DEV Community: n8n

[Live Demo] Automate a Viral Newsletter Using n8n + Real-Time Web Data

Angel Menendez — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 22:38:58 +0000

Here is the recording from my livestream with Rafael Levi from Bright Data. In the stream, we show you how to create a daily newsletter on the topics you care about powered by real-time data from your favorite sources.

In our demo, we walk you through building an agentic workflow in n8n that automates the entire process, and share technical pro-tips along the way.

We cover how to:

Use Bright Data’s verified node in n8n to extract fresh content from sources like Reddit, Hacker News, and Twitter. Go beyond the front page of these platforms to get deep context on the articles themselves.
Configure an AI Agent with precise prompts and the right tools to fine-tune recommendations.
Deliver an HTML newsletter straight to your inbox at a schedule you choose.
Utilize the DEV API to publish the newsletter as an article to the community.

By the end, you’ll know how to spin up your own personalized news digest that’s ready to read before your coffee even cools.

And because building cool stuff is even better with prizes: n8n is teaming up with Bright Data and DEV for the Real-time AI Agent Challenge running now through August 31st with $5,000 USD in cash prizes. We’ll take a moment during the show to cover challenge details so you can jump in. Learn more and join the challenge →

How hyperautomation will transform business operations

Lorena — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 16:02:51 +0000

Are you trying to convince your manager to invest (more) in automation? Or are you the manager who went a bit over budget with automation tools and you're wondering if it was worth it? Or maybe you're just exploring the vast space of workflow automation tools and wondering: "Is this the future of real work, or is it just fantasy?"

In this post we’ll share with you the key facts you need to know about hyperautomation: what it is, why it is important, what are examples of hyperautomation tools, how businesses can use them, and how hyperautomation is predicted to evolve in the next few years.

What is hyperautomation?
How are businesses leveraging hyperautomation?
What is the future of hyperautomation?
1. Orchestrated automation processes
2. Automation marketplaces
3. Vendor-agnostic hyperautomation
4. Infrastructure automation
Start automating!

What is hyperautomation?

Gartner defines hyperautomation as "a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms."

Examples of hyperautomation tools are:

no-code/low-code application platforms (N/LCAP)
workflow automation tools (WAT)
robotic process automation (RPA)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
chatbots and conversational agents

The hyperautomation-enabling software market has been rising in the past two years and is expected to reach $596bn in 2022.

How is hyperautomation different from automation?

Automation refers to the accomplishment of a specific task without manual or human intervention. For example, you can use a no-code workflow that creates tickets from form submissions automatically, instead of doing this manually. Automation is well-suited for repetitive, boring, regular, rule-based, software-based, and time-consuming tasks at small scale.

Hyperautomation refers to the combination and connection of several automated workflows, thus creating an orchestrated automation. This orchestration feature takes automation to the hyper level, allowing businesses to scale individual processes. Taking the example above a step further, you can add this workflow alongside an ML model or service that detects the sentiment of user reviews, a chatbot that assists customers, an application that processes text from invoices, and a database synchronization to keep the information up-to-date -- all these forming a hyperautomated business.

Why do we need hyperautomation?

The examples above highlight the two main benefits of hyperautomation: increased productivity and seamless scaling of business operations. Without automation orchestration, business departments risk working out of sync, thus impacting the overall progress and costs of the organization.

Gartner points out that hyperautomation is driven by two forces: operational excellence and digital acceleration. Operational excellence is reflected in profits (businesses being able to deliver faster or cheaper), whereas digital acceleration is reflected in adoption (attracting more customers at a faster pace).

To get to that point, organizations can go two ways. Traditionally, they can increase productivity by hiring department-specific people or IT-skilled engineers who can set up automations. IT teams become fusion teams, where employees with different skills can directly contribute to the automation processes needed in their department.

In short, hyperautomation helps organizations to save costs, increase efficiency, and overall improve their business model. On an individual level, employees whose tedious tasks are automated have more time to focus on meaningful and creative work, which in turn increases their job satisfaction.

How are businesses leveraging hyperautomation?

According to a Gartner study, businesses have on average 4 automation processes. This number seems low even for small businesses, considering how many individual tasks are on the to-do lists of employees in every department. However, 80% of senior business executives say they will spend more on digital initiatives in 2022, aiming to accelerate their business (65%) and go to market faster (71%).

Businesses in all industries can leverage the power of hyperautomation. For example:

E-Commerce can automate almost the entire journey, from announcing product launches, sending and analyzing emails, issuing invoices, tracking packages, running inventories, and notifying customers.
IT can automate DevOps and SecOps use cases like contributions to a repository, critical incident response, or vulnerability disclosure.

What is the future of hyperautomation?

Gartner foresees four trends in hyperautomation in the next few years.

1. Orchestrated automation processes

"By 2024 diffuse (siloed) approach to hyperautomation initiatives will drive up initiative specific total cost of ownership by 40-fold, making adaptive governance a differentiating factor in financial performance."

Think of how many different apps and services you use in your daily job, and how many more your colleagues from other departments use as well. In fact, 78% of business professionals use three tools from different categories to accomplish their daily tasks, which is not really practical or efficient.
In the next few years, businesses will try to turn these disparate (disconnected) automations into orchestrated (connected) hyperautomation workflows. For example, you can have one workflow that synchronizes data between the Sales Pipedrive and Marketing Hubspot.

2. Automation marketplaces

"By 2024, growth of “automation marketplaces” will propel 80% of the large enterprises to pivot to principles of composability to minimize operational interdependencies and maximize value of hyperautomation initiatives."

Businesses will change the way they deliver their digital products, replacing packaged applications (like individual projects or products) with composed applications (in the style of catalogs or markets). Think of these "automation marketplaces" as curated, interactive exhibitions.

For example, in a workflow automation marketplace, you would not only see a list of integrations, but also sort them by industry or function, try out automation templates, and learn from supportive content––maybe even tailored to your personal role.

3. Vendor-agnostic hyperautomation

"By 2024, the lack of standardization and uniformity in vendor pricing structures will continue driving 40% of clients to increase hyperautomation vendor-agnostic business capabilities."

It's hard to find the one tool that ticks all the boxes: affordable price, powerful functionality, intuitive UI, blazing speed. Commonly, businesses are willing to compromise on some features for the sake of simplicity (keep their processes on one platform––at the risk of vendor lock-in.

Hyperautomation tools can diminish this risk, since they make it possible to interconnect apps services. As a consequence, in the future businesses will move away from a commitment-based model to a consumption-based model, preferring to combine features of different tools until it's a match for their use case.

4. Infrastructure automation

"By 2024, 40% of organizations will use managed service provider hyperautomation offerings to fill infrastructure operations gaps fortifying a foundation for TCO and scaled automation."

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies to go into remote work mode. But with employees working around the world, it's challenging to ensure smooth connectivity, data security, incident response management, timely decision-making, and ongoing support and maintenance.

To create a solid infrastructure for these processes, businesses will rely on hyperautomation tools. For example, you can build no-code workflows for automatic incident response or database monitoring.

Start automating!

Going back to the questions in the introduction, we hope the information in this post helps you make a compelling case for automation in your workplace, rest assured that your investment in automation tools is worth every penny, and dare to explore the hyperautomation space.

One more thing: 3% of hyperautomation professionals characterize their organization as having a high impact on hyperautomation governance. Are you going to be among them?

How to automatically manage contributions to open-source projects 🏷️

Harshil Agrawal — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 08:05:18 +0000

October is an exciting month, with people across the world looking forward to Halloween or Oktoberfest. But for me, I'm most excited about Hacktoberfest–the month-long celebration of open-source projects. DigitalOcean has been organizing this event for the past eight years with the goal of encouraging the global tech community to support open-source projects.

Hacktoberfest provides a great opportunity on one side for individual developers to apply their skills on real-world projects, and on the other side for organizations to extend their projects with the help of contributors.

However, the popularity of Hacktoberfest also creates spam, unnecessary pull requests, and loads of comments on GitHub issues, which can become overwhelming for the project owners and maintainers.

Our solution to this problem? Automation! In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a no-code workflow that automatically assigns an open GitHub issue to a contributor interested in working on it.

Prerequisites for building the workflow

Workflow for assigning GitHub issues to contributors
1. Trigger the workflow on GitHub events
2. Route the workflow on specific events
3. Handle new GitHub issues
4. Assign the issue
5. Handle new comments on GitHub issues
6. Check if the issue is already assigned
7. Assign an issue to a contributor
8. Add a comment to the issue
What's next?

Workflow for assigning GitHub issues to contributors

Prerequisites for building the workflow

n8n: Sign up for n8n.cloud to quickly get started or use n8n on your own servers. Refer to the installation guide to learn more.
GitHub account: To connect the workflow with your GitHub account, follow the steps mentioned in the documentation.

Workflow for assigning GitHub issues to contributors

The general idea of this workflow is to assign an issue to the contributor who is interested in working on it. There are four scenarios that you need to consider:

A contributor creates an issue and wants to work on it.
A contributor creates a new issue and doesn't want to work on it.
A contributor is interested in working on an issue reported by another contributor and no one got assigned to it.
A contributor is interested in working on an issue opened by another contributor, but someone else has already been assigned to it.

In popular open-source projects, you usually meet all these scenarios. If you're a project maintainer, you know it can become difficult to manage the contributions efficiently, especially during events like Hacktoberfest.

The visual builder that n8n provides helps you classify and handle issues automatically. Let's dive into it!

1. Trigger the workflow on GitHub events

The workflow should run every time someone opens a new issue or comments on an issue. For this, add the GitHub Trigger node and configure the following parameters:

Authentication: If you're using n8n.cloud, I suggest you select the OAuth2 authentication method. This option allows you to connect the node with your GitHub account without the need to create credentials. Otherwise, you can learn how to create the credentials from our documentation.
Repository Owner: Enter your GitHub username.
Repository Name: Enter the name of your repository.
Events: Select issue_comment and issues from the dropdown menu.

Configuration of GitHub Trigger node

Now the workflow will run when a new issue gets created, closed, or edited, or when a comment gets posted, removed, or edited.

Note: If you want to use this workflow for a repository that belongs to an organization, you will have to use the Webhook Trigger node. Refer to the GitHub documentation to learn to add webhooks to your repository.

2. Route the workflow on specific events

The workflow should continue only when a new issue gets created or a new comment gets posted. To identify these events, add a Switch node and set the following parameters:

Data Type: String
Value 1: Use the expression {{$json["body"]["action"]}}

Click on the Add Routing Rules button. For this workflow, you need two different routes, one to handle each event mentioned above.

The first routing rule handles the scenario where a new issue gets created. For this, configure the following parameters:

Operation: Equal
Value 2: opened
Output: 0

The second routing rule will navigate the data to output 1 of the Switch node when a new comment gets posted on an issue. For this, use the following values:

Operation: Equal
Value 2: created
Output: 1

Configuration of Switch node

3. Handle new GitHub issues

Contributors who open a new issue may or may not want to contribute to it. To make sure that you assign the contributor only if they're interested in working on it, add an IF node connected to the output 0 of the Switch node.

Configure the IF node as follow:

Value 1: Add the expression {{$json["body"]["issue"]["body"]}} in the Expression Editor.
Operation: Regex
Regex: /[a,A]ssign[\w*\s*]*me/gm

The above condition checks if the user wants you to assign them the issue or not.

The workflow should also check if the issue has already been assigned to a contributor or not. For this, add another condition in the IF node. This condition should be of the type Number. Set the following parameters for this condition:

Value 1: Use the expression {{$json["body"]["issue"]["assignees"].length}}
Operation: Equal
Value 2: 0

Configuration of IF node for new GitHub issues

4. Assign the issue

The next step is assigning the issue to the interested contributor and label the issue as assigned. To do this, connect a GitHub node to the true output of the IF node and

Configure the parameters of the node as follows:

Authentication: Use the authentication that you used in the GitHub Trigger node
Resource: Issue
Operation: Edit
Repository Owner: Enter your GitHub username or use the following expression: {{$node["Switch"].json["body"]["repository"]["owner"]["login"]}}
Repository Name: Enter the name of the repository you previously used, or use the following expression: {{$node["Switch"].json["body"]["repository"]["name"]}}
Issue Number: Use the expression {{ $json["body"]["issue"]["number"] }}

Click on Choose Option To Add, and select Labels. Similarly, add the Assignees option. Configure these parameters as follow:

Label: Enter assigned or any other label you want to add to the issue.
Assignees: Enter the following expression: {{$json.body.issue["user"]["login"]}}

Configuration of GitHub node for issue assignment

5. Handle new comments on GitHub issues

Your workflow currently handles the following situations:

Assigning the issue to the contributor who opened the issue if the contributor is interested in working on it
Stopping the workflow if the contributor who opened the issue is not interested in working on it.

You now have to design the workflow that handles the other two scenarios. For this, add an IF node connected to output 1 of the Switch node. This node will check if the contributor is interested in working on the issue. Set the following parameters for the IF node:

Value 1: Use the expression {{$json["body"]["comment"]["body"]}}
Operation: Regex
Regex: /[a,A]ssign[\w*\s*]*me/gm

Configuration of IF node for interested contributors

6. Check if the issue is already assigned

If a contributor is interested in working on an issue, the workflow should assign them to the issue, but it should also check if someone has previously been assigned to the issue or not. To check this, connect an IF node to the true output of the previous IF node. Set the IF node as follow:

Value 1: Enter the expression {{$json["body"]["issue"]["assignees"].length}}
Operation: Equal
Value 2: 0

If no one is assigned to the issue, this node returns true, otherwise false.

Configuration of IF node for assigned issues

7. Assign an issue to a contributor

To assign available issues to an interested contributor, connect a GitHub node to the true branch of the previous IF node.

Configure the parameters similarly to the previous GitHub node. In the Assignees fields, use the expression {{$json["body"]["comment"]["user"]["login"]}}. The rest of the parameters should stay the same.

8. Add a comment to the issue

If the issue has already been assigned to a contributor, you should the interested contributor know about it. For this, connect a new GitHub node to the false branch of the IF node. This node will add a comment to the issue.

Set the node parameters as follows:

Authentication: Similar to the previous GitHub node
Resource: Issue
Operation: Create Comment
Repository Owner, Repository Name, Issue Number: Similar to the previous GitHub node
Body: Enter the comment body in this field.

Configuration of GitHub node for commenting on issues

This is the last node in the workflow. Now you only need to activate the workflow by clicking on the toggle in the top right corner of the Editor UI. The active workflow will run automatically in production.

What's next?

In this article, you learned to create a no-code workflow that automatically assigns GitHub issues to interested contributors. This kind of automation will help you and our organization maintain your open-source projects–just in time for Hacktoberfest!

Here's what you can do next:

Build more workflows: There are many other possible automation workflows that could improve your work as a project maintainer and the experience for your contributors. For example, you can build a workflow that checks the progress on an assigned issue to see if the contributor needs help.
Contribute to n8n: You can work on open issues, create nodes, improve our docs, or write a blog post.
Read more tutorials: Learn how to build workflows for other automation use cases, for example a no-code CI/CD pipeline with GitHub and TravisCI.

I'd like to know how you are using automation to manage your open-source projects! Feel free to message me on Twitter or discuss in the community forum 🧡 And if you want to get the latest content on automation, subscribe to our newsletter 💌

This post originally appeared on the n8n.io blog.

6 features of tasks that can be automated 📑

Lorena — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 07:52:57 +0000

You're working long hours now, six in the morning to six in the afternoon. Sometimes even eight in the afternoon, six days a week. Sometimes seven days a week. It's a long hustle but it keeps you busy.

Busy but unfulfilled, because many of the things you do are plain boring, repetitive, unengaging, and could probably be done (better) by a machine. If you've found your way to this article, it means you've had it with manual work and you're ready to start automating at least part of it. Congratulations, welcome to the future of work!

There are plenty of things in our daily lives that surely would rather be automated than half-heartedly accomplished by a bored human who, mind you, might even make mistakes. Workflow automation platforms like n8n enable you to automate even complex tasks with no code (or a bit of JavaScript, if you insist).

But how do you decide where to begin? In this post, I present to you six features of tasks that can (and should) be automated.

1. Repetitive tasks

Download this from here, upload it there, write this, click that. Repeat 10 times a day, 50 times a year, until the end of time. Or until you discover automation, because tasks like this shouldn't be accomplished manually anymore.

For example, getting your daily news, checking the weather, creating backups of your work (this is also a reminder to do it!), or cross-posting articles on different channels are all activities that can be automated with no code.

2. Boring tasks

"My favorite part of my job is copy-pasting data from one file into a spreadsheet!", said no one ever. More likely, you wish you could be doing anything but that. If a task is unengaging, it doesn't involve decision-making, higher-order thinking, creativity, or "the human touch", then it's a good candidate for automation.

For example, a common activity in sales is collecting information about companies (like the number of employees, industry, and location) from the website of a business event, in order to create contacts or leads in a CRM. Instead of manually copy-pasting data, you can create a workflow that does web-scraping, data transfer, and even email validation for you.

3. Frequent, regular tasks

It's the end of yet another month and you need to calculate yet another budget for your business, run an inventory on your products and orders. You need to set a reminder and block a full day to get this job done–a day when you could be doing more exciting work or even take a holiday.

If the task has to be done at the same time or interval and it involves the same sequence of steps, then it could be automated. In fact, we've already built a workflow for the use case mentioned above.

4. Rule-based tasks

Most automation-friendly tasks are rule-based, meaning they follow a logical sequence of steps in the form of "if A, then B, else C". This is the kind of low-level decision-making that can be established by a human and, if you know that the process won't change, delegated to a machine.

For example, filtering sales orders based on their value was a boring task that our friend Nathan had to do for his team, before we taught him how to automate it. In the same way, you could automate your e-commerce business, for example by filtering positive and negative reviews or issuing invoices.

5. Software-based tasks

Did you know that U.S. users had on average 20 apps installed on their mobile? And that organizations worldwide were using on average 80 software as a service (SaaS) applications? Now think of all the tasks that you're doing daily and how many of those involve transferring or synchronizing data between different apps, without human input.

For example, if you need to sync data between your CRM and a database, you can create a no-code workflow for that and let the two systems communicate with each other. Don't act as an intermediary machine, you're just making it awkward.

6. Time-consuming tasks

I don't know about you, but for me, the most annoying thing about boring tasks is that they are time-consuming. Fine, life and work are not always rainbows and butterflies, sparkling with creativity and meaningful activities. I can do some brainless tasks for a while if needed, but when they start taking up hours of my precious time–that's where I draw the line and reach for n8n.

For example, in one of my previous roles, I was responsible for creating reports, which involved aggregating data from different sources (Google Analytics, BigQuery, Salesforce, Postgres), calculating some custom metrics, and sending the results to management or clients. This kind of reporting could take up to two hours, every month/quarter/year–or only a few minutes once to set up a workflow in n8n.

In this post, you've learned how to identify tasks that can be automated. To sum up, automatable tasks are repetitive, boring, regular, rule-based, software-based, and time-consuming. Keep this in mind next time you're working on something, and try to automate it!

Create a toxic language detector for Telegram in 4 steps 🤬

Lorena — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 08:06:38 +0000

When was the last time you talked to someone online, be it friends, coworkers, or even strangers? Nowadays, you most likely do it every day. Online communication platforms like Telegram, Reddit, or Discord have made it possible for people from all over the world to connect and share their thoughts on pretty much any topic, instantly. This can be an enriching experience for users, but these platforms can also foster toxicity like cyberbullying, threats, and insults, forcing some users offline and silencing their voices.

One solution to this problem comes from Jigsaw and Google's Counter Abuse Technology team, who developed Perspective API: a free API that uses machine learning to identify toxic language in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Russian. Toxic language is defined here as"a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make someone leave a discussion".

Perspective API in action

In practice, Perspective scores a phrase based on the perceived impact the text may have in a conversation. The phrase can be analyzed on different attributes: flirtation, identity attack, insult, profanity, sexually explicit, threat, and (severe) toxicity. Keep in mind though that machine learning models can only be as good as the data they're trained on. This means that they may misclassify as toxic some innocent comments (and vice versa), so the flagged comments should be reviewed by a human eye.

Perspective API has been implemented by several major publishers and platforms like Reddit, The New York Times, and DISQUS, helping them moderate online comments. At n8n, we communicate with our 16,000+ community members in the Discourse forum, on Discord, Twitter, and even via Telegram for Spanish speakers. We value open, inclusive, and respectful communication and want to ensure that everyone has a positive experience in the n8n community – and beyond.

To this end, we used the Perspective API to build the Google Perspective node, which allows you to integrate toxic language detection in your workflows.

Workflow for detecting toxic language in Telegram messages

To give you an idea of how you can use the Google Perspective node, we created a workflow that detects toxic language in messages sent in a Telegram chat and replies with a warning message.

Workflow for detecting toxic language in Telegram

Telegram Trigger node starts the workflow when a new message is sent in a Telegram chat.
Google Perspective node analyzes the text of the message and returns a probability value between 0 and 1 of how likely it is that the content is toxic.
IF node filters messages with a toxic probability value above 0.7.
Telegram node sends a message in the chat with the text "I don't tolerate toxic language" if the probability value is above 0.7.
NoOp node takes no action if the probability value is below 0.7. This node is optional and serves only to show that the workflow can be extended in this direction.

Now let's see how to configure each node step by step. If you haven't built an n8n workflow yet, you might want to take a look at our quickstart guide or take the beginner's course. This will help you understand the configuration of the nodes used in this workflow.

1. Get new messages from Telegram

First of all, you need to create a Telegram bot and get credentials. Start a chat with Botfather in your Telegram account and follow the instructions to create your bot and get credentials. Make sure you add your newly created bot to the channel you want to monitor.

Then, open the Telegram Trigger node and add your Credentials Name and Access Token in Telegram API.

In the Updates field select: message, edited_message, channel_post, and edited_channel_post. These update options will trigger the workflow when a text message is posted.

To test if the bot works well so far, execute the Trigger node and send a message to the Telegram channel. We tested this workflow with the message "You're a stupid bot! I hate you!" (we swear it's just for testing purposes, we actually think bots are pretty cool and smart). The Telegram Trigger node should output the following result:

Configuration of the Telegram Trigger node

2. Analyze the toxicity of the message

In the second step, the incoming message from Telegram has to be analyzed with Perspective. In the Google Perspective node configure the following parameters:

Operation: Analyze ContentThis operation analyzes the incoming text message.
Text: {{$json["message"]["text"]}} This expression selects the incoming Telegram message to be analyzed.

In the section Attributes to Analyze you can add one or more attributes supported by Perspective that you want to be detected in the incoming message. If you don't add any attribute, all will be returned by default. For this example, the node is configured to detect profanities and identity attacks in the text, so two attributes are added with the properties:

Attribute Name: Profanity
Score Threshold: 0.00 This value sets the score above which to return results. The score is a value between 0 and 1 representing the probability that the text is toxic; it doesn't reflect the intensity (how toxic the text is). For example, if you set the Score Threshold at 0.5, then only messages that are 50% likely to be toxic are returned. If no value is set, at zero all scores are returned. You can read more in this article about what the scores mean.

In the section Options, you can select the Language of the text input. This option is useful if you want to monitor only a specific language. If unspecified, the node will auto-detect the language. In our example, we select the Language English.

Now if you execute the Google Perspective node, the output should look like this:

Configuration of the Google Perspective node

3. Filter toxic messages

In the third step, the toxic messages with a probability higher that 0.7 have to be filtered out. For this, you need to set up an IF node with the following parameters:

Value 1: {{$json["attributeScores"]["PROFANITY"]["summaryScore"]["value"]}} This expression selects the score value of the respective attribute.
Operation: Larger
Value 2: 0.7 This is the value we want to compare the score with.

If you execute the IF node now, it outputs the following results:

Configuration of the IF node

The message "You're a stupid bot! I hate you!" scored 0.92 for profanity and 0.62 for identity attack, which means it has downright strong toxic language on these attributes.

4. Send a warning message to Telegram

The final step is taking action against the toxic message. A mild action would be to just reply to the message in the Telegram channel warning the user that "We don't tolerate toxic language here!". To do this, configure the Telegram node with the following parameters:

Resource: Message
Operation: Send Message
Chat ID: {{$node["Telegram Trigger"].json["message"]["chat"]["id"]}}
Text: I don't tolerate toxic language!
Add Field > Reply to Message ID: {{$node["Telegram Trigger"].json["message"]["message_id"]}}

Configuration of the Telegram node

Now the bully will be publicly admonished in Telegram (once again, sorry, bot, you're really cool):

Response to a toxic message in Telegram

What's next?

In this post, you've learned about the challenge and importance of monitoring toxic language in online communities and how you can build a no-code Telegram bot for this purpose. The use case in this tutorial is fairly simplistic, but this kind of toxic language detector can be implemented in various platforms at scale.

For example, you could tweak this workflow and connect the Google Perspective node to Discord, Discourse, or DISQUS to detect toxic language in online communities and forums, or even to Gmail to filter out toxic emails. You can take different actions to toxic messages, for example forwarding them to a moderator, storing them in a database, flagging or banning the user depending on their message scores.

Here's what you can do next:

Try this workflow yourself: install n8n or sign up for a free 30-day trial on n8n.cloud ☁️
Discover more workflows using the Telegram (Trigger) node ⚙️
Join the discussion in the n8n community forum 🗣️
Read more workflow tutorials 💡

How to get started with CRM automation (with 3 no-code workflow ideas) 👥

Lorena — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 07:45:48 +0000

If you run a business, sell a product, or offer services, you know how important it is to nurture the relationship with your customers and gain new ones. Whether you operate alone or with a sales team, you probably also know how difficult it can be to keep track of your leads, customers, and orders.

We're here to show you that you can optimize your sales and customer workflows with two keywords: CRM and automation. Read on to learn what exactly a CRM is, why and when you should use a CRM for your business, and how to automate three common CRM sales workflows in only a few clicks.

Why and when you should use a CRM
3 steps to CRM automation for the sales funnel
- Choose the right CRM for your use case
- Decide what you will automate
- Build workflows
  - Capture leads from Typeform submissions
  - Send reminders after meetings with prospects
  - Process newly created deals based on their stage, value, and priority
What's next?

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is pretty self-explanatory: it helps you manage the relationships with your customers. This means that it stores information on your customers (such as name, title, company, role), the relation they have with your company (e.g., lead, opportunity, deal), and the status of the relationship (e.g., closes, open, waiting), and the monetary value of closed deals (like quote and price).

The CRM software market is forecast to grow to $43.5 bn in 2024, proving the increasing popularity and necessity of CRM tools for companies.

Global CRM software market growth

Most commonly, CRMs are used by sales teams to track their sales activities and milestones in the sales funnel, from lead to deal.

Why and when you should use a CRM

To better understand the value of a CRM, let's take a business example.

Say you have a creative business specializing in professional corporate photography. Your visitors can book shootings on your website (which offers plenty of opportunities for automation), but you also actively network to find new opportunities. At a business event you've attended, you've met Marketing and Branding employees from different companies (contacts). Of these, a couple have expressed interest in your professional photo shootings for their team, qualifying them as leads for your business. This means they could become your customers, which is awesome! Now you need to follow up with them, make them an offer they can't refuse, and eventually close the deal.

The sales and marketing funnel

How can you and your sales team keep track of all these steps, for each lead, while also making sure that you nurture the relationship with your (potential) customers and organize the logistics with your team of photographers? If you think a digital calendar, a paper agenda, and a spreadsheet could do the job, you wouldn't be completely wrong. Sure they can help you organize your time and contacts, but provide limited features, are error-prone and even unmanageable in the long run.

Here are 3 common challenges that sales-oriented teams face in their organization:

Information is spread in different sources.\ You contact a customer via email, your salesperson talks to them on the phone, then you write down key information on a post-it and your colleague inserts the order details in a spreadsheet. If anyone asks something about that specific customer, you'd need to sift through emails and notes and ask several people who've come in contact with the customer--a highly inefficient process.
Information is duplicated or missing completely.\ If your salespeople have back-to-back calls and meetings with leads and customers, inevitably they might forget to pass on some information, or even assume that a colleague has taken care of that. At the other end, two salespeople might contact the same lead because they don't have an overview of their assignments. This is how meetings get overlooked, clients get annoyed, and you don't get orders.
Salespeople are unmotivated and exhausted by repetitive tasks.\ It's no secret that sales is a fast-paced and high-pressure field. But the role of a salesperson can become particularly challenging if they are often tasked with repetitive work (like sending the same email to different leads) or their work is inefficiently organized. These problems lead to a decrease in performance and invariably in sales.

A CRM solves the five problems listed above, by providing you with a feature-rich integrated system that can save your business up to 10 hours of work every week. In short, you should use a CRM if you sell a product, provide a service, or deal with customers or clients in any way.

If you are convinced by the advantages of a CRM, but reticent about the costs, note that the cost of not automating is higher than the investment in a CRM, which ultimately increases the productivity and value of your sales team.

3 steps to CRM automation for the sales funnel

Now that you've seen the advantages of using a CRM, it's time to start implementing it.

1. Choose the right CRM for your use case

On a first look, you might get overwhelmed by all the CRM providers available on the market. There are options for different team sizes, departments, and budgets. To help you get an overview of their features, we compiled a list of 10 of the most popular CRMs, which also come with n8n integrations that allow you to perform common CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations on your saved contacts, companies, deals, and more.

CRM integrations on n8n

Agile CRM is an all-in-one CRM software for marketing, sales, and service. With the Agile CRM node you can manage company, contact, and deal details in your workflows.
Copper is a CRM integration for Google Workspace and is best suited for small and medium-sized businesses. The n8n nodes Copper and Copper Trigger provide the basic CRUD operations for companies, customer sources, leads, opportunities, persons, projects, tasks, and users.
HubSpot's CRM platform provides tools for social media marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. With the HubSpot node and HubSpot Trigger node you can manage contacts, contact lists, companies, deals, forms, and tickets.
Intercom is a conversational relationship platform which allows businesses to communicate with prospective and existing customers within their app, on their website, through social media, or via email. The Intercom node lets you manage companies, leads, and users from the CRM.
Keap offers an e-mail marketing and sales platform for small businesses, including products to manage and optimize the customer lifecycle, customer relationship management, marketing automation, lead capture, and e-commerce. The Keap node and Keap Trigger node allow you to manage companies, contacts, contact notes and tags, ecommerce orders and products, emails, and files.
Pipedrive is a cloud-based sales software company that aims to improve the productivity of businesses through the use of their software. You can use the Pipedrive node and Pipedrive Trigger node to manage activities, deals, deal products, files, leads, notes, organizations, persons, and products.
Salesforce is the leading vendor in the CRM market worldwide. Salesforce provides customer relationship management service and also sells a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. The Salesforce node allows you to manage over 10 different fields, such as contacts, leads, opportunities, flows, and tasks.
Salesmate is a cloud-based CRM solution that caters to small and midsize businesses across various industries. Key features include contact management, sales pipeline management, email marketing and internal chat and phone integration. The Salesmate node lets you manage information about activities, companies, and deals.
Zoho CRM is an online Sales CRM software that manages sales, marketing and support. The Zoho CRM node allows you to manage accounts, contacts, deals, invoices, leads, products, purchase orders, quotes, sales orders, and vendors. With the Zoho CRM node you can perform CRUD operations on deals, invoices, leads, quotes, and many more.
Freshworks is a cloud-based CRM that helps businesses manage their interactions with their customers and leads. The Freshworks CRM nodeprovides basic operations for managing sales activities, tasks, deals, and more.

2. Decide what you will automate

After you've picked a CRM and explored its functionalities, you should define what you want to automate. Think of the tasks involved in every step of the sales funnel and ask yourself these questions:

Is the task repetitive?
Is the task time-consuming?
Do you need to perform the task often and regularly?
Does the task have a high value?

If you answered yes to these questions, then your task is most probably a case for automation. Once you've identified the pain points in your current manual workflows, you can start defining and designing automated workflows.

3. Build workflows

Before starting to create workflows for the tasks identified in the previous step, ask yourself one more question: do you need to automate tasks that take place only within the CRM or also between the CRM and other apps or services?

For the first case, note that some of the CRMs listed above offer built-in automation functionality for simple workflows. For the second case, you can take advantage of the n8n nodes, which allow you to connect your CRM to 200+ apps or services.

To help you get started, we've created 3 workflows with HubSpot and Pipedrive for automation at every step of the sales journey. Of course, you can replace the HubSpot and Pipedrive nodes with another CRM of your choice.

Capture leads from Typeform submissions

Typeforms are a presentable and efficient way of capturing leads and feedback from your customers. For example, you can embed a typeform on your website where visitors can request a quote for your services, or one which asks them to submit their contact details in order to download gated content.

This workflow is triggered when a typeform is submitted, then it saves the sender's information into HubSpot as a new contact.

Workflow for capturing leads from Typeform submissions

Send reminders after meetings with prospects

We mentioned that a common problem within sales teams is synchronization and information transfer since salespeople might forget to note down details from their conversations with leads, jumping from one call to another.

This workflow is triggered when a client meeting is scheduled via Calendly. Then, an activity is automatically created in Pipedrive, to keep track of the lead cycle. Fifteen minutes after the end of the meeting, a message is sent to the responsible salesperson in Slack, reminding them to write down their notes and insights from the meeting with the lead.

Workflow for sending reminders after Calendly meetings

Process newly created deals based on their stage, value, and priority

You're reaching the bottom of the sales funnel and getting deals--good for you! From here, there are several tasks you can automate to speed up the sales process.

This workflow is triggered when a new deal is created in HubSpot. Then, it processes the deal based on its type and stage.

The first branching follows three cases:

If the deal is closed and won, a message is sent in a Slack channel, so that the whole team can celebrate the success.
If a presentation has been scheduled for the deal, then a Google Slides presentation template is created.
If the deal is closed and lost, the deal's details are added to an Airtable table. From here, you can analyze the data to get insights into what and why certain deals don't get closed.

The second branching follows two cases:

If the deal is for a new business and has a value above 500, a high-priority ticket assigned to an experienced team member is created in HubSpot
If the deal is for an existing business and has a value below 500, a low-priority ticket is created.

Workflow for processing new leads created in HubSpot

Apart from Typeform, you can also use the Eventbrite Trigger nodeto capture the contact information of people who registered for an event, or the SurveyMonkey Trigger node to save the responses of a survey.

What's next?

In this post, you've learned about the advantages of CRM tools, when and why you should use a CRM, and what workflows you can automate with different CRMs. You've seen how automating different processes in the sales funnel can increase your productivity and minimize the time between the first contact and a closed deal.

Try these workflows yourself: install n8n or sign up for a free 30-day trial on n8n.cloud ☁️
Discover more workflows using CRM nodes ⚙️
Join the discussion in the n8n community forum 🗣️
Read more posts about workflow ideas 💡

6 e-commerce workflows to power up your Shopify store 🛒

Lorena — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 09:08:04 +0000

The online shopping trend has been driven by increasing digitalization in the past years, and the COVID-19 outbreak has only fueled e-commerce growth. Consumers around the world are turning to online stores for pretty much all product categories, due to in-person restrictions or contamination concerns.

In 2020, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to $4.28 trillion and in 2021, over 2.14 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online.

But as online shoppers have grown in numbers, so have digital shop owners. Thanks to e-commerce platforms, almost anyone can set up an online shop with only a few clicks. However, running even a small digital business also involves some manual, repetitive tasks that might add up and steal too much of your precious time. Luckily, these kinds of tasks can be automated.

In this post, we'll have a look at the most popular e-commerce platforms and how to automate common e-commerce workflows in n8n.

The e-commerce platforms leading the global market

Many e-commerce software platforms have emerged in the last years, but the most popular ones, leading the market, are WooCommerce and Shopify.

Market share of e-commerce software platforms worldwide in 2021

Shopify is a paid e-commerce platform that offers templates for quickly designing your online shop. With Shopify, you don't have to worry too much about technicalities and instead focus on selling your products.

WooCommerce is the second most popular e-commerce software platform as of April 2021, owning over 23% of the market share. WooCommerce is actually an open-source WordPress plugin, making it the go-to choice for smaller and cost-conscious shop owners.

Why and when you should automate your online shop

Regardless of the platform you choose or the products you sell, there might come a time when managing your orders becomes too time-consuming and you'll probably find yourself in one of these two common situations:

Your business is growing and you don't have the bandwidth anymore to manage all the orders. You might consider hiring one or two people to help you out, but be aware that additional employees could mean additional responsibilities for you.
Your online shop is a side hustle and you don't have much time to take care of it besides your main job. You neither want to compromise your career nor give up your hobby business.

If you identify yourself with one of these cases, you should consider automating at least part of your work. Workflow automation might sound intimidating or a skill reserved for the tech-savvy ones -- but don't be intimidated.

No-code tools with a visual user interface like n8n make automation feel like childsplay. You can easily combine WooCommerce and Shopify integrations with other apps or services to automate common workflows in your digital store.

Workflow automation ideas for Shopify

n8n offers four nodes for Shopify and WooCommerce: Shopify node, Shopify Trigger node, WooCommerce node, and WooCommerce Trigger node. They provide various operations for managing orders, products, customers, and carts. Read our docs to learn how to configure the nodes, then you can start configuring various parameters to build workflows for your online store.

The Shopify and WooCommerce nodes open up many possibilities for automation, helping you win back time and focus on things that matter. Here are six ideas of workflows you can automate for your Shopify store (and adapt for WooCommerce):

Promote your new products on social media

A survey on social commerce revealed that 43% of users research products online via social networks and 28% discover brands via ads on social media. This goes to show how important it is to have a presence on social media and regularly share and promote your products.

To help you automate your social media activity, we created a workflow that is triggered when you create a product on your shop and automatically shares the news on your Twitter account and a Telegram channel with the message "Hey there, my design is now on a new product ✨ Visit my [shop_name] shop to get this cool product_name 🛍️ [shop_link]".

Workflow for social media promotion

You can make the message even more appealing to your audience by adding a Bannerbear node that automatically creates template images for your new product announcements.

Update customer and order details in Zoho CRM

Once the first orders start to come in, it's time to neatly track the orders and nurture the relationship with your customers, ideally in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

The first branch of this workflow saves customer orders from Shopify to the Zoho CRM and Trello. In the Zoho node, you can select the option Create or Update, which creates a new contact if a contact with a matching last name and email address exists. This way, you don't have to worry about duplicate contacts.

Workflow for saving order details from Shopify to Trello and Zoho CRM

Of course, you can replace the Zoho node with another CRM, for example, Salesforce or Agile CRM.

Create invoices for new orders

A not-so-fun part of being a shop owner is paperwork like invoices. Manually writing the details of each order for each customer is not only tedious but also error-prone. So why not automate this task?

The second branch of this workflow automatically generates invoices with Harvest when an order is created in Shopify. Then, it creates a Trello card with the order information and the invoice attached.

Workflow for creating invoices in Harvest from Shopify orders

Offer coupons and discounts to high-order customers

In 2020, the leading reasons why internet users around the world added a product to their online basket and purchased the item were free delivery, coupons or discounts, and reviews from other customers.

Though free delivery is up to your pricing model, you can (and should) invest in the latter two incentives. For example, you can offer discounts to high-order customers.

The third branch of this workflow is triggered when a new order is created and checks if the order value is above 100 (or any value you set) -- if it is, it sends an email to the customer with a 10% discount coupon for their next order, otherwise, it sends them an email thanking them for their order.

Workflow for filtering high-value customers from Shopify

For extra productivity, you can combine this and the previous two workflows into one super-workflow:

Workflow for processing new Shopify orders

Request customers to write a review after they have received their order

In the previous workflow, we've mentioned product reviews and the third reason why customers buy products online. In recent years, it has become increasingly important to the consumer to read up on a product, business, or service before spending any money. In 2020, reviews were the third top reason that convinced shoppers to purchase a product online. This year, nearly 70% of online shoppers typically read between one and six customer reviews before making a purchasing decision.

This proves the value of investing in customer experience and incentivizing shoppers to write reviews about your products. To incentivize them, you can tweak this workflow to be triggered when an order is marked as fulfilled by selecting the Topic: Order Fulfilled in the Shopify Trigger node. Then, an email should be sent to the customer, asking them to write a review about their product.

Run sales inventories and reports in Google Sheets

When your online shop generates a steady flow of orders, it's necessary to keep an inventory and track your growth regularly. For small businesses, even a Google Sheet can be enough for keeping records.

This workflow is scheduled to run every week, when it gets all your Shopify orders, calculates their sales value, and stores the data in Google Sheets for you to evaluate. Additionally, it can send a message to a Slack channel (if you work together with a small team) or Telegram to inform you about your weekly sales.

Workflow for running inventories of Shopify orders

What's next?

In this post, we talked about the growing popularity of e-commerce and possibilities for automation. Whether as a full-time business or a fun side hustle, if you want to sell goods online -- from art prints to clothing and cosmetic products -- e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce enable you to set up an online shop with only a few clicks.

Now that you've learned how to automate six common workflows in your online shop to save precious time, here's what you can do next:

Try these workflows yourself: install n8n or sign up for a free 30-day trial on n8n.cloud ☁️
Discover more workflows using the Shopify (Trigger) and WooCommerce (Trigger) nodes on the n8n workflows page -- and feel free to share your workflows as well ⚙️
Join the discussion in the n8n community forum 🗣️
Discover more automation use cases 💡

5 tasks you can automate with the new Notion API ⚡

Lorena — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 15:03:56 +0000

If you're into productivity and organisation hacks, you've probably heard of (and even got to love) Notion, the all-in-one workspace app that allows you to take notes, create databases, manage projects, and schedule tasks–all with highly customisable designs.

At n8n, we've been using Notion since day one for the internal organisation: from meeting notes and onboarding checklists to content calendars and product research. Imagine our excitement when we heard that Notion launched their API (beta), thus opening new possibilities of using the app in a more personalised way!

Notion integrations

Our developers got to work right away and we launched two of the most awaited nodes: Notion node and Notion Trigger node.

The Notion node has five basic operations that allow you to manage blocks, get and query databases, create and update records in a database, create and search for pages, and get users who are part of your workspace. The Notion Trigger node allows you to check at regular intervals when a page is added to the database, then trigger a workflow.

Now you can easily connect your tools to Notion to sync data and boost your productivity. We're super excited to automate some of our workflows, and even more so to see what other creative ideas the n8n community comes up with. In this article, we'll present to you 5 Notion workflows you can automate in n8n:

Add candidates' profile assessment to Notion before an interview
Check to-do's in Notion and notify the assignee in Slack
Send notifications about new Notion notes to Mattermost
Add positive feedback messages to a compliments table in Notion
Add memorable articles to your Notion reading list

Add candidates' profile assessment to Notion before an interview

Scheduling interviews has become easier thanks to apps like Calendly, but evaluating candidates' skills and personality still requires a human touch and good psychological understanding. Humantic AI can complement recruiters' evaluation, by generating psychometric assessments (including DISC and the Big Five personality traits) from candidates' résumés.

For this use case, we created a workflow that is triggered when an interview is scheduled via Calendly. The Humantic AI node retrieves the LinkedIn profile of the candidate from Calendly, creates their psychometric assessment, then the Notion node inserts this information into a dedicated page.

By automating this process, you don't have to worry about your applicant database being up to date, and instead, you have more time to prepare for the meeting.

Check to-do's in Notion and notify the assignee in Slack

One of the most useful applications of Notion for teams is keeping to-do lists where you can assign tasks to specific people. A limitation is that the in-app or email notifications can easily be overseen and are out of context. To overcome this issue, you can use this workflow that regularly checks your to-do list in Notion and notifies the person in Slack when a new task is assigned to them.

Of course, you can replace the Slack node with another messaging app of your choice. We prefer Mattermost and have built several workflows around it, which substantially improve our communication and productivity.

Send notifications about new Notion notes to Mattermost

Another practical use of Notion pages is for taking notes in meetings and keeping them well-organised by topic or meeting type. After the meeting, you might first want to go get a coffee before taking care of the action items just discussed. But as it often happens, even a short break can interrupt your working flow, so you may easily forget what you needed to do or who you had to follow up with once you're back at your desk.

Luckily, you can automate your chores away! This workflow is triggered whenever new meeting notes are added in Notion. If the property field in the notes mentions the Marketing team, a message about the new notes will be sent to the Marketing channel in Mattermost, so all team members are up to date. Now you can enjoy your long-awaited coffee break knowing that the main action items will be taken care of.

Add positive feedback messages to a compliments table in Notion

We, humans, are prone to negativity bias, meaning that we remember negative experiences more (strongly) than positive ones. For example, in a business context, when getting feedback from customers on your product or service, you are more likely to keep in mind that one negative review over the other tens of praise messages. This bias can impact your perception of your work and the team spirit, so it's important to highlight the good news.

For this use case, we built a workflow that analyses the sentiment of feedback messages submitted via Typeform: messages with negative sentiment are added to a Trello board, while the ones with positive sentiment are added to a compliments table in Notion, then shared in a Slack channel. Looking once in a while at the impact you have on your customers is a wonderful way to keep your team motivated and inspired!

Add memorable articles to your Notion reading list

"The modern day reading list includes more than just books.", writes Notion in their Reading List template, and we couldn't agree more. Millions of blog posts, news articles, and research papers are published every day, serving you information on how to solve problems, improve various skills, make informed decisions--or are just food for thought. You'll most probably stumble on some articles worth sharing or saving for a later (re-)read.

To help you manage your reading list, we designed a workflow that automatically adds important articles to a Notion page from Discord. When you type in Discord the slash command /[URL], with the URL of the article you want to save, the workflow extracts the article title and adds the linked title to the reading list in your Notion page. When all is done, you get a confirmation message on Discord: "The link was added to Notion." Now you can focus only on reading and taking notes.

Next Steps

So, which workflow will you try first? On our blog, you can find more ideas of workflows that you can automate in the workplace and in your personal life, which you can now tweak to integrate Notion. Share your ideas with us on Twitter or in the community forum — we're curious to see what you build! And if you want to get the latest content on automation with n8n, subscribe to our newsletter 💌

15 Google apps you can combine and automate to increase productivity

Lorena — Wed, 12 May 2021 10:31:59 +0000

Google creates some of the best services on the web for professional use cases, with G Suite being the go-to choice for many businesses. One of the main advantages is having an ecosystem of apps for various specific uses: from organisation and productivity tools to databases and language processing services.

n8n offers 15 nodes for the most popular Google apps that you can combine to build powerful automated workflows. In this article, we'll give you some ideas of processes you can automate, so that you can boost productivity in the workplace, save time from repetitive tasks, and focus on what matters. Specifically, we'll show you eight workflows that use various Google nodes to automate analytics reports, database monitoring, onboarding processes, event registrations, feedback analysis, and file management--there's something for everyone!

Connect Google Analytics and BigQuery to Sheets and Gmail to automate your reports

To meet your business goals and check whether you're on the right track, it's important to keep an eye on different metrics (like visitors to your website, the performance of online campaigns) and create regular reports for stakeholders or clients. These tasks can be repetitive, so why not let this ready-made workflow do the work for you? The Google Analytics node will get the number of sessions on your website, grouped by country, and store the data in Airtable (or in Google Sheets, to stay in the Google ecosystem).

You can further extend this workflow by adding a Gmail node that emails the report to the stakeholders, so that you save up another 5 precious minutes of your work day! In addition, you can add a Google BigQuery node to retrieve records from or insert new records into your data warehouse. And if you're feeling particularly creative, you can even create a dashboard for KPIs from different sources, as explained in this tutorial.

Connect to Google Cloud Firestore to automatically monitor your databases

Another common use case related to data management is database monitoring, where you need to track the performance of your database and monitor key metrics in real-time, to quickly identify and fix potential issues. Google offers two cloud-based databases for real-time data syncing: Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database; n8n offers you the nodes to automate them: Google Cloud Firestore node and Google Cloud Realtime Database node. You can schedule workflows like this one that regularly inserts data into a database or updates it.

Connect G Suite apps to automate the onboarding of new team members

Hiring new members for your team is an exciting moment! Not so exciting is the series of small boring tasks you need to do in advance, like creating an email account and setting up meetings. You can turn this process into an automated workflow that uses the Gmail node to detect when you get an email with the subject "Welcome our new team member!", then creates a new user account with the G Suite Admin node, adds the user to your contacts using the Google Contacts node, and finally schedules a welcome meeting for you using the Google Calendar node. Now your new hire is all set up for their first day and you have more time to prepare a nice onboarding experience (you could even let the Google Tasks node add that to your to-do list automatically).

Connect Typeform to Google Sheets and Calendar to automate event registrations

Organising an event involves a lot of work, even in these times when most of them are hosted online. One of the main challenges is keeping track of attendees and notifying them on time about the latest updates in the program. Doing these things manually would be not only time-consuming, but also prone to error. Luckily, this too can be automated and we even have an in-depth tutorial dedicated to this use case. The workflow makes use of the Google Sheets node to store information from a registration form like Typeform, the Google Calendar node to create events for the conference sessions, and the Gmail node to notify the attendees. For more engagement, you can use the Orbit node to pull in community metrics or post notifications.

Connect Typeform with Google Natural Language and Sheets to analyse and store customer feedback

Getting feedback on your product or service is an incredible opportunity for improvement. Particularly insightful are written reviews from customers, but simply reading them is not feasible, especially as your customer base grows. A workflow for this case uses Google Cloud Natural Language node to analyse the sentiment of reviews submitted in Typeform, filter positive and negative reviews, and store them in Google Sheets. Depending on your needs, you can also translate the reviews with the Google Translate node before analysing them.

Connect to Google Drive to Slides and Gmail to automatically manage your files

Let's face it: we could all be a bit tidier in our digital workspace. But it seems like no matter how rigorously you organise your folders, a document always gets saved mistakenly in the wrong folder and before you know, digital clutter reigns.

A solution to this problem is automating the regular file flow, so you don't have to worry about it anymore. For example, you can start with this workflow to get the Google Slides of your weekly presentation, add the Google Drive node to store the slides in a shared team folder and the Gmail node to email them to the team members. You can also connect the Google Drive node with other apps to automatically save files sent to you in a specific folder. Even your personal budget can be automated, as you can learn from this tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to add your expense receipts to Google Sheets.

Will you use any of these workflows to automate your Google ecosystem, or do you have other ideas? Let us know in the community forum or on Twitter 🧡 And if you want to get more content about automation, subscribe to our newsletter 📧

This post was originally published on the n8n blog on May 12, 2021.

Automate your data processing pipeline in 9 steps ⚙️

Lorena — Tue, 04 May 2021 10:10:01 +0000

If you've ever struggled with setting up pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading data (so-called ETL jobs), managing different databases, and scheduling workflows -- know that there's an easier way to automate these data engineering tasks. In this article, you'll learn how to build an n8n workflow that processes text, stores data in two databases, and sends messages to Slack.

A few months ago, I completed a Data Science bootcamp, where one week was all about data engineering, ETL pipelines, and workflow automation. The project for that week was to create a database of tweets that use the hashtag #OnThisDay, along with their sentiment score, and post tweets in a Slack channel to inform members about historical events that happened on that day. This pipeline had to be done with Docker Compose and included six steps:

Collect tweets with the hashtag #OnThisDay
Store the collected tweets in a MongoDB database
Extract tweets from the database
Process the tweets (clean the text, analyse sentiment)
Load the cleaned tweets and their sentiment score in a Postgres database
Extract and post tweets with positive sentiment in a Slack channel

This is a fun project that offers lots of learning opportunities about different topics: APIs, text processing with Natural Language Processing libraries, both relational and non-relational databases, social media and communication apps, as well as workflow orchestration. If you're wondering, like I did, why we had to use two different databases, the answer is simple: for the sake of learning more. Postgres and MongoDB represent not only different database providers, but different kinds of database structures -- relational (SQL) vs non-relational (NoSQL) -- and it's useful to be familiar with both.

Though our use case is just for fun, this pipeline can support most common data engineering tasks (e.g. aggregating data from multiple sources, setting up and managing the data flow across databases, developing and maintaining data pipelines).

I was really excited, though also a bit overwhelmed by all the things I had to set up for this project. In total, I spent five days learning the tools, debugging, and building this pipeline with Python (including libraries like Tweepy, TextBlob, VADER, and SQLAlchemy), Postgres, MongoDB, Docker, and Airflow (most frustrating part...). If you're interested to see how I did this, you can check out the project on GitHub and read this blog post.

But in this article, I'll show you an easier way to achieve the same result in as much as an hour -- with n8n!

Workflow

Since I started using n8n, I've been looking for use cases for various data science tasks, starting with my existing projects. When I realised that all the apps and services that I used in my tweets pipeline are available as n8n nodes, I decided to replicate the project as an n8n workflow with nine nodes:

Cron node to schedule the workflow
Twitter node to collect the tweets
MongoDB to store the tweets
Google Cloud Natural Language to analyse the sentiment of the tweets
Set to extract the sentiment values
Postgres to store the tweets and their sentiment
IF to filter positive and negative tweets
Slack to post tweets into a channel
NoOp to ignore negative tweets

In this article, I'll show you how to set up this workflow node by node. If this is your first n8n workflow, have a look at our quickstart guide to learn how to set up n8n and how to navigate the Editor UI. It's also helpful to have at least basic knowledge of databases and SQL.

Once you have your n8n Editor UI open, there are two ways to follow this tutorial: either copy the workflow from here into your Editor UI and deactivate the nodes, so that you can execute and test each node separately, or add the nodes one at a time.

1. Starting the workflow

We will begin with the end in mind: We know that we want this whole workflow to run every day, so first we need to set up the Cron node to trigger our workflow every day at 06:00.

The Cron node makes it very easy to schedule and trigger workflows, compared to setting up scheduling and triggers in Airflow, and this saved me so much time and nerves!

2. Collecting tweets

Next, we are going to collect tweets with the hashtag #OnThisDay. To do this, first you need to create a Twitter Developer account and register an app. Follow the instructions in our reference docs to learn how to set up your Twitter app and get the necessary credentials (Consumer Key and Consumer Secret). Once you have your credentials, copy and paste them in the Credentials field of the Twitter node. Next, set the parameters:

Operation: Search
Search Text: #OnThisDay
Limit: 3. This last step is not mandatory, but I recommend limiting the number of collected tweets at least for testing the workflow, to ensure that you don't reach the query rate limit of the Twitter API and Google Cloud Natural Language.

3. Inserting tweets into MongoDB

Now that we collected some tweets, we need to store them into a database. MongoDB is a non-relational database (NoSQL) that stores data in JSON-like documents. Since our tweets are returned in JSON format, MongoDB is the ideal database to store them in and the MongoDB node allows us to connect to the database. Before configuring the node, you need to create a MongoDB instance, set up a cluster, create a database and a collection within it.

Create a MongoDB account
Set up a cluster: cloud.mongodb.com > Clusters > Create New Cluster
Create a database: Cluster > Collections > Create Database
Create a collection: Cluster > Collections > Database > Create Collection
Create a field: Collection > Insert document > Type the field "text" below "_id"
Allow access to the database: Project > Security > Network Access > IP Access List > Add your IP address.
Connect to the database from your terminal: mongo "mongodb+srv://YourClusterName.mongodb.net/" --username YourUsername

If you need more detailed information or other set up options, refer to the MongoDB documentation. Now that we have a MongoDB collection up and running, we can set up the MongoDB node for our workflow. Set up:

Connection String: mongodb+srv://YourClusterName.mongodb.net/YourDatabaseName
Database: YourDatabaseName

Next, configure the node parameters to insert the collected tweets into the collection:

Operation: Insert
Collection: YourCollectionName
Fields: text

4. Analysing the sentiment of tweets

Here comes my personal favourite part of this workflow: analysing the sentiment of tweets, i.e. the feeling associated with the entire text or entities in the text. For this, we use the Google Cloud Natural Language node, which analyses a text and returns two numerical values:

score: Sentiment score between -1.0 (negative sentiment) and 1.0 (positive sentiment).
magnitude: A non-negative number in the [0, +inf) range, which represents the absolute magnitude of sentiment regardless of score (positive or negative).

Both results are returned as documentSentiment in JSON format:

{
"magnitude": number,
"score": number
}

Before configuring the node, you have to sign up on the Google Cloud Platform to enable the API and get the necessary credentials (Client ID and Client Secret). Follow the instructions in our reference docs to set up your account and the node credentials.

Once that's done, add an expression to the parameter Content by clicking on the gear icon and selecting Current Node > Input Data > text.

As a side note, here it was interesting to see how differently Google Cloud Natural Language and the VADER and TextBlob libraries evaluated the sentiment of text:

5. Processing sentiment analysis

Now that we have sentiment scores for each tweet, we want to insert the text, sentiment score, and magnitude of the tweets into a new Postgres database. Since the magnitude sentiment score and the magnitude are included in the documentSentiment, we need to extract them in order to insert the values in two separate columns in Postgres.

For this, we use the Set node, which allows us to set new values based on the data we already have. In the node parameters, set three values:

Score (number): Current Node > Input Data > JSON > documentSentiment > score
Magnitude (number): Current Node > Input Data > JSON > documentSentiment > score
Text (string): Current Node > Input Data > JSON > sentences > [Item: 0] > text > content

6. Inserting tweets values into Postgres

Next, we want to insert the newly set data values into a Postgres database. First, you need to install Postgres, then create a database and a table for tweets. The process is quite similar to the MongoDB setup and you can do this from your terminal:

1. Connect to Postgres:psql
2. Create a database: createdb twitter
3. Go into the created database: psql twitter
4. Create columns in the database. The columns have to be named like the values defined in the Set node, in order to be matched: CREATE TABLE tweets (text varchar(280), score numeric(4,3), magnitude numeric(4,3));

Now we can go ahead and configure the Postgres node. Fill in the name of your database, username, and password in the Credential Data fields, then configure the node parameters:

Operation: Insert
Table: tweets
Columns: text, score, magnitude
Return Fields: *

After executing the node, you can check if the tweets have been inserted in the table by running SELECT * FROM tweets; in the terminal.

7. Filtering positive and negative tweets

Here comes another fun part related to sentiment analysis: filtering negative tweets. For this, we use the IF node, which allows us to split the workflow conditionally based on comparison operations. We define positive tweets as those with a sentiment score above 0. To configure the IF node with this condition, configure the parameters:

Value 1: Current Node > Input Data > JSON > score
Operation: Larger
Value 2: 0

This condition determines the data flow to the following connection: if the sentiment score is greater than 0, the tweet will be sent to Slack, otherwise it will just be kept stored in the database.

8. Sending positive tweets to Slack

The way to send tweets from a database to a Slack channel is via a Slackbot, which you have to create from your Slack account. Follow the instructions on Slack and in our reference docs to learn how to create your Slackbot and get the necessary credentials (Access Token).

Once you have the Slack node credentials set up, configure the parameters:

Resource: Message
Operation: Post
Channel:
Text: 🐦 NEW TWEET with sentiment score {{$json["score"]}} and magnitude {{$json["magnitude"]}} ⬇️ {{$json["text"]}}

After executing the node, check your Slack channel for a new tweet:

9. Ignoring negative tweets

The last node in this workflow is the NoOp node, which is used when we don't want to perform any operations. The purpose of this node is to make the workflow easier to read and understand where the data flow stops. Though this node is not necessary for our workflow, I included it to mark visually the false condition and make it clear that the workflow can be extended in this direction.

Finally, execute the whole workflow and activate it, so that it runs as scheduled. Also, check your MongoDB collection and Postgres database to make sure that the tweets have been inserted properly.

Next steps

Congrats --- you now have an automated workflow that informs you every day about positive historical events that happened on that day! As usual, you can tweak and extend this workflow, for example by keeping track of whether a tweet has been processed already, adding an action for the condition when the IF node is false, or cleaning the text of the collected tweets to check whether it influences the sentiment score.

Of course, you can also build other ETL pipelines for various business use cases, such as product feedback at scale, Jira ticket automation based on customer sentiment, or regular database querying for reporting.

Did you find this tutorial helpful? Feel free to share it on Twitter 🐦 and discuss it in the community forum 🧡 To get our latest content about automation, subscribe to our blog by adding your email address in the form below!

This post was originally published on the n8n blog on May 4, 2021.

How a digital strategist uses n8n for online marketing 💻

Omar Ajoue — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 09:45:05 +0000

We talked to Gustavo Salvador about how he uses n8n workflows for digital marketing and creative content for his clients.

How Gustavo Salvador uses n8n for digital marketing

Gustavo Salvador, digital strategist and digital training co-producer at MSG Agência Digital, has been using n8n in his online business. We talked to him about how he uses n8n workflows for digital marketing and creative content for his clients.

Hi Gustavo, tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Gustavo Salvador, I work as a digital strategist and digital training co-producer. I also run a digital marketing agency that has been running 100% remotely for over a year and growing constantly. We plan daily sales funnels, lead generation, marketing email automation, social media content, video editing, and other tasks related to digital authority construction and digital product sales.

Have you tried other automation tools before?

I have always loved process automation and it made me love the digital market. I worked as an occupational safety technician in the steel industry before joining the digital marketing ecosystem, so I know how industries work. I tried some tools, but none with the power that n8n provides. It was undoubtedly love at first sight, even for users like me who are not programmers. The installation was easy, practical, and the functions are endless. Being a fair-code project allows me great power to work with strategy automation and possibilities.

What kind of workflows are you building with n8n?

At MSG Agência Digital, I work as a specialist co-producer in a few areas, like paid traffic management, design, video editing, copywriting, web design, and sales strategy, while my team works on support levels 1 and 2. But we also want to have a social impact.

People who are getting started with digital marketing can become affiliated with our stores, learn about digital marketing, and become sales representatives for some extra cash. Many of our affiliates are not experts in digital marketing, so we teach them how to come up with effective strategies and help them build a lead database without having to set up different tools.

Our own setup includes Hotmart for the sales process and WordPress for creating landing pages, promoting webinars, and general company information. We also sell this toolkit to other companies that have a similar business model.

For example, for a client we created a landing page on WordPress with the goal of collecting user information via a signup form. We use WordPress plugins to post the lead information to an n8n webhook, which then creates a card on a Trello board for each of our affiliates. Our Trello board works similar to a CRM where each affiliate gets in touch with their potential customers and closes the deals. From Trello, the sales reps qualify leads and finish the sales process.

Here is a recording of this workflow (in Portuguese):

Which integrations do you use the most?

Currently I am using Webhook and Trello nodes. I am also working on more integrations using Google Sheets, Mautic, Asana, and a few others.

Which n8n feature do you like the most?

The possibility to add custom scripts is great for adding business logic to workflows.

Have you created n8n workflows for personal use?

Not yet, I have been working on automating business processes first, but I have a couple of ideas for personal workflows. One is to automate the many WhatsApp calls I get. Another is to control the office lighting and devices like AC systems. I'd like to try to do this with n8n in the future.

Do you have any tips for someone who wants to try n8n?

My tip is to try to understand processes before creating workflows, so you can find repeatable and automatable patterns that can be converted into workflows.

How do you see yourself using n8n in the future?

I believe I will build many workflows in the near future, I am studying some new use cases. I want to master all n8n functionalities and the features it provides and create new automations for my daily job. For example, I'd like to automate billing processes, course certificate generation, and payments to service providers via n8n.

Is there a feature you would like to have on n8n that currently does not exist?

I would like to see a bigger Portuguese speaking community and more workflow tutorials in Portuguese, with practical applications and goals.

n8n users come from a wide range of backgrounds, experience levels, and interests. We have been looking to highlight different users and their projects in our blog posts. If you're working with n8n and would like to inspire the community, email lorena@n8n.io to tell your story 💌

This article was originally published on the n8n blog.

5 creative ideas for virtual team building events for startups 🎭

Leoni Bruch — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 09:15:55 +0000

Creating a place where people love to work and collaborate can be challenging in a fast growing startup. A constant high number of new joiners and a remote-first work culture are not the best circumstances for team building activities in startups. Luckily, there are still many opportunities to connect your remote team members without meeting in person.

Here are five creative ideas for remote team building events for startups.

1. One-Day Hackathon

Organise a one-day hackathon with your team to automate tasks or build low-code products.

If you want to bring your team together, enhance cross-functional collaboration, and increase your startup's efficiency at the same time, this is the must do event. To get this started you need to set up teams of 2-3 people. It's important that the team has mixed technical skill levels to ensure that everyone can build a product or automate processes. There are also many no-code tools available (e.g. n8n, Webflow, Airtable, MailChimp etc.) which make it possible to run the event for non-developers. In preparation, it is advisable to organise team meetings in advance to give everyone time to decide what to build or which processes to automate. There are many options, like building a dashboard to automatically track your KPIs or automating your customer onboarding processes. You can find some ideas for workflows here.

As for the schedule, you can divide the day into five sections:

1. Welcome and icebreaker

2. Hacking Part I

3. Virtual team lunch

4. Hacking Part II

5. Presentation, celebration, and drinks.

Group size: teams of 2-3, no limit for the number of teams

Duration: whole day

Best for: dev focused teams, cross-functional collaboration, mixed technical skill levels

2. Art night

Your office walls could use some color or you just want to take some time out and get creative? Then this will be the perfect team event for you.

You could use the art night to paint a collage for your office, where every team member creates one piece of the picture. Even if it takes a bit of effort to draw the first lines, it is an excellent activity to get everyone out of their stressful everyday life and have a lot of fun together. It's even nicer when you all listen to the same music and have a tasty drink while painting. It is amazing to see how the event can strengthen your team affiliation!

If you want someone to organise the event and guide your painting session, you should find a local art teacher or school to run the session, ideally one which can also provide paint and materials to the team.

Group size: no limit

Duration: 2-3 hours

Best for: team affiliation, creativity, relaxing

3. Among Us

30 min coffee chats, Thursday after-work or after your next lunch break? Honestly, there is always time for a quick round of Among Us.

If you haven't heard about it, don't worry you will learn it easily. You can play the game with up to 10 people. The game takes place on a spaceship where all crew members need to complete different tasks. Unfortunately, up to 3 team members are Impostors that sabotage and kill crew mates. The goal of the crew is to identify the Impostor(s); the goal of the Impostor(s) is to kill everyone before completing their tasks. Prep for this quick team event is pretty simple: You only need a video meeting and the Among Us app on your smartphone. I swear your team will love this.

Group size: 3-10

Duration: 15 min

Best for: taking a break from a long day, new teams, fun

4. Fitness activities

With so many of us working from home, it can be difficult to get motivated to get up and get moving. Why not take the opportunity to boost the team spirit and work out together?

This will not only be really beneficial for everyone's physical and mental health, but also bond your team. There are many activities you can do together, like yoga or HIT (high intensity training). In any case, it should be something that everyone would enjoy. You can make a poll where team members can vote for their favourite activity. If you don't have a sporty volunteer in your team, it's a great idea to ask a professional trainer for a private online session.

Group size: no limit

Duration: 60 min

Best for: active teams, mental break

5. Escape Room

Another online game but so much different! You probably know about Escape Rooms: Those sometimes more or less spooky rooms where you need to team up and solve different riddles to escape the room get out.

The team's goal is to solve all riddles in a predetermined time. Though this game is commonly played offline at a real location, there are also online versions, just as exciting. Working together under time pressure will make it a lasting experience for everyone, so this is the perfect opportunity to improve your team collaboration skills and have a lot of fun together.

Group size: no limit

Duration: 60 min

Best for: problem solving, team bonding, collaboration

Out of all these fun ideas, our team is most excited about the automation hackathon. If you want to learn more about how we run it and how to organise a remote one for your team, feel free to contact us on Twitter or email. If you have any questions about n8n, drop by our forum 🧡.

This article was originally published on the n8n blog.

DEV Community: n8n

[Live Demo] Automate a Viral Newsletter Using n8n + Real-Time Web Data

How hyperautomation will transform business operations

Table of Contents

What is hyperautomation?

How is hyperautomation different from automation?

Why do we need hyperautomation?

How are businesses leveraging hyperautomation?

What is the future of hyperautomation?

1. Orchestrated automation processes

2. Automation marketplaces

3. Vendor-agnostic hyperautomation

4. Infrastructure automation

Start automating!

How to automatically manage contributions to open-source projects 🏷️

Table of contents

Prerequisites for building the workflow

Workflow for assigning GitHub issues to contributors

1. Trigger the workflow on GitHub events

2. Route the workflow on specific events

3. Handle new GitHub issues

4. Assign the issue

5. Handle new comments on GitHub issues

6. Check if the issue is already assigned

7. Assign an issue to a contributor

8. Add a comment to the issue

What's next?

6 features of tasks that can be automated 📑

1. Repetitive tasks

2. Boring tasks

3. Frequent, regular tasks

4. Rule-based tasks

5. Software-based tasks

6. Time-consuming tasks

Create a toxic language detector for Telegram in 4 steps 🤬

Workflow for detecting toxic language in Telegram messages

1. Get new messages from Telegram

2. Analyze the toxicity of the message

3. Filter toxic messages

4. Send a warning message to Telegram

What's next?

How to get started with CRM automation (with 3 no-code workflow ideas) 👥

Why and when you should use a CRM

3 steps to CRM automation for the sales funnel

1. Choose the right CRM for your use case

2. Decide what you will automate

3. Build workflows

Capture leads from Typeform submissions

Send reminders after meetings with prospects

Process newly created deals based on their stage, value, and priority

What's next?

6 e-commerce workflows to power up your Shopify store 🛒

The e-commerce platforms leading the global market

Why and when you should automate your online shop

Workflow automation ideas for Shopify

Promote your new products on social media

Update customer and order details in Zoho CRM

Create invoices for new orders

Offer coupons and discounts to high-order customers

Request customers to write a review after they have received their order

Run sales inventories and reports in Google Sheets

What's next?

5 tasks you can automate with the new Notion API ⚡

Notion integrations

Add candidates' profile assessment to Notion before an interview

Check to-do's in Notion and notify the assignee in Slack

Send notifications about new Notion notes to Mattermost

Add positive feedback messages to a compliments table in Notion

Add memorable articles to your Notion reading list

Next Steps

15 Google apps you can combine and automate to increase productivity

Connect Google Analytics and BigQuery to Sheets and Gmail to automate your reports

Connect to Google Cloud Firestore to automatically monitor your databases

Connect G Suite apps to automate the onboarding of new team members

Connect Typeform to Google Sheets and Calendar to automate event registrations

Connect Typeform with Google Natural Language and Sheets to analyse and store customer feedback

Connect to Google Drive to Slides and Gmail to automatically manage your files

Automate your data processing pipeline in 9 steps ⚙️

Workflow

1. Starting the workflow