework is designed so that agents can interact with external services such as APIs, search engines, local systems, or custom tools. This allows the agent to go beyond text generation and actually perform operations that help solve the task it was given.

While writing about OpenClaw and experimenting with it, I found it useful to think of it as a framework that helps bridge the gap between LLM reasoning and real-world actions. The language model provides the intelligence, and the framework provides the structure that lets that intelligence interact with the outside world.

The Problem with OpenClaw

Any AI Agents Without Tools Are Limited and will produce AI slop.

When building agents with frameworks like OpenClaw, one limitation becomes obvious rapidly. An agent powered only by an LLM can reason about problems, generate text, and suggest solutions, but it cannot actually do it; it misses some capabilities.

In that setup, the agent is restricted to the knowledge that exists inside the model’s training data. The model can explain concepts, generate plans, or simulate answers, but it cannot fetch fresh information, execute operations, or interact with external systems.

In practice, this means the agent cannot:

• access real-time information such as current news, search results, or live data
• execute APIs to retrieve structured data from external services
• perform automated actions like sending requests or triggering workflows
• integrate with existing systems such as databases, tools, or applications

When I started experimenting with agents, this limitation became obvious. The model could reason about what should be done, but it had no reliable way to actually do it. It could suggest using a search engine, for example, but it could not perform the search itself.

For agents to be genuinely useful, they need the ability to connect reasoning with execution. The model decides what action should happen, and some mechanism must exist to safely expose external capabilities to the agent.

This is exactly the problem that Model Context Protocol (MCP) is designed to address.

What Is MCP (Model Context Protocol)?

MCP is a protocol that allows AI agents to discover and use external tools dynamically.

Instead of hard-coding integrations inside the agent, tools are exposed through MCP servers.

The Architecture

The setup works as a sequence of components that pass the request along a chain.

A user request is first received by the OpenClaw Agent.
The OpenClaw Agent then forwards the request to an MCP Client.
The MCP Client sends the request through the MCP360 Gateway.
The MCP360 Gateway connects to an external tool, which in this case is Google Search, to retrieve the required information.

This architecture keeps agents clean, modular, and extensible.

When the agent needs information, it calls the MCP tool instead of guessing.

Why I Used MCP360

I used MCP360 because it gives OpenClaw one MCP gateway to connect with 100+ tools and custom MCPs.

It is a unified MCP gateway with a large pre-built tool catalog, support for all MCP-compatible clients like Claude, Cursor, YourGPT, and n8n, plus a custom MCP builder if you need your own integration later.

For this OpenClaw setup, that made the workflow much simpler: I could connect through a single MCP endpoint, use ready-to-test tools, and avoid managing multiple API setups myself. MCP360 also includes a chat playground for testing MCPs before wiring them into an agent, which makes experimentation easier.

Step 1 — Install OpenClaw

First clone the OpenClaw repository.

curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash

Once OpenClaw is installed, you also need to install MCPPorter, which enables MCP support inside OpenClaw.

MCPPorter acts as the bridge that allows OpenClaw agents to communicate with MCP servers and access external tools exposed through the Model Context Protocol. Without it, the agent would run, but it would not be able to use MCP-based tools.

npm install -g mcporter

Step 2 — Create MCP Configuration

OpenClaw loads MCP servers through a configuration file.

Create the following file inside the project:

config/mcporter.json

Now add this configuration to setup google search with mcp360:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google-search": {
      "url": "https://connect.mcp360.ai/v1/google-search/mcp?token=YOUR_API_KEY"
    }
  }
}

Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your MCP360 API key.

This tells OpenClaw to connect to the Google Search MCP server hosted on MCP360.

mcporter list

With this command, you can list all the healthy mcp servers.

Once this configuration is loaded, OpenClaw automatically detects the tool.

Step 3 — Start the OpenClaw Gateway

Now start the OpenClaw gateway so it loads the MCP configuration.

openclaw gateway start

This command starts the OpenClaw runtime and connects it to the configured MCP servers.

These tools are now available for the agent to use.

Step 4— Test the Agent

Now it is time to verify that the agent can actually use external tools.

Try asking a question that requires live information, not something the model could answer from training data alone.

For example:

Find the latest news about OpenClaw and Tesla stock price

When this request is sent, the agent should not attempt to guess the answer. Instead, it will follow a tool-driven workflow.

First, the agent analyzes the request and realizes that the question requires current web data. Since the model itself does not have access to real-time information, it determines that a search tool is required.

Next, the agent invokes the Google Search MCP tool through the MCP connection. The tool performs the search query and returns the results to the agent.

Once the results are retrieved, the agent processes the information and composes a response grounded in the fetched data, including the latest updates related to OpenClaw and the stock price of Tesla.

This step is important because it demonstrates the difference between a simple chatbot and a functional AI agent. Instead of generating answers purely from its training data, the agent is able to decide when to use tools, retrieve external information, and produce responses based on real data.

What I Learned While Testing This Setup

After setting this up and running a few tests, a few things became clear.

1. Openclaw Agents Become Much More Useful With Tools

Without tools, an open claw mostly behaves like any other system. It can explain things, generate ideas, or describe how something should be done.

Once tools are available, the openclaw agent can actually perform tasks. It can fetch live data and interact with external systems. That is the point where it stops behaving like a chatbot and starts acting like a real agent.

2. MCP Simplifies Integration

Since I had already worked with MCP before, one thing that stood out again was how simple it makes tool integration.

Instead of writing custom API logic for every service, tools are exposed through MCP servers. The agent just calls the available tools through the MCP interface, which keeps the integration clean and consistent.

3. Hosted MCP Services Reduce Setup Time

Using MCP360 also made the setup easier. I did not have to run or maintain my own MCP servers.

The tools were already available through the hosted gateway, which made it faster to connect everything and start testing the agent.

What You Can Build With This

Once OpenClaw is connected to MCP tools, you can build agents that:

Prospect Discovery and Email Verification
An agent that searches for potential leads, collects company or contact information, and verifies email addresses before adding them to a prospect list.
Company Research Assistant
A system that gathers information about companies, founders, funding, or market presence and prepares a quick research brief.
Content and News Monitoring Agent
An agent that tracks news or updates about specific companies, industries, or technologies and sends summaries.
Data Enrichment Assistant
Given a company name or domain, the agent can fetch additional details such as website information, social presence, and business data.
Competitive Intelligence Assistant
An agent that monitors competitors, collects information about products, pricing, or announcements, and compiles periodic reports.

This opens the door for much more powerful automation.

Conclusion

While working with OpenClaw, what I found most interesting was not just that it can execute tasks, many modern agents can do that. The more unique aspect is its self-configuring capability.

By self-configuring, I mean the agent is able to dynamically set up and coordinate other agents or capabilities when a task requires it. Instead of relying on a fixed workflow designed ahead of time, the system can decide how to structure the work and create additional agents or components to handle different parts of the task.

In practice, this makes the system much more flexible. Rather than building a rigid pipeline for every use case, the agent can adapt its structure depending on the objective.

However, even with this capability, agents only become useful when they can interact with real systems. Without tool access, they are still limited to reasoning and generating responses.

Connecting OpenClaw with MCP360 solves that problem cleanly. MCP exposes tools through a standard interface, and MCP360 provides a hosted gateway so the agent can access those tools without requiring you to build and maintain the integrations yourself.

For me, this setup turned out to be a practical way to experiment with self-configuring agents that can actually interact with external systems. If you are exploring MCP, tool calling, or agent architectures, it provides a solid starting point.

I Built a Smart Amazon Price Drop Alert Using N8N with MCP360

Ankur Saini — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 07:14:53 +0000

A client came to me with a problem. They were selling electronics on Amazon and kept getting undercut by competitors. One week they'd price their product at $120, thinking they were competitive. Then suddenly, sales would dry up. They'd check the listings and find out a competitor had dropped to $72 three days ago.

By the time they noticed and adjusted their pricing, they'd already lost significant revenue.

They needed a way to monitor competitor prices in real-time and react quickly. Manual checking wasn't cutting it anymore.

So we built an automated competitor price monitoring system.

Here's what it does

The client tells the system which competitor products to monitor. It finds them on Amazon, records the current price, and starts tracking.

Every day, it checks if any competitor has changed their price. When a competitor drops their price, the client gets an immediate email notification with the details.

No dashboard to constantly monitor. No manual checking. Just alerts when something actually matters.

The workflow

We went with N8N since the client already had it running for other automation tasks, but this could easily be done with Make, Zapier, or even just a cron job with some Python scripts.

When adding a competitor product to track:

An MCP tool (from the MCP360 server)
It returns the competitor's product with current price, rating, and seller details
The system saves this to a database—this becomes the baseline for comparison

The daily check:

A scheduled job runs every morning at 6 AM
It loops through every competitor product in the database
For each one, it fetches the current price from Amazon
If current price ≠ last recorded price, send email notification
Update the database with the new price

The email notification:

Plain text
Competitor product name, old price, new price, percentage change, link
Simple and actionable

Why this approach works

Most competitor monitoring tools are enterprise-level solutions with monthly fees that don't make sense for smaller sellers. Or they're generic price trackers that weren't built with competitive intelligence in mind.

This system focuses specifically on what matters to Amazon sellers: knowing when competitors move on price so you can respond strategically.

The conversational interface took a bit of extra work, but the client loved it. Instead of filling out forms or importing spreadsheets of ASINs, they just describe which products they want to monitor. It's faster and more intuitive.

The actual code structure

Here's the basic architecture we implemented:

Database schema:

competitor_products
├── id
├── product_name
├── product_url(ASIN)
├── current_price
├── user_email
├── created_at
└── updated_at

N8N workflows:

Chat interface workflow (handles user interaction)
Price check workflow (runs daily via cron)
Email notification workflow (triggered when price drops)

MCP360 integration:
The MCP tool handles all the Amazon API complexity. We just pass it a search query and get back structured product data. No scraping, no worrying about rate limits or API changes.

Things we learned

Check frequency matters for competitive response. We initially set this to check every hour, but then we made it to daily checks at 6 AM works.

Track all price changes, not just drops. Originally we only alerted on price decreases, but price increases are also valuable intelligence. If a competitor raises prices, that's an opportunity.

Context matters more than raw numbers. We added fields for competitor seller name and percentage change. Knowing that "Seller X dropped 15%" is more actionable than just seeing "$120 → $102."

Amazon's pricing is dynamic. The same ASIN can have different prices from different sellers. The MCP tool returns the Buy Box price, which is what most customers see and what actually matters competitively.

What we'd add next

If we were expanding this, we'd probably include:

Automatic price adjustment suggestions based on competitor moves
Historical price charts to identify patterns
Multiple competitor tracking per product category
Slack or SMS alerts for urgent price changes
Integration with the client's repricing tool

But for the initial scope, this gives the client exactly what they need to stay competitive.

The actual results

Three weeks after deployment:

8 competitor products being monitored
12 price change notifications sent
Average response time reduced from 3 days to same-day
Estimated revenue protection of $2,400 from faster competitive response

More importantly, the client stopped obsessively checking competitor listings. They can focus on running their business while the system handles monitoring. When something changes, they know immediately.

Tech stack breakdown

The tools we used:

N8N - workflow automation (self-hosted or cloud)
MCP360 - provides the Amazon product data tools via MCP
N8N Table - for the storing product data
SMTP - for email (using Gmail's SMTP)

The whole thing runs on a $5/month VPS. Could easily run on a Raspberry Pi for a fully self-hosted solution.

If you're working on something similar and want to see the actual N8N workflow setup or dive into the technical implementation, feel free to reach out.

Custom automation doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. This project took a weekend, runs on a $5/month server, and gives a small Amazon seller the kind of competitive intelligence that used to require enterprise-level tools.

Sometimes the best solutions are the ones built for a specific problem, not the ones trying to do everything.

Building tools for e-commerce sellers or working on similar competitive intelligence projects? I'd be interested to hear what's working in this space.