This is the duplicated version of my medium blogpost the first time I exploring n8n
Hey folks, I want to share a recent journey that left me feeling a bit foolish, but also super excited. It’s about n8n a tool I almost ignored, but now I realize how much easier it could have made my daily workflow.
My First Impressions
at first, I thought n8n was just another automation tool that wasn’t worth learning, especially since I’m not a professional developer. Coding isn’t really my main thing, just know enough to get by. All I can do is just a mediocre web development using nextjs, nothing more.
One of my ideas has been to build a crossposting app, automatically sharing content across platforms. Initially, I thought I’d roll up my sleeves and go fullstack with Next.js (which tho only thing i know). But with work and life in the way, this project sat in the “maybe later” pile for ages.
Then, one day, I came across this post on Threads about automation. My first thought was: “This probably beats hand-coding everything.”
It would be super easy!!!, well… not really
My first attempt wasn’t smooth at all. Turns out, some nodes in n8n need a public IP and SSL, but I was running everything locally. The country I live, getting a public IP is tough, most connections are behind NAT. I tried methods like Cloudflare Tunnel and ngrok, but for some reason, my webhooks just wouldn’t respond. Probably just a skill issue on my end, because my mentor, Abah Indrazm, got Cloudflare Tunnel working fine.
Cloud Hosting to the Rescue, Temporarily, I PROMISE!
I decided to just spin up a free GCP VM for temporary hosting and surprisingly, it worked! I learned so much in the process:
- Setting up a GCP VM
- Opening and closing ports
- Installing Docker and nginx
- Setting up Let’s Encrypt SSL
- Connecting Cloudflare to a subdomain with strict SSL
- Locking down n8n’s ports
- Creating LinkedIn and Twitter dev accounts
- Learning how to integrate OAuth
- Authenticating Discord bots via webhook/token
- Managing Telegram bots
Honestly, it was overwhelming at times. Huge shoutout to my buddy GROK for staying calm even when I was losing it!
Worth It? YES. Makes happy? YES.
After all that, my flow finally ran successfully.
Since then, I’ve expanded and built more automations. One of my favorites is for WordPress: it not only posts automatically, but also:
- Generates optimized slugs, titles, meta descriptions
- Paraphrases content for focus
- Picks categories and featured images
- Uploads to my website every 3 hours (or on demand via Telegram)
It usually takes less than a minute per article (about 40–50 seconds) and costs around $0.04 per post. Seriously, it’s so worth it.
Next Up: Money Manager for the Family
Now, I’m working on something for my family an expense tracking bot. The idea is simple: send your expenses to a Telegram bot, let AI analyze them, and send the parsed result back to confirm. Once approved, the data goes to Google Sheets for tracking, and eventually, visualization in Looker Studio.
Inputs can be just text “bought Nike shoes for $1500”, or even a photo of a receipt. If it’s an image, I’m parsing it with Google Cloud Vision (thanks for the free 1,000 images/month!) or you can use LlamaParse as well (5000 pages) , doing a bit of data cleaning, sending the result back for approval.
Still working on the Looker Studio integration and database piece, so stay tuned.
not gonna lie! n8n honestly surprised me. It’s not magic, but if you invest a bit of time (and maybe get a public VM), it’s insanely powerful especially if you’re not a hardcore coder.
If you want to chat, ask questions, or see my scripts, check these out: https://n8n.io/creators/khmuhtadin/
Thanks for reading don’t be like me and sleep on tools that can make your life easier!