Becoming Essential to the AI Revolution

There was nothing particularly wrong with n8n in 2022.

The three-year-old workflow automation startup had a powerful and flexible product, a sturdy enterprise business, and an active, tight-knit user community of over 16,000.

If data was the new oil, n8n was the pipes through which it flowed, connecting hundreds of apps via a low-code tool. Its “fair code” licensing arrangement made the company’s code accessible to anyone to use to get started, and appealing to developers.

Business “was going very, very well generally,” says Jan Oberhauser, the founder and CEO of the Berlin-based company. “We were growing okay. Not outstanding. But it felt solid.”

Just a year earlier, n8n had raised a $12 million Series A led by Felicis Ventures to help expand its team and services. Jan — a former video compositor obsessed with efficiency — wanted to make the product simpler so even the less technically savvy could benefit from automation, and so n8n could expand its community, which skewed toward developers and other technical users.

Even with that momentum and direction, Jan worried about growth. n8n’s business customer pipeline was essentially 100% inbound, and conversions took time. He kept close tabs on how competitors and other startups fueled their growth to see if he was missing anything. Then, in March 2022, he noticed Pinecone raised $30 million just a year after its $10 million seed round.

“Even though they weren’t a direct competitor, that got my attention,” says Jan. “I thought, ‘Why are they growing that fast? What changed?’”

Jan zeroed in on the pivot that came with the fresh raise: “Before they were a vector database, which was cool. Then they became an AI database, which was very cool.”

At that point, AI was on the radar but not yet consensus. ChatGPT’s public launch was still a few months off. Pinecone’s product was already geared toward data scientists working with AI, but narrowing in on AI-driven search usage signaled to Jan that a shift may be underway.

Eight weeks to change everything

Jan realized AI posed a greater imminent threat to his business than he had previously considered. Once ChatGPT launched, Jan saw how AI might soon handle some of the simpler automations users did with n8n. Jan figured n8n might be fine for a few more years, but that AI would advance so far by then that it would be too late to do anything about it. The clock was ticking.

Jan considered his options. The short-term approach was to “sprinkle” AI on the product like other software companies, using it to clear workflows, write some code, and perform other time-saving tasks. Those were the easy moves to keep up with the moment. But Jan didn’t just want n8n to survive the AI revolution; he wanted to be essential.

“Enhancing the product with AI features would give us a 10, 20, 30% boost, but it wouldn’t allow us to grow 10X,” he says. “So we took a step back and realized, hey, if we really want to be successful, we have to allow people to use n8n to build AI applications to become part of the value chain.”

AI has its own workflows. Models consume data, and then use that data to create more data or trigger decisions sent elsewhere. The chain can keep going in endlessly complex paths if it’s fed the correct inputs and orchestrated correctly. In 2022, people needed to prompt and connect models to other workflows. But these were the kinds of processes n8n, even in its early incarnation, was made to do.

Jan’s vision: turn n8n into the Excel for AI. Just as Excel is ubiquitous because it’s equally useful to anyone who needs to work with data, n8n would create tools for enterprises and the less technically inclined alike to build with AI.

Jan brought his epiphany to his leadership team. He welcomed their doubts. If everyone instantly got on board, he thought, the decision was too obvious, and obvious moves never pay off in big ways. Even as he pitched transforming the company, Jan acknowledged the risks. “I was very honest with them,” he reflects. “It already felt like we were too late to the party.”

They pushed misgivings aside. Doing nothing wasn’t an option. n8n would have to become the workflow tool for building with AI, the proverbial people handing out shovels.

Getting the product built became absolutely critical. Jan dedicated all his time to coding.

“I’m not the best coder in the world,” he says humbly. “But I think I was able to make something that was usable – okay enough design and good UX – faster than most people because I had this past experience building the product already.”

It made the difference. In just eight weeks, Jan, a back-end engineer, and a front-end engineer built the product that would transform their business. They ran it by their team and community, and then it was ready to go live. And while it would be nice if they had pushed a button and the new n8n took off, that’s not what happened.

“The proper launch,” says Jan, “was a bit underwhelming.”

It’s not that no one used the new tools. Jan just expected the community he had worked so hard to build and engage to embrace the new direction. But Jan didn’t view the response as a fundamental rejection. He knew they were on the right path, and saw a messaging issue. “The community was concerned that the product they loved was being replaced instead of enhanced,” says Jan.

‘It was almost like we launched again.’

It’s always been impossible to separate n8n’s business from its community.

Jan first experienced the power of community while working at a five-person open source startup in Berlin. “I just loved that they’d built this small community of really engaged people who completed the business around the product,” he says.

When he started n8n, Jan brought that experience with him. He believed that to build a tool that worked well for all levels of technical skill, he’d need a thriving community creating and sharing new integrations that could push the product forward and attract new adopters. An army of evangelists could also help one another with technical support and keep their own team lean. The trick was to have a great product that was also free, so users could create their own value from the tools.

n8n had used the strategy since its pre-Seed days, when users drove the product forward faster than Jan could on his own. In 2019, user Ricardo Espinoza stumbled across n8n on Product Hunt and eventually posted his first integration to Github (opens in new tab), where Jan reviewed it and offered feedback. Espinoza went on to create and post dozens of integrations out of love for the community and the product.

“That showed me how powerful the community can be,” says Jan. “I didn't have money back then, so I couldn't give him much. But as soon as I raised the Seed round, he was hired full-time.”

The community was core to their AI launch strategy, but showing them the potential of the new tools would take a more concerted effort than just releasing it. It took nearly a year of engagement and messaging for Jan to feel like the community had finally embraced the new direction near the end 2023. n8n never lost sight of the product itself during that time.

“It’s almost like we launched again. We just knew we had something great,” Jan says. “We kept investing in the product and making it better. It took really, really iterative building.”

Off-platform content — on Github, YouTube, and social — made by the community had always been a critical part of how new users found their way to n8n. Community members now began spreading the word about how it helped them build using AI.

“There were a lot of creators who realized what we'd built and started creating more content about it,” says Jan. “It created this flywheel and helped us grow.”

With the community on board, the product evolving, and AI dominating the economy, n8n’s revenue and user growth surged. To keep up the momentum, n8n kept rolling out new features, including expanded AI model support, improved data tools, and AI Agents, which let users build workflows that operate autonomously. By the end of 2024, n8n had quietly become the backbone of the AI builder ecosystem.

That set the stage for 2025, when n8n’s users grew 6X and revenue 10X. Demand for AI agents skyrocketed, and n8n made it easy to it orchestrate and deploy them. Last year, more than 80% of workflows built on n8n involved AI agents.

As AI usage and n8n grow in tandem, Jan’s vision – to become the Excel of AI – has become increasingly prescient. And it’s still early days.

While the pivot and its success might surprise those watching from the outside, Felicis founder Aydin Senkut says Jan’s conviction and clarity of vision have always made the company exceptional. “Even in 2021 when we led their Series A, it was clear that Jan was the kind of founder who would never shy away from doing the hard work or making the tough decisions,” says Aydin. “He always had an intuition for when to stick with bold ideas and how to quickly course correct when pursuing them.”

A billion users > A billion dollars

Jan knows that n8n will only continue to succeed if its goals remain aligned with those of its user community. He’s already had to make adjustments. Previously, he set a goal of reaching $1 billion in revenue with fewer than 500 employees. But, over time, Jan realized that sent the message that n8n’s paying, corporate customers were the ones who really mattered, and not the individuals and small teams who drove the community. “People felt like it was about the money, no matter how much we insisted our focus was adoption,” Jan reflects.

The fix was simple, but meaningful: Forget $1 billion. Let’s go for a billion users, and not go overboard on headcount. Jan trusted that business growth would follow community growth, as it always has for n8n. “When we set our goal to 10X our users this year, the goal wasn’t to 10X our enterprise users, but our whole community,” he says. “That wasn’t just pandering to the community. If you just focus on enterprise, you’re never going to become the default tool for anything.”

With over 700,000 developers now on the platform and more than 130,000 registered users in its forum, it’s inevitable that the n8n community will change, making nurturing and protecting it even more important.

“In the past, it was obviously a smaller, more tight-knit group. Now, we put a lot of effort into making sure that we have the right people in there,” says Jan.

n8n now has an internal team that puts on events and broadly supports content creators, offering tips on which topics resonate, how to make better videos, and doing other small things like providing microphones to improve sound quality. n8n also developed an ambassador program (opens in new tab) for community members who want to put on events in their hometowns with the company’s guidance and support. There are currently about 70 ambassadors around the world, with a goal of reaching 1,000.

And while he can’t respond in the forums nearly as much as he used to or would like, Jan checks to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks. He joins calls and attends events with the community and ambassadors to answer questions and simply be visible. After all, he knows he wants to send the right message to the community that will always be central to n8n.

Jan notes, “If I don’t show up and stay engaged, people might think I don’t care. The truth is, being present is how we keep the n8n community strong. It matters deeply. It’s what makes this more than just a company; it makes it an essential tool that we have built together.”