What is n8n?
A couple of years ago, I was working as a copywriter for a health information website. My job was updating medical articles — think guides on symptoms, treatments, conditions. Whenever a new clinical guideline dropped (often 300 pages long), I had to figure out which parts of our articles needed updating and rewrite them.
It was slow work. I'd spend hours cross-referencing pages, and I wasn't getting through nearly enough articles.
Then I discovered n8n and started building workflows with AI agents. I fed the articles and guidelines into a structured pipeline, and suddenly the AI could tell me exactly what needed changing and suggest the updates. My output went through the roof. My boss noticed. I went from being a working student copywriter earning 15 euros an hour to being the AI ops guy earning 150.
That's not a typo. Same company, same desk, ten times the pay — because I learned to automate.
The One Pattern Behind Every Workflow
Every workflow you'll ever build follows the same shape:
Trigger → Action
A trigger is the "when." When an email arrives. When a form is submitted. When the clock hits 9am. When a row gets added to a spreadsheet.
An action is the "then." Then send a message. Then update a record. Then call an API. Then notify someone on Slack.
That's it. Simple workflows have a trigger and one or two actions. Complex ones might have twenty steps with branching logic and AI making decisions. But the pattern is always the same.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Someone in a meeting says "every time a customer cancels, I update the spreadsheet, email the account manager, and log it in our CRM" — and you think: that's a trigger and three actions. I could build that.
Why n8n?
I'll be honest: I picked n8n originally because they're from Berlin and I thought that was cool. And Zapier was too expensive for what I needed.
But the more I used n8n, the more I realized it was the right choice for deeper reasons.
It's free to self-host. You run it on your own machine or server. No subscription fees, no per-task limits. Your workflows run as much as they need to without anyone asking you to upgrade.
It's open source. You can see exactly how it works. Your data stays yours. No vendor lock-in.
Self-hosting unlocks the real power. This is the thing that made n8n my primary tool: when you self-host, you can install npm packages — JavaScript libraries that do almost anything you can think of. Need to parse a PDF? There's a package for that. Generate an image? Package. Convert currencies, validate emails, process CSVs? Packages. When I started programming, the most mind-blowing realization was that somebody already built a tool for nearly every problem I could think of — and it was free and online. n8n lets you tap into all of that.
400+ built-in integrations. Google Sheets, Slack, Gmail, Notion, HubSpot, PostgreSQL, OpenAI — if you use it at work, n8n probably connects to it. And if it doesn't, there's an HTTP Request node that can talk to any API.
Seeing the World with New Eyes
Here's the part nobody tells you upfront.
The most valuable thing about learning automation isn't the time you save. It's that you start thinking differently about work.
Before n8n, whenever my boss gave me a repetitive task, I just accepted it. Oh, I'm the guy who updates this spreadsheet whenever that thing happens.
Now, whenever I encounter a task like that, my default is: this gets automated. The only question is how. And only if it turns out to be genuinely impossible do I do it manually. I automate by default.
Part of that is that I'm inherently lazy — I don't want to spend time on things that bore me. But mostly it's because once you know what APIs are and how they work, you realize that almost every piece of software you use at work can be connected and automated. Slack, Google Sheets, your email, your invoicing tool, your CRM — they all have APIs. They're all waiting to be wired together.
That shift in perspective has been more valuable to my career than any single workflow I've built.
The Career Angle (Let's Be Real)
I went from 15 to 150 euros an hour. I now do this full-time and get paid at those rates consistently.
If I hadn't learned this and stayed in my old copywriting job, I'd honestly be pretty worried about my future right now. AI can write articles. AI can update content. The role I had before is exactly the kind of job that's being automated away.
But instead of being replaced by AI, I became the person who builds the AI workflows. That's a very different position to be in.
If you're in a job where you feel threatened by what AI can do — this course is for you. The best response isn't to hope it goes away. It's to start using it. Start thinking about your work on a meta level: what am I doing manually that a workflow could handle? n8n is the best gateway into that way of thinking.
What You'll Build in This Course
This course gives you the structured path that doesn't exist yet for n8n. If you want to learn to code, there's Codecademy. If you want to learn n8n, there are long YouTube videos you have to manually search through and hope they cover what you need.
I've watched plenty of those videos myself. And honestly, in the beginning I mostly just watched them rather than actually doing the exercises. That's not how you learn. You learn by building.
So this course is hands-on. Every lesson gives you a task and an exercise workflow. You build first, get hints if you're stuck, and reveal the solution when you're done. We use video too — so you're not just reading walls of text — but the core of every lesson is you doing the work in n8n.
The course mixes skills lessons (where you learn specific techniques) with story arcs (where you apply those skills to multi-step projects):
- You'll decode a CV written entirely in Wookiee — Chewbacca submitted his resume and a recruiter needs your help translating it
- You'll build an AI email triage system that reads incoming support requests and routes them to the right team
- You'll respond to an emergency at a dinosaur park using AI vision and agent workflows
The scenarios are fun, but the skills are real. Fetching data from APIs, transforming JSON, building AI agents — these are the same techniques you'll use to automate your actual work.
Ready?
You don't need any programming experience. We start from zero — literally installing n8n on your machine — and build up step by step.
In the next lesson, you'll get n8n running for free. Then we'll explore the interface and build your first workflow.
Let's go.