n8n CEO Jan Oberhauser on Building the Universal AI Automation Layer

0:00What is the stack that you see people using with in a day? Actually, fight diverse. The thing is actually. Obviously, it makes sense because the nice thing about that system, like and it is, you can actually connect everything to anything. Means like, there is probably not kind of this default stack people are using. Like they use literally any LLM, they use any kind of memory or vector store, any kind of applications and accept the thing that makes anything great because I don't know what LLM is kind of Vinter is in the end. who's going to eat the best one, if it's going to be one of it's going to be a million different ones, it's going to be a small one up.

0:33Big one, I have no idea. But that's the great thing about it and it's like we don't have to care because the nice thing is he can use whatever is best for use case and I think that makes it so powerful.

0:59Today we're joined by Jan Overhuser, founder and CEO of NADN, who is one of the most remarkable growth stories in the automation era, quadrupling revenue in eight months after six years of steady building. What makes this breakthrough particularly compelling isn't just the explosive numbers, but the strategic pivot that made it possible, transforming from a workflow automation tool into an orchestration layer for AI -powered applications. Jan discusses the counter -intuitive marketing strategy that abandoned lead generation to focus on community adoption, the delicate balance between serving free users and enterprise customers, and why he believes horizontal platforms will ultimately win over vertical AI applications.

1:41He also shared how their open source ethos informs how they prioritise what to build and how to package it, and the importance of fair code usage in commercialising their technology. Yann's vision for NADN is to become the excel of AI, the default tool people think of when building anything AI related. He reveals why empowering builders at the bottom of the market may be the key to capturing enterprise customers at the top. And why the future belongs to those who can connect everything to anything in an increasingly fragmented AI ecosystem. Enjoy the show. So Yann, hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us.

2:17We've been in business together for a long time. I think as far back as 2020, so the early days of LA then, so we're grateful for you being with us and sharing some of the perspectives. I thought maybe a good question to kick off with is just to share a little bit about the last eight months of really N810's history. It's been incredible run. You added I think four times the revenue in the last eight months, so it took the first five or six years to really achieve in the company. So the business is really ripping. What happened? What changed? First, thanks for coming here. great to be here. I think it's and it comes down to things that we actually did quite a few years ago, actually almost true by now.

2:58And I think it's there's been two things. One was obviously our focus in AI. It's like when this whole AI wave started, we kind of honestly, we have worried a little bit at the beginning and we ran it sure what that's it would mean for us. And we knew it's probably going to be one of two things. Either it's going to be a future opportunity or actually to the mice of the company. You obviously want to be very sure it's going to be one or the other. Then we kind of looked in the market as like what are other companies doing and what the most companies did is they kind of added nicely eye features to the application.

3:32And we kind of realized that there's probably another kind of thing that makes sure we can stay around long term. What is really important is to kind of become actually part of the value chain. So what we did is exactly that is kind of We not just edit AI features, we actually allowed people to build AI part applications with NLN. There's obviously nothing that the user base of people kind of realize overnight, like what NLN has become back then, that is obviously takes some time to kind of catch on. And this, whereas the second piece comes in, historically we kind of focused on many two things until the NLN, especially in the marketing department.

4:09They always had like a store focus on the the kind of creating leads, but also kind of make sure that the inbound that kind of we get more adoption. This kind of always caused a problem in the sense of we are always very good at adoption, but at the same time leads normally fall short. So what happened is that the marketing department put everything from adoption in leads just to make sure that we can make that goal as well. And that was a big problem at the time because all the long -term planning like when the way that they couldn't really have the impact it could have had. If we realize, hey, you have this amazing community, we have this amazing bottom -up adoption.

4:45So instead of actually kind of forcing something that's not really true to us, it has to be focused on what was already working with this really focusing on this kind of top of the follow. That's what we did. We kind of removed the lead goal. We actually exchange it with a valid adoption of large organizations. That's when all in the community making sure that as many people as possible are using N at N. And the kind of also there's another thing that you can decide and you make the change but it's nothing is kind of happens overnight. You actually have to fight a lot of trust in that and you have to kind of really double down and kind of wait because these things kind of take some time to mature.

5:22And this is actually the thing that actually happened like it matureed, the kind of really doubled down, the kind of empowered our community more, the creative way events, kill it more content. And that is then in the end, this thing that materialized, especially in the beginning and the end of last year in December, is where the market finally realized that the hip became the CI tool, but also could have took the community, especially around on YouTube, more people created more and more content of simple content, people create, then more other people want to create content, they better get it get shranked and then everything kind of started to explode.

5:54I had an amazing story at our ball reading, a couple of weeks ago, that you have Jan focused time on long flights and you actually coded the first version of that AI node product flying back from San Francisco. Is that true? Actually I created quite a few things on on plays in the past. That thing I didn't create on planes or trains. I think I was lost the time. Honestly right now I'm I always love that to be honest, but now I was a few like destroying more than actually helpful. So it's a kind of create more like MVP. So some head data play around rather than actually adding production code on planes or trains anymore.

6:26which is same. On dodgy lifeline. Yeah, I'll accept. Maybe, yeah, and if you can take us back to 2019, I think it was just you sort of found our entrepreneur when you went out and raised your precede round. What was kind of the last specs, the origin story that really stands out to you? What has really stayed the same from day one of NA then? What has really changed over that time, for you? I think what always stayed true is for sure the kind of focus on the community, like actually the first people, So, like in the first week in April, a few people started. And one of the first people that started was at the FRL.

7:01Because I always knew like, if we want to make sure that ended and becomes meaningful, it kind of becomes the company. I wanted to build. I really have to kind of make sure, kind of, I invest in the community very early on. And that kind of always stayed true. I think another thing is probably something around values. We always actually I always attribute to be as honest and upfront about things and as possible. He also see that for example in our license. We probably have seen like we never call ourselves open source because we don't have always the approved open source license. What does it mean?

7:36It means our source code is available. Everywhere can use the tool for free. They can't even use it in production. They take the innovative and somebody home privately or somebody in large organization, everybody can use it. Once it's however different in our license, is that people cannot commercialize our code. It means nobody can just take our code and often I get now a hosted version of NITN, for example, or kind of create X, Y, Z, automated in the product. Why is it important? Because I saw a lot of organizations that passed, like, open source organizations that kind of changed license. And people obviously got very angry and they really hated that.

8:16And what I thought was quite interesting is people didn't hate it because of the license to the company's shows. People remain angry because people like this company changed the rules and it's never nice. And so what I thought, hey, I think it's a very useful thing. So I'm just very honest and upfront about it from the very beginning. I said, hey, I'm not building and it and giving it away for free because I'm a good person. Like I actually want to put a business around it. I want to make sure I can get paid. I can be I want to make sure all the other people can get paid as well because I actually think is the interest of everybody.

8:46So that is why I chose to dive into this. We have always had stayed very true around that. Again, not getting the second part of the question is like, what change? I think it's definitely like around like what what what we started at is like as I said, as mentioned before, like we started this is kind of automation tool. Honestly, I never have thought that we would ever ever ever, it's like it's never even crossed my mind that we would go in the ice space. By the way, I think in the end it's like sometimes you see opportunities out there and you have to take them and also I think it makes a difference between building some big sustainable company that really matters and probably building a kind of a start at at some point as this goes out of business at least.

9:29Yeah, and you've done a masterful job on the community building aspect of an 8n and you mentioned the values which I'm sure were really critical to earning the trust of your community. Can you also talk a bit about the tactics? It's kind of the constant push and pull of trying to kind of shape or curate the community while also really trying to listen and see where they want to go. How, tactically, how have you managed the community over the years? I think for the very beginning, it was very important for me to test to kind of include people. For example, in the beginning, we didn't have a little, not tell them to date at all.

10:06that we didn't connect any telemetry. Which is obviously fine there by beginning, but obviously as a company grows, you kind of initially need data, kind of improve the product very fast. Again, that's going to make a difference between the company's survives or what it doesn't. So we had a telemetry data. Another thing we had was at some point, we obviously added paid features. And every time we made a bigger change, we kind of posted it to the community forum for actually kind of what, like we shared with them, what we wanted to do, gave them the reason why we wanted to do it. and then kind of this into their feedback.

10:38I think that is just kind of taking them with you and you're doing something, I think that's a very important thing. Another thing is definitely kind of trying to kind of empower them. Actually, like one of the earliest edit and employees was Ricardo. Ricardo, you see, he is this amazing guy working in Florida and he was the first, one of the first codi -peaders to edit in. He discovered a product on product count. And this started to kind of create one node. And you created two nodes, created three nodes. And every time you contributed something as a player, that's great, thank you very much.

11:10And then I kind of gave feedback, I improved things and then he learned and he was excited and created more nodes. And at some point, he created like 50 or 60 nodes, like integrations for NIDN. Then obviously, as soon as I had the first Monday banker, I hired him. I think it simply just very important to kind of show people that you care and take them with you and kind of show how much you value them. I think I really hope that the community knows how much value they will try to give back a lot. I think that's generally I think this kind of, in the way not all the open source, we have to say this open source ethos very kind of really give a lot first and they think they normally get so much more back than they actually receive.

11:50We see the same thing again also with our community today, they just say, like, we empower you and then they create all of this amazing content and no more deepest on YouTube and LinkedIn, they create tutorials, nothing of that, that worked out very well. There's something they're still doing to this day. Jan, is there any shift in, I mean, given the scale of the community today, right, it's hundreds of thousands of members in size? Is there being a change in how you try and surface the right information or the right ideas and how you choose which to prioritize coming from that community base?

12:21Yeah, and the beginning was definitely easier. Like, which ended up in the beginning I didn't really worry about monetization at all. So it just wants to make sure I build the best product and I just build things that people really wanted. So I could literally, on the very beginning, we had a community forum where people could, at feature requests and people could upvote the ones they wanted to have the most. That is literally kind of how we chose very early on what to build. It's just that there's something totally out of whack. We normally build it because we knew people really build it that very much.

12:52And that works quite a while. At some point you have to be a bit more opinionated, but you don't just kind of building what the community wants But you actually have to kind of think about the like where the market is going also how you kind of build something Again, that's just sustainable that again, especially also something what honestly is also kind of larger Obviously, it's used as well and also just anyway, you see the market going And I think that's what we're doing right now We try to find a good mix between what are people really asking for and what do we think we have to build to be successful in the long term, both because like something like AI, but also again, what for example, enterprise organizations need?

13:31You mentioned earlier toward the start of the conversation that you have this sort of maker break moment in the early days of AI where you realize that AI was either going to be the future of the NN or I think the word you used was the demise of the demise of the NN. Can you take us back to that moment? What did you see that made you realize how important and inflection point in the trajectory the company this is going to be and then what did you do to figure out how to position in aid in so well with respect to these AI tailwinds? One thing I actually saw is I saw it was the funding announcement of Pine Cone where I think they raised like a hundred million dollar around or something like that.

14:14They also saw that they kind of raised around a year before at exam point before and it was wondering like what change, it's like why, why a company suddenly care so much about them. And then I realized, again, if it's exactly that, it's like, what they ran the past is they were the vector database. What they've become, they became deep database for AI. This is what I really say, we have to do something very similar with it and as well. That's exactly what we did. What we also did on this in the past and what the most of our competitors did is they kind of created an openly I node. A node they kind of connected via HTTP that requests to OpenAI.

14:53And you could do quite some nice things with it. And you can still do it at this point in time. But what we have when realizes that this is also not enough, like you can do quite nice these cases, but really powerful things are not possible. You really have to be able to kind of create proper agents, like change auto -proms, add tools, add a vector database, and output parses, and all of these things. And that is where we then kind of build out our advanced AI function, or T very, very, very allowed people to do the things in and at end in this kind of no code, no code way. That was the only positive writing pattern scripts, was we kind of drastically reduced the entry barrier for people to build things and also reduced the speed because the staff has historically also been quite finicky, honestly, like connected A with B in the didn't work and taking away all of the pain points and it takes care about it underneath the hood.

15:47And it has clicker a few times. And an agent, add a model, add a memory, and so on. And it's working magic. Yeah, and talking about companies that share, I guess, an open source ethos across AI. Obviously, the role of open source, I think, is changing across the industry at large. We've seen, obviously, a lot of headlines coming out of Meta, out of Mistral, over an AI release, the LGBT, in an open source version, et cetera. What are just some perspectives you can share on how you perceive the state of open source in AI more generally, and maybe how do you see its role changing in the future? I think that great thing that we always had about with open source is it's like it's kind of it's driving very rapid innovation at the end, like because you have this kind of huge army of people that really, really care very deeply.

16:35They're very smart and very of never a lot of time. And they kind of do things that organizations can way off not to because again, they have very different incentives or have very different timelines. So I have, it's simply that's the work. And then I think the nice thing about Opsauce is like, you can do whatever you want. And you can explore things that maybe wouldn't even make sense in a company setting. So actually think like Opsauce is like really this amazing thing. They kind of almost up the world to very many different possibilities. And the end like some of them bins and that another open source project never make it to anything.

17:10Obviously this is the one that nobody talks about. By some of them they kind of hit something and that does kind of the mindset, it's really kind of meta and kind of really shape kind of very often the whole industry at the end. Maybe a follow -up question to that, Jan. I mean do you see a shift in the role of open source? I mean do you see that companies, I mean today might be using some of these open source technologies to save money, to save costs, but maybe actually having more control inside of organizations over the performance of models, might be a value proposition that evolves in the future.

17:38Definitely very, very much. I think like, first I'm not sure if open sources that are very often the cheapest thing, I think this is kind of misconceptions actually very often not true. I think you get to win a lot of things like being able to kind of self -host knowing where data is stored and what's happening with it, I think there's a lot of value there, but right off the edge of the cheapest thing, very often it's actually the more expensive thing because you have hardware. This is probably idle for 99 % of the time. in this actually kind of turns out to be more expensive. So actually, I'm not sure if that's actually true, but the second part I think is true, and people care about it more and more, like we actually work now with a few organizations.

18:18And that's actually the main reason why they wanted to use open source. It's not because it's free, it's because they actually did the care about the data privacy and data security angle. And I think that's also what we are always historically off the ceiling within it anyway, often it's like people want to kind of self host and want to know where the data start. and admit themselves, what they don't mean, they run it and they compute underneath the test, they run it on the cloud, but obviously in their own private cloud. Yeah, I'm one, I think noticeable shift over the last couple of years, something that, of course, anything I'm sure has been a beneficiary of is just improvements in the communication protocols between different systems and different models.

18:52And obviously, MCP is a, you know, high profile candidate that has really driven the industry forwards. He's talking a little bit about that kind of how you see the changing role of some of these protocols in the future, And what you think might evolve. I think that if you kind of sanitize, you kind of in the end, you kind of accelerate things. I think that's very important. Even interestingly, if the sense is maybe not perfect, I think it's still at so much value. And I think if MCP is going to be the one we're going to use in a few years, I have no idea. I think it's great to have a starting portal kind of you kind of can build on top.

19:24In the end, this MCP is like the HTTP of the AI workflows and think that's really amazing. thing. I think it's kind of a really neighbor. It's already neighbor's now things like agent to agent and it kind of it's a kind of building blocks actually need for this kind of more powerful use cases like for example, the marketplaces or like, placket play automations. And I think N &N can act as the kind of orchestration layer between this kind of diverse MCP agents and tools and also obviously N &Ns are the best kind of platform to bit also tools that you can access with MCP as well. Actually, on that, John, we haven't really done the straightforward, what is in Aden.

20:06So for somebody listening who has a passing knowledge of in Aden, but wasn't sure exactly what it is, what is in Aden and when should people think about it when building in AI? I think in it ends by now probably the easiest to use most powerful way to build AI agents right now. I think it allows you to build things you previously never even thought you were able to build. You could build, I think that the nice thing that your body can go very fast from a first idea you have to a first prototype and then bring that prototype into production. What is the stack that you see people using within a day?

20:46actually quite diverse. Then the nice thing about that system like N and N is you can actually connect everything to anything. There is probably not kind of this default stack people are using like they use literally any LLM they use any kind of memory or vector store or any kind of application. Except it's just the thing that makes anything great because like honestly, I don't know what LLM is going to win the race in the end. Who's going to need the best one? It is going to be one of it's going to be a million different ones. It's going to be a small one up big one. I have no idea. But that's the great thing about it.

21:15And it's like, we don't have to care because the nice thing is you can use whatever is best for use case. And I think that is what makes it so powerful. Any interesting observations on what's been trending positive or negative in the in a then universe. But people definitely use quite a lot. It's honestly still like all the kind of Google tools. Google is definitely still I think that one, the kind of application you can use, like people use the private in large organizations, I think that's a amazing thing. So we definitely see this probably one of the strongest ones. We definitely also see a lot of this kind of communication platform.

21:51So if it's a Slack telegram or anything like that, that's also gonna make sense, especially in this kind of AI world, because you obviously need like an interface, how you kind of interact with the agency build. And I think that is for the few to come out. the path from that obviously also things like just databases any kind of again the nice thing what and it and you can connect And they treat anything so it's not just kind of applications also kind of low low level things as well Also, honestly, they often also internal tools as well one of the nice things about in a din is you start a good balance between the sort of flexibility customization Control that a developer might want with the ease of use that somebody who's less technical might want Has your user base changed kind of the complexion of the inadian user base?

22:38Has it changed as you've gotten more and more AI adoption? It's quite interesting. Like when actually our user base started to explode, like since the last eight months, you are really wondering if those people are really going to be the most successful. Like if the quality actually dropped and quality doesn't mean the people that's just like that kind of people are successful with NLN, and they did it, which was quite surprising. They're million people that are quite either hourly, quite technical, or people that really have a use case, and they care where we deeply about what they're building, and they're just willing to put in their work.

23:15Like maybe they're not as technical, but they really kind of enter, but they have a problem they really want to solve. And we have actually cried a few users that actually started to learn to code because of NLN. And why do they do that? because they can realize how you can do as that much. Like if I'm technical, but they cannot cope, but it can't cope. But again, it can literally go anywhere if I can. And kind of this whole new world opens up. That is actually, but I say, didn't change that much. And I think that's just really amazing. There's so many technical people out there and people are really interested in think our community is really amazing.

23:48They're just the ideas they're having, how driven they are, and how much they also want to help each other out. I think that's just great. And do you think with the proliferation of adoption of many of these different AI technologies, the pressures are different on being a founder in 2025? I mean, you've lived it over the last eight months. Yeah, I think that the definitely changed things. I think the main thing is that the past, it was easier to plan in Norway, you're going and right now you're always living this constant, I wouldn't call it fear, but kind of constant state of uncertainty where the world is moving.