How I use n8n and AI agents to scale my startup

Running a lean and bootstrapped startup comes with many day-to-day operations you don't really want to spend time on! Naturally as an engineer my first reaction is to whip out my code editor and start automating it. In my experience that often times leads to a bunch of barely maintainable scripts that are glued together, so recently I was looking for a better alternative. In this blog post I want to show you 3 n8n workflows with some AI sprinkled in that I use to make the day-to-day operations more efficient, and most importantly buy me back some time to spend on important things (like writing this blog post lol) Source XKCD Handling Invoices Our techstack is pretty lean and our external vendors minimal (checkout our blog post outlining our techstack), but we still get monthly invoices from a few vendors that we need to save so that our accounting is always up to date. In theory, this only takes a few minutes per month to do, but I truly hate it. So I automated it! Every vendor we use has its own email inbox where they send the invoices to. I then have an IMAP trigger that listens to the inbox and sorts it according to the vendor, to then upload it to the correct Google Drive directory. In theory I could also automate the extraction of the actual price, but that is a bit more critical if something goes wrong and our current accounting setup doesn't really allow for it. It will come though! So until now I atleast don't have to upload the invoices manually each month:) Btw, if you want to setup your own n8n instance that won't bankrupt you, we have a tutorial for that! Status Updates One of the things that happens pretty often is that one of our providers has some issues. But not all issues are equal! For example, most issues that Docker has don't matter to us. The only thing we really care about is if pulling from the DockerHub registry is not possible. Because that often times means that deploying to sliplane is also not possible. But how do you filter out the relevant status page updates? I could of course just look at every single status update, but that is overloading me so much that I just started ignoring status page updates (trust me, I tried). So instead I created a workflow in n8n that takes the Docker RSS status feed as input and then a classifier that decides if this affects pulling images. If yes, I get a discord notification! Support Requests We take support very seriously at sliplane, and I would argue that this is one of the main reasons why developers chose us. Most support requests are users asking for help configuring their service, but every now and then we get a bug report that is critical and should be fixed ASAP. So for that I built a classifier that reads incoming requests, tries to figure out if this is a "user issue" or a "platform issue", enriches the data (by looking up logs, status pages etc) and then sends us a Discord notification (yes we use discord for a lot of things). This one is a pretty new workflow and always changing to keep up with our platform! The classifier for that is super simple but works surprisingly well: Conclusion There are many more workflows that we have, but I think these are some neat examples that are applicable for many other developers, founders, and n8n users. What cool workflows did you build that help you save a lot of time? Let me know! Cheers, Jonas, Co-Founder sliplane.io PS: If you want to deploy an instance of n8n in less than 2 minutes, check out this guide: Self-hosting n8n the easy way

Apr 5, 2025 - 15:18

How I use n8n and AI agents to scale my startup

Running a lean and bootstrapped startup comes with many day-to-day operations you don't really want to spend time on! Naturally as an engineer my first reaction is to whip out my code editor and start automating it. In my experience that often times leads to a bunch of barely maintainable scripts that are glued together, so recently I was looking for a better alternative.

In this blog post I want to show you 3 n8n workflows with some AI sprinkled in that I use to make the day-to-day operations more efficient, and most importantly buy me back some time to spend on important things (like writing this blog post lol)

Source XKCD

Handling Invoices

Our techstack is pretty lean and our external vendors minimal (checkout our blog post outlining our techstack), but we still get monthly invoices from a few vendors that we need to save so that our accounting is always up to date. In theory, this only takes a few minutes per month to do, but I truly hate it. So I automated it! Every vendor we use has its own email inbox where they send the invoices to. I then have an IMAP trigger that listens to the inbox and sorts it according to the vendor, to then upload it to the correct Google Drive directory. In theory I could also automate the extraction of the actual price, but that is a bit more critical if something goes wrong and our current accounting setup doesn't really allow for it. It will come though! So until now I atleast don't have to upload the invoices manually each month:)

Btw, if you want to setup your own n8n instance that won't bankrupt you, we have a tutorial for that!

Status Updates

One of the things that happens pretty often is that one of our providers has some issues. But not all issues are equal! For example, most issues that Docker has don't matter to us. The only thing we really care about is if pulling from the DockerHub registry is not possible. Because that often times means that deploying to sliplane is also not possible. But how do you filter out the relevant status page updates? I could of course just look at every single status update, but that is overloading me so much that I just started ignoring status page updates (trust me, I tried). So instead I created a workflow in n8n that takes the Docker RSS status feed as input and then a classifier that decides if this affects pulling images. If yes, I get a discord notification!

Support Requests

We take support very seriously at sliplane, and I would argue that this is one of the main reasons why developers chose us. Most support requests are users asking for help configuring their service, but every now and then we get a bug report that is critical and should be fixed ASAP. So for that I built a classifier that reads incoming requests, tries to figure out if this is a "user issue" or a "platform issue", enriches the data (by looking up logs, status pages etc) and then sends us a Discord notification (yes we use discord for a lot of things). This one is a pretty new workflow and always changing to keep up with our platform!

The classifier for that is super simple but works surprisingly well:

Conclusion

There are many more workflows that we have, but I think these are some neat examples that are applicable for many other developers, founders, and n8n users. What cool workflows did you build that help you save a lot of time? Let me know!

Cheers,

Jonas, Co-Founder sliplane.io

PS: If you want to deploy an instance of n8n in less than 2 minutes, check out this guide: Self-hosting n8n the easy way