n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool — think Zapier you can self-host, with a node for almost everything and an HTTP node for everything else. For a founder, it's a way to buy back hours without hiring. Here are twenty workflows you can stand up this week, grouped by where they save the most time.
Marketing & lead capture
- New Stripe customer → welcome sequence. Trigger on the first successful payment, add the customer to your CRM and email tool, and start onboarding.
- Form submission → Slack + Notion. A Tally or Typeform response posts to a channel and appends a row to Notion, so nothing sits unseen in an inbox.
- Competitor & industry RSS → AI digest. Pull new posts, summarize them with an LLM node, and drop a Monday-morning digest in Slack.
- New signup → enrichment → routing. Enrich the email, score the account, and route high-fit signups straight to you.
- New GitHub star → thank-you + log. Acknowledge early fans and track momentum over time.
Sales & CRM
- Calendly booking → deal + prep doc. Create the CRM deal and auto-generate a one-page prep doc before the call.
- Inbound email → AI triage. Categorize and assign incoming mail so the right thing reaches the right owner.
- Abandoned checkout → follow-up. Trigger a gentle nudge sequence on dropped Stripe sessions.
Operations & finance
- Daily KPI digest. A cron job pulls your key metrics and posts them to Slack every morning.
- New invoice → bookkeeping. Log every Stripe charge to Google Sheets or your accounting tool automatically.
- Form → contract → e-sign. Generate a PDF from a template and send it for signature.
- Uptime alert → escalation. Route a monitoring webhook to Slack or PagerDuty with context attached.
Product & support
- New ticket → AI draft reply. Draft a response for a human to approve — faster first replies, nothing robotic.
- NPS response → routing. Send detractors straight to a founder and promoters to a review request.
- Churn event → win-back. Trigger an exit survey and a win-back email when a subscription cancels.
- Feature request → backlog. Turn Canny or form requests into Linear issues in one hop.
- App error → triage. Pipe Sentry errors into Linear, tagged and prioritized.
Content & reporting
- New blog post → cross-post. Push to your socials and newsletter the moment a post ships.
- Video upload → blog draft. Transcribe a new video and have an LLM draft a post from it.
- Weekly investor update. Compile the week's metrics and let an LLM write the first draft.
Plan the automation before you build it
The workflows above are easy individually; the trouble starts when you wire a dozen together and lose track of what triggers what. Automation is a software project like any other — it deserves a spec.
InitRepo treats automation as a first-class project type: describe what you want automated and get a PRD, architecture, and roadmap for it — the same planning suite you'd get for an app. Map your automation.