I Got Rejected By Devs So I Built 50 Workflows

So I'm Max, the original Flowgrammer. I'm here with Summer Chang. Hi, Summer.

Hi. Hi, everyone.

Summer, where are we right now?

We are in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. Here we are at this park. They're having this big wheel contact.

Thank you very much for the recommendation. As I was saying off camera, very often when I come to San Francisco, I hang out in startup offices. So it's nice to have a little bit of the culture.

And the weather is nice. Good vibe here. Everybody is having fun. People with their family, they dress up. They're enjoying the Sunday time with family and friends.

I was looking at your LinkedIn and I noticed that you have a design background, right? You have an MFA. How did automation come into the picture with that sort of a background?

Actually, I just got into the automation in February when I joined the hackathon event hosted by Lovable and ElevenLabs. I walked into the hackathon without any teammates. I was a designer talking to maybe one-third of the people there. They're all developers. And then I pitched myself to them like, well, you need a designer to be on your team, but no one No one wants me to be on their team. That was like so much rejections. People, they don't need designers to be on their team.

If I may, as a UX designer myself, fools, fools. You need a UXer in the room. We know what we're doing. That must have been very frustrating.

So that's why I'm like, I probably can do some of the no-code tools and to do the backend side of things. I can do the frontend side of things, but what's the backend side of things looks like? So that's why I find out in the end, way too long. Has so much resources, great community. I just enjoy learning this tool and have built over maybe 50, 60 of automation flow.

You have 50 to 60 workflows and how long have you been using N8N?

Less than 30 days. For N8N, you can have the 2 weeks free trial, but yeah, less than a month.

Summer, you definitely make more workflows in a month than I have, but it sounds like you caught the flowgramming bug. That's fantastic. But just to repeat back in my own words, so you were at a hackathon and you wanted to find a team and you were having a hard time finding a team because you've got this UX background and they're like, well, we don't need UX anymore. We got Lovable, right? And then you left the hackathon. You're like, you know what? I think I could do backend as well. And that's what triggered your journey to find a tool where you could do that so that you could use your UX skills, have the backend as well.

Yes. I'm like new to the tool. So I need to find the templates I can use or people are teaching or using the tools and then I can actually learn quickly. That's why I'm joining some of the Communities, especially Neck Hurts AIS Plus, a shout out to him. He's awesome. He's such a great instructor, great community too. People, they are so inspiring building automation. They share their templates, the ones they're building. It was great learning journey. When you got stuck, you ask for help and people, they're like, oh, you know, maybe try this, try that. Sometimes it's like trial and error. It's not like you did something wrong. Sometimes it could be something really tiny.

Development is a lot like that. as well. You get some errors, you figure it out, you get some errors, but that's progress. You found N8N, you found the community, you found support in it. Nate Hook, he's such a great guy. I had him on the show recently. He's such a humble human being, even with all his success and whatnot. You know, a lot of folks like that might have a bit of an ego, but he's just a humble individual. I would say that underscores so many people in the N8N community. But I'm wondering, did you try any other automation tools when you were exploring?

Yes, actually I went to their conferences, the one Make and Zapier, because they host like events all the time. I'm just like going to the conference to evaluate Which automation tools I want to invest my time in and then just do out.

What made it stand out? Because Zapier and Make, honestly, in the market, they're incumbents. We were the baby for a long time. I think we're doing a bit of a global takeover right now, but that's my 2 cents. But what made you pick n8n versus Zapier or Make? I'm sure my boss would love to know.

Oh, your boss? Will your boss hire me?

We are hiring, by the way. Check the careers page. There'll be a link. But yeah, no, I'm curious. We've been working on n8n for a while and they're solid products, right? They've got big user bases. What made you choose n8n over Zapier and Make?

Like I say, it's a lot of resources. And then also innovation of N8N. It's always have updates. It's crazy. Sometimes 2 updates a week.

Yeah.

It's insane. This theme tool, this AI agent tool, there's always something new. And then listen to the community, the users. Today you are interviewing me and asking me my experience about N8N. You are like care about how I'm using it, what I'm using it for, and then how you can help me to build my business. So that's amazing.

I'm getting very warm fuzzy feelings right now. Summer, actually, let's— since we're here and you're a user and you've used it for a month, what advice would you give to someone that just clicked the get started button?

I will say have a user case in mind. What do you want to use this tool for? There is so many templates. It's plug and play, a little bit API experience, and you can automate anything so fast. In such a short amount of time. Look for the template you can use and modify it and change it up and break things.

Yes. Yes. Thank you for sharing that, Summer. And I'm curious, of all these automations that you've built, you've said like over 60, what's the one you're most proud of?

Actually, it's followed Nate's template, but it was so complicated. It was faceless videos. So it has this image generation, this audio generation from ElevenLabs. There's a combination. You have to stitch them up and you have to publish it to YouTube Shorts. There's multiple moving parts. If one step broke, you cannot complete the task. You cannot publish to the YouTube channel. So that was really fun. I spent like 2 days just obsessed. And after that hackathon, I joined another hackathon hosted by Lovable. I got much better this time. I didn't need a team. I worked solo. Yes, I didn't wait anymore. I didn't Win any prize, but I can do a lot with no coding tools as a designer to have a working prototype.

Do you have any automations that you use sort of day to day for yourself, for those things that are happening in your life or in your business life, like ones that you rely on?

I use Notion automation, just an intake form for the client. Sometimes people reach out and schedule a call, but it could be a waste of time because they don't have the budget. They just want free work. You want to filter out all the requests so the trigger doesn't have a human in the loop. I connect Notion with N A N. With this workflow, I can approve the message before sending out to the client. So it's not an automation I send it out to the client for just schedule call with me right away. I need to stop doing that because it takes a lot of time, context switching, and that's the one thing. But there's so many opportunities for connecting like Notion with N A N, ElevenLabs with N A N.

We're not paying Summer. She's here from her own volition and saying all this on her own mind.

But I would like to get paid if you want to pay me. Take cash, Venmo, or, you know, Zelle.

You know what's funny? All of our NNN community members are hustlers. Every time I crack that joke, they're like, but you can, like, I'm down, like, I will take cash.

Thank you for all the templates you share in the NNN community. It was really fun to play around with them. And then the way you're showing the step-by-step is like really easy to follow. I think people should give it a try and then just check out some of your videos. Pretty straightforward.

Thank you kindly. Can you give us a few bubbles for the shot? Oh yeah, look at that, gang. We've got it all here in sunny San Francisco. Cheers, thank you. This is a question I would always ask in user interviews. If you had one magic wish to change anything in N8N, small effort, big effort, doesn't matter the t-shirt size, what would you change if you had one magic wish?

If I can just talk to N8N and tell them like, okay, this is what I'm trying to build. Can you find a template for me to use to start with? So I'm not like building from scratch. So that will be my wish.

The good news is, and I saw the alpha of it at the, at an Amsterdam event we had a couple couple weeks ago or last week. I don't know. It's a bit of a blurry road trip. It was an alpha of text-to-workflow. So you can type out your workflow and it generates it. Now it was for a simple workflow.

Is it out?

I don't think it's out yet.

Okay.

But if there's an alpha, I'll see if we can get you. You want a little sneak peek?

Yes.

See, gang, when Max comes into town and asks for an interview, you get beta access to neat features. So say yes.

Yes.

Thank you so much for your time. Welcome to the N8N community. I'm really excited for your journey. If you've built 60 templates and workflows, In a month. I can't imagine where you're going to be this time next year. And if you're in the Bay Area, Summer, how can people get in touch with you if they're in the area, they're also flowgramming, they'd like to connect? Where are you active online?

People can get in touch with me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Also, I have a newsletter called Post It, helping creators to make money online. So follow for more.

Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I hope you have a wonderful rest of this beautiful Sunday, and I can't wait to follow on your journey. Happy flowgramming, everyone.

Ciao.