So you've joined the community and you're asking yourself. Where should I start? n8n or Claude? How do I even make money? All valid questions. I've been in automation since 2016. My boss taught me how to code with Python. That opened the door to where I am today, helping businesses solve problems with n8n and Claude. I'll share my own journey from zero clients to retainers. When I first started in 2016, I made a commitment to code for an hour a day. That's all I did. With time I started building apps and solving my own problems. That didn't bring clients at the start. Rather I got clients by bragging to everyone about what I was doing. It was never condescending. It was excitement. I couldn't believe what I was building and wanted everyone to know. Because trust me. When I shared my algo-trading Python code with my friends, they gave zero shit. All I got was "okay, cool." However working at an ecom company was the break I needed. I started automating my work and my colleagues took notice. After a while they started asking for help with different tasks. That's how I got my first in-house programming work. They told other people about this, and that's how I landed a $7k deal. I could share more, but the gist is this. Commit to a tool. Keep doing it for a long time. Tell people about what you're doing. Help people for free. With time, you'll find someone who wants to pay you.

One thing I've realised after 6 months in this space. The people making money stay quiet about how they do it. The people making zero dollars will tell you how to make money. That's where things get weird. Most of group 2 loves sharing how you should make money. Most of them fall into one of these buckets. - The person who makes things up about how to make money. - The person who repeats advice from other people. - The person trying to be helpful but not making any money. So what do all three have in common? In every case, the person giving advice isn't making money. But they give it anyway. That's the problem. When you're new, you want advice. You ask for help. But if the advice isn't based on real experience, listen to Alex Hormozi instead. You'll get better advice on how to make money. But what about when you start making money? I'm on that side now. Clients pay me. And I understand why you don't want to share how you make money without charging for it. Have you received advice on how to make money in the AI space and failed?

In this video I walk through how I create AI chatbots for customer service, lead nurturing, and wherever else you want to use AI to talk with people. The reason I decided to post this is because once I hire somebody I just want them to watch this video and be able to produce the same results I do without me having to tell them what and how to do it :) But I might as well share it since some of y'all might find it useful!

how do you build? Most people go straight to one massive workflow with all the nodes. It looks impressive, and I fell into that trap with my first client. But take a guess what happened when we ran the system. It crashed somewhere in the chain. And every time it broke, I had to repair that node and start from scratch. What I learned is that you need to control the data from flow to flow. Here's how. Say you have leads coming in from HubSpot. To move them between flows, use a status field. 1. Lead enters Flow 1, gets status "new" 2. Flow 2 runs only on status "new", updates status to "processed" at the end 3. Flow 3 picks up the processed lead from Flow 2 and marks it as "done" This is how you process data through many flows without connecting them. You control movement with different states so leads pass through each flow in order. What are the benefits? If Flow 3 gets an error, Flows 1 and 2 keep running. You have fewer nodes to fix when something breaks. Fixing an error takes 10 minutes instead of 30. I've attached an image of my WhatsApp lead gen system I built for a client. It has 8 flows, but you could put every node into one flow and try to make it work. But instead I have a system that runs 24/7 and processes leads as they come in. One tip. Don't start with 8 flows. Start with 3 and make them work together as one system.

I’ve been experimenting with Claude Sonnet and Opus for logic-heavy chains, but I’m seeing mixed results with latencies. What’s your go-to model right now when you need reliability over speed? Also, any other German automation experts in here? Would love to connect!