Hey everyone, Just a win, I want to celebrate with this group. In mid-February, I received my first payment of around 3,100 EUR (~3,660 USD) for one week's work. I started freelancing last October, focusing on digitalization consulting, implementation support, and hands-on project work for small trades businesses. Here's what I've learned so far: Lesson 1: Get clients through in-person networking All three of my clients came through personal connections — two from industry meetups focused on digitalization in the trades, and one through my social circle. Nothing has beaten showing up in person. Lesson 2: Always come prepared What made the biggest difference in converting those connections into working relationships was the prep work I did before each first meeting. Client 1 — A small business owner in the food industry. I analyzed their website with SEMRush ahead of our first meeting and came in with a full report. We had a great conversation, and I advised them on several issues I'd found. I made an offer for ongoing SEO services (~1,000 USD per month for 6 months), which was outside their budget, but it built goodwill and established the relationship. Client 2 — A trades business owner who needed help selecting industry-specific software. I used Claude to build an exhaustive questionnaire beforehand, which made the conversation much more productive. I've been working pro bono so far (this is the guy from my social circle), but am currently figuring out how to transition to paid services. Client 3 — The one who paid me. They had an idea for a larger project involving automating a manual process. I showed up to the first meeting with an MVP, which impressed them enough to offer payment on the spot. We're now building it out further.

Next week I start a brand new job which pays about 50% more than my previous one. It's a lifechanging amount of money. Now I'll be able to put more towards investing each month and really start scaling the "retirement" account. How did this happen? Every week I put in the work to learn more about Data and Ai. Am I the best Data Analyst, No. Am I the best Ai Engineer, Definitely not. When you put in work week after week eventually something pays off. Every week we have a call in here, the people who show up are also getting Wins. Last week one of the people on the call @Alexander Cebulla landed his first freelance customer. 90 Euros an hour (if I remember correctly) @Alfred Alonso landed a large n8n/fb ads customer from a call and @Ryan Steggerda is probably landing his first n8n customer soon (we are working on his profile). @Alex Rodriguez also landed his first n8n customer. We have about 750 members in the group currently, and I really want to see more people on the calls and engaging. The more you put in = the more you get out of the group. Lets get a TON of wins in here for 2026.

Yeah, I haven't built any major workflow yet, but this is much much of a win to me as I begin this journey. I first signed up for the 14 day trial and it was okay, then i realized if the trial expires, i can't automate at all, which sucks. And I don't have the finances to keep up paying monthly, since I plan to take this seriously up to 5 months plus. Then i heard of Self Hosting in the Classroom Section of this community, and i heard it is literally free, unlimited executions; but it's very technical to set up and encounter webhooks not working. So I sucked it up; I must learn! I began the quest to have it work. I searched numerous Youtube's, Perpelexity. Then i found out about using Cloudflare Zero Trust for tunneling so that n8n can connect to the public network. All i needed was a domain(You can buy .online, .xyz, .store etc from Namecheap for less than $2/yr; it works so far you not using it for production and just for learning like me), Cloudflare Zero Trust plan(Free plan) and that's all. I can't lie, It was really technical setting up the docker and the routing. Hours of troubleshooting, long Perplexity threads to the point it told me to suck it up and use the n8n local host(http://localhost:5678/) 😂. I didn't give up!! Finally routed it, but I encountered an error where I couldn't even have access to the domain i routed the Cloudflare tunnel to. My guts just told me to use Firefox and voila!!, It works!!! (A win for Firefox i guess..lol) Now I can finally dive deeper and comfortably in learning AI Automation!! I'd appreciate any more tips or advice moving forward using this approach as this is my first time. Thanks!

We resolved a production alerting issue in our n8n monitoring system — and it reinforced some important lessons about reliability and data governance. The issue Our monitoring workflow was repeatedly sending WhatsApp alerts for services that hadn’t actually changed status. The result was unnecessary noise, reduced trust in alerts, and operational distraction. Why it mattered Teams started ignoring alerts (classic alert fatigue). Monitoring reliability was questioned. Sensitive infrastructure data risked being logged or shared unintentionally. What we changed Implemented a persistent, external source of truth so alert state survives restarts and redeployments. Cleanly separated runtime logic from stored state, improving stability and predictability. Strengthened health-check validation to correctly handle timeouts and errors. Ensured alerts and logs are generated only from verified system state, not third-party responses. Added rate-limiting and redaction controls to prevent duplicate alerts and protect infrastructure details. The result Alerts now trigger only on real service status changes. Monitoring remains stable across deployments. No sensitive endpoint data is stored or shared. Higher confidence in alerts and faster response when issues actually occur. This was a good reminder that monitoring isn’t just about uptime — it’s about signal quality, resilience, and trust. If you’re using n8n or similar tools and struggling with noisy alerts or unreliable state, happy to share a sanitized workflow and a production-readiness checklist. Feel free to DM

Hey guys, I’m Amrit, a Computer Science student. Lately, I’ve been seeing how AI can build full websites in like 10 minutes. Web dev jobs are changing fast, and honestly, it feels unreal that just a few prompts can do so much. Instead of getting scared, I decided to build something. I built my own Second Brain using Lovable — a place to track your Habbits and finances and think more clearly about it instead of keeping it in my head. This made me realize: AI isn’t here to replace us — it’s here to amplify people who build, think, and experiment. Curious to know — are you building anything with AI right now? Or does this whole AI wave excite or scare you? Disclaimer ***-- I am still making changes in the app like payment and a few setting are not done yet. Rest assured, feel free to navigate through it check the app out here:-https://ur-2ndbrain.lovable.app