Top 10 n8n Workflows Every Small Business Should Run

n8n is one of the most powerful automation tools available — and if you self-host it, it's free. The problem is knowing where to start. These 10 workflows deliver the highest ROI for small businesses and can be set up in an afternoon.

1. Lead Capture → CRM + Slack Alert

Trigger: New form submission (Typeform, Tally, or your website). Action: Add contact to your CRM (HubSpot, Notion, Google Sheets), send Slack/Telegram notification with lead details. Never miss a lead again.

2. Daily AI Content Brief

Trigger: Schedule (every morning at 07:00). Action: Search trending topics in your niche (via RSS + Brave Search), run through AI to rank by relevance, send a brief to Telegram or email. Exactly what maxmeg.com runs daily.

3. Invoice Sent → Follow-Up Sequence

Trigger: Invoice created in your accounting tool. Actions: Wait 7 days → check if paid → if not, send polite reminder. Wait 14 days → check again → send firmer reminder. Automates the most awkward part of freelancing.

4. Blog Post Published → Social Media Distribution

Trigger: New post published in Ghost or WordPress. Actions: Generate platform-specific caption with AI → post to LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Pinterest. Your content reaches every channel automatically.

5. Customer Support Triage

Trigger: New email to support inbox. Actions: AI classifies by urgency and topic → routes to correct team member via Slack → logs to spreadsheet → sends acknowledgment reply to customer. Scales support without hiring.

6. Weekly Business Report

Trigger: Every Friday at 17:00. Actions: Pull revenue from Stripe/Gumroad, new leads from CRM, website traffic from GA4, social follower counts. AI summarizes trends. Sends report to your inbox. Your weekly review, automated.

7. Competitor Price Monitor

Trigger: Daily schedule. Actions: Scrape competitor product pages for price changes → compare against yesterday → alert via Telegram if anything changed. Stay informed without manually checking.

8. RSS → AI Summary → Newsletter Draft

Trigger: New items in RSS feeds (your industry news sources). Actions: AI summarizes each article in 2 sentences → collects daily batch → formats as newsletter draft in Ghost or Notion. Your newsletter writes itself.

9. New Customer Onboarding

Trigger: New paid customer in Stripe or LemonSqueezy. Actions: Add to email list → send welcome sequence → create project in Notion → notify team via Slack → schedule 7-day check-in. Every new customer gets the same great experience.

10. Uptime Monitor + Alert

Trigger: Every 5 minutes. Actions: HTTP request to your website → if non-200 response, send immediate Telegram alert with status code. Simple but critical — know about outages before your customers do.

Getting Started

If you don't have n8n yet, you can self-host it with Docker in under 10 minutes. All 10 of these workflows use standard n8n nodes — no coding required. Start with #1 (lead capture) and #10 (uptime monitor) — both take under 15 minutes to build and deliver immediate value.

I run most of these on my home server for maxmeg.com and my other projects. The time savings compound quickly.