20 discovery calls my first 3 months. 8 became clients. 12 wasted hours. Then I learned one question that predicts who buys. Ask it in first 5 minutes. THE QUESTION: "What happens if you DON'T fix this in the next 3 months?" Not "what's your pain" or "what's your budget." What happens if nothing changes? THE RESPONSES THAT PREDICT BUYERS: BUYER: "We'll miss growth targets. Hiring another admin just for data entry, $40K annually. Can't scale like this." Specific consequence. Financial impact. Timeline urgency. NON-BUYER: "I mean, it's annoying. Would be nice to fix eventually." Vague. No urgency. No real pain. THE PATTERN: Buyers have CONSEQUENCES for inaction. Non-buyers have INCONVENIENCES. Consequences = money, time, growth limits, team frustration Inconveniences = "would be nice," "annoying," "eventually" MY CLOSE RATES: Consequence answers: 11/13 closed (85%) Inconvenience answers: 1/7 closed (14%) WHY THIS MATTERS: Stop wasting time on inconvenience leads. Qualify hard early. If they don't have real consequence, they won't buy. THE FULL DISCOVERY FRAMEWORK: MINUTE 1-2: "Walk me through your current process." Listen. Take notes. Let them vent. MINUTE 3-4: "How long does this take monthly?" Get specific numbers. 10 hours? 20 hours? MINUTE 5: "What happens if you DON'T fix this in the next 3 months?" THE MONEY QUESTION. If strong consequence → continue call If weak consequence → "Sounds like this isn't urgent. Check back in a few months?" MINUTE 6-10: Demo solution (if strong consequence) Show working example. Their problem solved visually. MINUTE 11-12: Next steps "Want me to send proposal? We could start next week." OTHER QUALIFYING QUESTIONS: "Who else needs to approve this?" (reveals decision-making) "What's your timeline?" (reveals urgency) "What budget allocated?" (reveals seriousness) But consequence question is #1. REAL EXAMPLES: CLOSED: "If we don't fix this by Q2, hiring two more people. That's $80K annually. Our margins can't handle that."

Sent 50 LinkedIn messages. Booked 8 calls. Closed 2 clients. Here's the EXACT approach. THE PROBLEM: "How do I find clients on LinkedIn?" Most advice: "Add value, engage with posts, build relationships..." Cool. But I needed clients now, not in 6 months. THE COLD MESSAGE THAT WORKS: Sent 50 messages using this template. Got 8 responses (16% response rate). THE MESSAGE: "Hi [Name], Saw your post about [specific pain they mentioned]. I actually helped [similar company] automate exactly this process - saved them 8 hours weekly. Not sure if you're still dealing with this, but happy to share what worked if you're interested. [Your name]" That's it. 3 sentences. THE BREAKDOWN: Sentence 1: Prove you're not spam (reference specific post) Sentence 2: Provide relevant social proof (similar company, specific result) Sentence 3: Low-pressure offer (no hard pitch) WHO TO TARGET: SEARCH FOR POSTS ABOUT: - "Spending too much time on..." - "Tedious process..." - "Manual data entry..." - "Overwhelmed by paperwork..." Filter: Posted last 7 days Target: Small business owners (not employees) Sweet spot: 50-500 employees MY TARGETING CRITERIA: Posted about operational pain in last week Title includes: Owner, CEO, COO, Operations Manager Company size: 50-500 employees Industry: Service businesses (agencies, firms, consultants) THE OUTREACH SCHEDULE: Day 1: Find 10 relevant posts, save profiles Day 2: Send 10 messages (use template, personalize sentence 1) Day 3: Find 10 more posts Day 4: Send 10 more messages Repeat: 50 messages total over 10 days THE FOLLOW-UP: If they respond: "Would a quick 15-minute call help? I can show you exactly what we built for [similar company]." Book call immediately. Send calendar link. Done. THE NUMBERS: 50 messages sent 8 responses (16%) 8 discovery calls booked 4 showed up 2 closed ($2,900 total) ROI: 10 hours outreach time = $2,900 revenue = $290/hour THE MISTAKES I MADE: First 20 messages: Generic ("I help businesses with automation")

Am I the only one who gets "Request failed with status code 500" when trying to open or work in n8n? UPD something big is happening with Cloudflare and a lot of sites, LLM and services are down…Claude came back to life (not sure for how long)

How do you structure n8n projects to avoid a 'big ball of mud'? After getting burned by a few overly complex and intertwined workflows, I wanted to ask others what patterns have they settled on? I'm not looking for theory, but for some practical, in-the-trenches methods for keeping workflows extensible and easy to update 6 months after you built them. What's your single most important rule?

I had a conversation with an Indian guy, who has built an agent that interviews IT people for jobs, and he was going at vibe coding giving examples of how it can be completely insecure and that they prefer to build things coding themselves without any AI tools.🤓 Even though I think he was taking it to far, this actually made me think about the potential security issues and how to prevent them. ⚡⚠️ I would really appreciate if guys who came across this issues or prevented them shared their experience. Did anybody come across any security problems with n8n, Lovable.ai, Relevance ai, Make or any other platform?