n8n’s mission and vision with CEO Jan Oberhauser, at our NYC Meetup (August 2025)

I'm not sure how many people actually know what our mission is. How many people know knew that? — Yeah. — Okay. Nobody. So, good that we talk about it. Um, again, what we set out to do is like we want to give technical people the powers of 10x developers like what it does it mean especially like what can a 10x developer do? Like a 10x developer is something that can do something that normal deopers cannot do in the end. They can build s systems that are much more scalable since are much more secure they can move much faster like a lot of the stuff you literally get built into edit end like if you build think about it better in agent like you click agent it's there and you say hey now I want an LLM it's there vector store there it's like and the stuff all of the problems that you normally arise in this kind of process that you kind of abstracted away for people you don't have to worry about those things you just actually think about the things actually matter in the things you want to create Um our vision I think again to be the default AI orchestration platform again like there obviously there's different parts quite important for that just talked about it with George a little bit was what is really at the core and it was always is the community like again that is what created like the amazing growth over the last seven eight months and this is the reason why all of your people are here and this I think is the reason why we're going to keep on being successful is like I think it's also what I think is missing in a lot of other products actually quite surprised guys like when you're here like the kind of level of excitement people are having. People shouldn't have that about an automation tool like it's an AI platform but people are super excited and why they're excited because think because other people excited they get a lot of value out of it like it creates value for them they see the value we create for others like they feel empowered and that is the thing that you get out of it end and I think this again why we always stay true to the community honestly it's quite sad to see sometimes like there's some news out there and people assume like the worst things out there that just want to clarify like we're not selling like we're not thinking about just about money or anything like that. We really want to make sure anyone becomes successful in the long term. So we're not selling out. We're not getting bored by I don't know who like we are here to stay. So it's at the center. Uh apart from that again what was always the amazing thing about NN what separated us is you can really build this kind of very complex systems. I think and was also about power and flexibility. That's why by I guess you all love it because what you see with most low code no code platforms is like you start they seem like amazing at the beginning and then you start to build something more complex you're almost there and then you realize hey actually like 20% are missing and you realize this 20% they're almost impossible like all the time you saved before they said hey how see how fast I was you kind of pay back 10x because the this flexibility part is missing and then at end like from the very beginning we always focus about flexibility and power has a disadvantage is obviously have a steeper learning curve which people mention a lot online but again that what we're winning there is exactly that like I'm totally okay people have a little bit harder time in the beginning if it means like they never hit this kind of glass ceiling um again horizontal by design is like where you get the most value from product like n is very similar to code it's like there's like for every vertical where there's a huge opportunity you have a vertical product and obviously vertical product is going to be amazing for this one vertical. But again, as soon as similar as before, like if you have like something that's less standard or like have something more compassing or then you need like a horizontal tool especially in our SAS world where you have like a million tools but especially also AI also becoming more fragmented over time. Think again that is where we kind of see again similar to code and it is low core platform. It's like we are very similar to code. I get the most value out of it by being flexible and kind of being able to integrate everything and not just being um focused on one single use case. How do you make sure that you get people get a lot of value out of it and how actually can we make sure how to build a sustainable company? People are obviously willing to pay the most money if the not just automating something that can break anytime they don't care like you get real value when people automate things that are very mission critical for them. It's like say hey if it and then goes down like it's the worst nightmare like that is the kind of use cases you want to have that are complex and at the center of what the the companies are building we just had a CTO dinner yesterday like there was a CTO there who literally the whole back end was built with end like it was not code it was all end workflows and that's amazing like that's as mission critical as it can get it's obviously where we want to go and also they get a lot of value out of it again because they could move so much faster get many other advantages out of it rather than building code. So again what we want to own is this kind of this whole end to end like build deploying collaborate um and understand the long term we want to um have other plans we talk about another time obviously like what you see here is amazing like we have literally we have one and a half million weekly active workflows right now out there I mean it's like one and a half things that create value for people that save between minutes and hours of

work like a lot of value gets created out there and you can see it's is accelerating it seems like we're really seeing a lot of growth and adoption a lot of being created these days through Nit and I think that's again especially since December like it's quite sad if you look at a graph it looks like we have been doing nothing the last years till like till January but actually we if you zoom in actually we have been growing nicely but just like the kind of scale that and kind of the magnitude of change really kind of accelerated a lot but now I think that's one of the most amazing things I actually think that graph is potentially even wrong it's actually is wrong because we like over 130,000 week uh GitHub stars these days like We definitely like one of the top 41 or something on GitHub. If we actually remove all the products that kind of our project got started like long before us like we actually like we are really one of the top products out there and I think that's amazing to see like how much things accelerated especially in the last 9 months again obviously thanks to all of you. a little bit about what we're doing actually right now. Maybe also one important thing to to mention here it's like I think a lot of people are always worried is like hey we investing all of this resources into enterprise and we kind of forgetting the community honest and upfront about this like we 70% of our engineers work literally on free features only 30% of our engineers are working on enterprise features like we always going to keep on investing very heavily into our free offering. Why do we do that? Because literally everything we invest in our free offering helps everybody. It helps all of you but also our all our enterprise customers. Everything we build for enterprise helps only a subset. That's why obviously the kind of split makes quite a lot of sense. Obviously AI is always at front and center now at Naden. Um one thing is like what we'll actually have the first version online right now is like text to workflow. Like think VIP coding for workflows. Like honestly like there still it's not perfect. We're rolling out slowly right now on cloud onto a small user base. But actually like it should hopefully make all of your lives much easier uh moving forward. So like heavily at first making adding AI to the product. The next time is obviously around orchestration like multi- aent is a big thing honestly we could have moved a little bit faster than hindsight. Um and obviously like integration is obviously a front and center about end is like that's the thing that really makes us stand out that you can all of you move faster not having to worry about creating an HTTP request node and figuring out the APIs. The last part I already talked about is like really making sure like when people actually kind of deploy this kind of miss mission critical um use cases they can actually um be 100% sure that it actually keeps on working like if you update the L& M if you change your prompt because you want to fix it one use case like things like evaluation is like actually one is what the center there is actually um what we see here we just launched honestly the first MVP version I think a month ago right now it's still very MVP other versions already like in the making. They kind of allow you kind of move even faster like the current version for example works via Google Sheets. Uh moving forward you can have the whole experience and at the end is going to be much more powerful. One of the most important things like I think that's very often one of the features people are not as excited about as it should be but that's exactly what you need like you when you build AI features like if you wrote code in the past you wouldn't have like if you didn't write tests it was not great but you survived. If you don't have evolations in AI, like evolations, you have no idea if it's still what worked yesterday still works tomorrow. By the smallest change can mess everything up. So evolations is really this kind of this unsung hero where we actually going to talk more about uh later in the demo. People already could create their own nodes. It was a nice thing. The bad thing was that they were not available on cloud. It's like people created literally thousands of nodes but they were not available to all the people that use our cloud solution. Now finally we obviously have them available there and we kind of releasing more and more literally I think every week right now and the amazing thing what's happening right now is not just like our community is creating those notes like now like this biggest organizations on the world they want to be in our platform because they get a lot of value out of it means like this organization create this nodes they support them and obviously make sure you all have the best experience out there have a very large and growing community like this one is one event of many like actually one of the first ones was um in Berlin one and a half months ago um our endfest really amazing to see like how many people showed up here. We definitely want to keep on going there and kind of create many more events like ourselves and with our amazing ambassadors out there that create literally events all around the world and in the most amazing locations. So please keep on participating and stay updated where the next event is that you don't have to travel for like I don't know 14 hours or whatever. And obviously we in the US right now like we opened our office um right now um just now that's why I'm actually here. Yeah. Amazing what we always thought like the US market could definitely slightly faster than the European market. It was amazing to see especially because the people in the US had a very bad experience because our people were only based in Europe. There's a huge opportunity there and that's now it's really excited about it be being here like having people of our team literally stationed here and being able to kind of interact with all of you more interact

with our enterprise customers more and kind of going from now kind of the east coast later in a few months to a year over to the east coast as well and kind of really finally capturing um the other excitement that is here all the opportunity and the next thing is obviously there are quite a few people that um yeah obviously quite new to NN like um Emma is obviously kind of starting um this kind of sessions right now we can have like different one different locations on the 8th of October as well in New York make sure to participate there education does mention before like we always a problem that people having a hard time getting started obviously where education is becoming much more important we kind of working um on different efforts there we actually have uh Liam here as well who is actually working on it um to making sure it gets released as soon as