Little Lifehack for ManyChat and n8n · AI Automation Society

Little Lifehack for ManyChat and n8n

If you've built a chat automation using ManyChat, Insta, and n8n, you might be familiar with this problem:

1. When the chatbot responds too slowly—for example, because Supabase was slow or for some other reason—the HTTP request, which are supposed to be sent back to ManyChat, times out.

2. As a result, the user sometimes doesn't receive any reply at all, which is obviously frustrating and requires manual intervention.

Here's a solution for this:

Solution Steps:

1. Once the AI has generated a response, save that message in a Google Sheet, a Data Table, or Airtable (I bet you do it anyways)

2. If an error occurs and the answer is returned to ManyChat too late:

- ManyChat detects the error message and triggers a small workflow (e.g. a Condition "response is null" sends one more http request to n8n)

- IMPORTANT : Before starting the second workflow, ManyChat has to wait ~20 seconds to ensure the response has already been saved in the Google Sheet.

3. In this smaller n8n workflow, the saved response is retrieved from the Google Sheet and sent to the user again.

This creates a loop with the last message, ensuring that the user always receives a response—even if the original automation was too slow.

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