Using AI to Find New Business Ideas with Reddit and n8n

hey it's Max the original flow gramar have you ever used Reddit to research problems that a group of people might have it's a great way to discover opportunities for building products and services like that next side hustle you're trying to build to get out of the right race you could be monitoring the feature requests and complaints for an incumbent app for example an overpriced work for automation tool or be monitoring local regions even cities to identify opportunities in your hometown or on the other side of the world Indie hackers and product managers have been doing this kind of Discovery work manually for years so zuar a member of our Global Community felt this is a pretty good use case for an agentic workflow and ITN is great at grabbing a bunch of daughter and organizing it and AI is pretty good at aggregating and summarizing it so check this one out hey Zar welcome to the show hey Max

good to see you man pleasure to be here so for the folks who don't know you would you mind introducing yourself quickly absolutely so my name is a I have a background in engineering the past year and a half I've focused my content on all things AI but specifically the past 6 months I've been Full Throttle on nadn and AI automations and then also I have a school Community that's centered around NN and creating automations for businesses and just learning how to take advantage of this amazing platform that we have so Zuber what have you got to show me today so I'm really excited to show you guys this amazing workflow that I created again the point of this workflow is to actually solve real world problems that small businesses are facing very cool so Zuber was showing me this off camera before we started recording I'm really excited about this one because it's basically identifying like business opportunities right based on problems that people have and this is something that I used to do myself manually on Reddit or using tools like gummy search and stuff I remember paying the tools that would allow me to do it manually myself so Zuber please take it away and show us what you built all right so let me go ahead and test the workflow and then I'm going to go ahead and walk through step by step and click on test workflow awesome and there you go as you can see right now obviously the execution is manual but you can do a schedule Trigger or have other triggers as well but right now it's going through and processing all the nodes updating our Google Sheets and then also we have a centent analysis I've shut off the slack and Gmail because I don't want to receive a bunch of stuff but as you can see right now the workflow executed properly and this is the Google sheet that we have right now so we have a bunch of columns here the subreddit size post upvotes original post summary and potential solution and as you can see right now it worked so let's go ahead and actually walk through a step by step and explain what's going on I will kind of go through the most important notes what's happening right now the probably the most important note here is the Reddit note the amazing thing about ITN is it already has that Integrations once you create this note what's happening is we're searching through posts inside the subreddit called small business now the small business is actually one of the top subreddits on Reddit where small businesses actually go they post their problems that their the issues that they're running into so this is a gold mine for people who are looking for solution for businesses because businesses provide their problems they're posting it there so as somebody who is looking to monetize this is great because now you're trying to solve real world problems that the businesses are posting themselves I mean and I think it's not just that they have the problem it's that as a small business owner they took the time to go on Reddit to post that problem that's going to you know validate that issue as more than just a small issue they went on and took that friction to try and get that answer which means they probably also have willingness to pay absolutely yeah obviously a small business don't have time to like figure things out on their own so that's where it's an opportunity for others who can utilize these amazing tools now to actually provide this try to solve a frustration like you said I mean it takes a lot for a business to take time out of their business and go ahead and post somewhere which means they're looking for a solution they're

desperate at that point the keyword this is very important this is what this node is going to search in the subreddit and right now I have the keyword as automation this could be whatever you want you can actually change this keyword doesn't have to be automation it could be something like I don't know coffee shops or whatever it may be right I would suggest not toggling this return all because this is going to send a lot of data here so you can the great thing is you can limit the amount of data that's coming in out of the Reddit here so I've put just two because for this demo purposes but what you could do is if you have a scheduled trigger you can do every day you can do five posts that you're like searching through so that way you have like the top posts that are coming through and then additional field you can actually sort by what's hot what's relevant what's new that's another great thing now you can even further filter the data to make sure it's meeting exactly what you're looking for so these are the two hottest posts in the small business subreddit that have the word automation absolutely yeah so actually we can increase the limit a little bit here let me just run this live so people know that this is working now this time I change it to four if I click on test step so now I'm going to get four posts you can see in the view you have four items here on the Json so this is where you can read the title and obviously we're getting a lot of data here that's where we need to now further go ahead in the next step and try to filter and grab the data that's relevant to us so that's the beauty of nadn where now you can e refine the data that's

coming out what's happening next is I'm just basically putting this F note and that's where now I am further filtering so I'm saying Hey I want to make sure that the posts have at least two uploads because you want to make sure that the post is being interacted with the next one I'm just making sure that the self text meaning the post is not empty I am filtering and make sure that the time is converted to ISO standard so that way it's readable and then I'm also so here's another great operation I'm saying that I am filtering this so I'm saying that if this post occurred I want to make sure that it's not sending me the data forever right I want to limit it up to 6 months from today so that's another great thing here that we're doing now we can further clean this data if I click on test step here there you go so now we have this nice true branch which is going to further filter the Reddit post that we're looking for specifically if note the output from the if node this is where now we can do a set note to clean the data and grab the exact things that we're looking so in our case I'm looking for upvotes I'm looking for subreddit size the original post the subreddit the date and then the URL so these are the only five things I'm grabbing because as you can see on the left hand side I have a bunch of stuff that's coming out of the if node you want to clean the data and set node to be honest is one of my favorite notes because it does such a great job of cleaning the data so that way you can do a lot more with it now this is something I recommend to everyone guys before your AI step if you're getting raw data from an API there's going to be probably most of the time a lot of data that is not relevant for getting your task done that could confuse your AI it's definitely going to slow it down cost more which doesn't matter if you run it once or twice but if you're doing anything at scale so this step that zuar is doing here very important and I think definitely a best practice like send in what you need to nothing more would you agree zuar oh absolutely like I said set node is one of my favorite nodes in NN because what you're doing is now you don't want to overwhelm yourself with all of the data and not only yourself you don't want to overwhelm the AI agents or the further notes that you're putting with all of this data that's coming as unnecessary because it's going to cost you more money obviously the AI agent to process it but not only that it's just going to get everything confused and I also like things to be beautiful and clean this is a perfect way to do that Mak so let's go ahead and test this step and you will see what I'm talking about the beautiful and the clean this is all the stuff that's coming out from the left hand side and if I click on test step here look how pretty and nice and organized it is on the right hand side now I have four items and I'm only grabbing five things upfold subreddit size original post and this is by the way matching my Google sheet here now that we have our data cleaned up now we can go ahead and now use AI agents and our AI nodes to do further things with it the next step I'm creating a tools agent uh conversational agent here what I'm doing is just I've kept the prompt very simple I'm saying decide whether this post is actually describing a business related problem I'm just grabbing the original post here the only thing this AI agent needs to Output is a yes or a no that's exactly what we're doing right because we want to be able to filter out further and look for something cuz a lot of people post a lot of things on Reddit so you want to make sure you're filtering out the actual solution or an actual problem that somebody's facing let's go ahead and test the step I'm obviously using my openai chat model here it's up to you can use cloud or whatever else you are used to so there you go now we have four items and out of the four items three were yes and one was no meaning that three of these posts have was actually a business that's looking for a solution and one of them was probably just a random post now that we have the output from the AI agent now we can actually merge that output along with the data that was coming in using our set node and merge node is also a great node here so we're just combining all of that data one from the yes output from the AI agent and then the rest here the next step is we're just using this filter node to be able to filter the uh output from the AI agent and also that's data that's coming in because we want to make sure that it's using the post that have that yes out for from AI agent let's go ahead and play that and once there you go so now we're good to go here so now we're sending three items because as we saw earlier one of the posts had it item that was related not necessarily to a business prop now we're

adding additional notes Here the first one is a summarization chain this is just summarizing the output here because we want to make sure that we're not sending the entire original post and then the openai note here so a quick note on the prompt here it's just saying based on the following Reddit posts suggest a business idea or service that could help solve this problem but not only this other problems that are similar to this because now we're trying to figure out posts that are going to be common amongst more small to mediumsized businesses so this gives you even further refinement and therefore it gives you the ability to do more stuff with it let's go ahead and process these so I'm going to do the summarization chain first that's again same thing I'm using the openi chat model and then obviously we're grabbing some additional data from our filter node here and then we're going to go ahead and use our merge node to combine all of that data that's coming in and we're going to process all of that and upload it to our Google sheet here this is exactly what the output looks like there you go perfect so now as you can see we're just

merging all of this stuff together and it's outputting all of that data into our Google Sheets so let's take a look at actually what's going on inside this Google Sheets if we click right here again and we're doing an appen roll operation here if you have your credential up you can grab this exact sheet which I've named Reddit business ideas right here and I'm mapping each column manually right so I'm just grabbing all of that information from my previous merge note and then I'm bringing it here and that's exactly what's happening and on the right hand side as you can see all of the data is cleanly outputed and now if we go back to our Google sheet there you go right everything is there including the subreddit size the original post the uploads and then including the actual link to that particular Reddit post here so as you can see this is actually real right like you can see somebody has already posted this and this has 1. 9 million members a lot of interaction is happening here and that's a great thing about posting the actual Reddit URL here so that way you can actually go and check out the original post we have our original post the post summary that we used our summarization chain there and then this is where that potential solution comes in this AI is actually outputting all of the solutions for this problem that this business is actually facing again you can do a lot more with this obviously I've added a sentiment analysis here just again this is optional you can send this to your slack channels Gmail if you're saying hey you know what any negative sentimental analysis the output that's coming in I want to send myself an email so that way I have that data as well and there so that way I can do further things with it this is kind of again for inspiration you can do a lot more with this could be a gold mine for finding a potential solution and monetizing definitely I think like with so many solutions these days and a lot of people like well someone's already done that and whatnot but I think like the thing to remember is there's regionalization and localization there's not every customer knows every single products I think especially in with AI and stuff you know a single operator identifying a small problem that VCS and stuff will never touch rapidly with loc code tools and stuff deploying that and getting a couple hundred customers that could pay more than being a startup employee but it's just the total available Market of that problem isn't big enough for some big team to go in but now again with you being able to identify with AI and build tools easier you can probably go serve that pain point and then the result is people getting products that are hyp specific for them you getting income and everyone's happier with the power of AI but I'm curious Zu be what's next for this guy way do you think you'll evolve this as you build it out now what I would do with this honestly is have this as a schedule trigger and then you can run this on a weekly basis now after this Google sheet because now you have all this great data that's all in one space in your Google sheet with all of this information what you could do next

is add additional AI nodes in here to be able to say hey you know what all of this data that's coming in find the common problem that these businesses are facing right and then from that now you can do things like come up with a solution for the most common problems that you see that's coming out of these business or these businesses are posting so that's where like I mentioned you could do a lot more with this where you can find the common data problems CU you know as this say necessity is the mother of invention you can find the necessities and the problems that these business are facing that's the best way to start any business is to find a problem that somebody's facing come up with a better solution and like you mentioned earlier obviously these small to medium-sized businesses they don't have the budget to go to bigger companies and have thousands of dollars just to talk to them before they can even come up with a solution now you can be a oneperson business a two person business now with these amazing tools that we have at our disposal a one person could start with two clients and make a living off of that that's where you can get going I think the really cool thing Zu bear if looking at this workflow as well is realizing I can change a trigger change that Google sheet to a set node and I've got an AI tool that some other AI agent can now use this like multi- agentic solution just as a tool again the combinatorics of what's possible just like expands and just one more thing I wanted to point out again you can play around with this doesn't necessarily mean this is the best possible way to create this workflow right this is just a option you can add for example instead of an AI agent in another note that will be better to solve this for example same thing you don't have to add sentimental analysis like a summarization so there's a lot you can do these are just I always say that when I create these workflows this doesn't necessarily mean that this is the one only solution right there's multiple solution to these things depending on what your use case I can't agree more I think one thing I always tell newbies is like imperfect workflows create value all the time I'll would probably say most of our whole user bases workflows are not perfect they're likely good enough and then that person like went to the other hundred things that they have to do that day iterating on it and improving it over time and I think that is absolutely true in this AI space the models we're using today three months from now probably gonna be using different models probably there's going to be some new pattern or something and I see that all the time like in my community when I post something there's amazing how people come up and like hey by the way I found this better way to do this and I learned from everybody cuz like we're all new in this space that's the great thing about like working with others even if they're completely beginners and like oh by the way you guys know how to I figured out a way to do this and then everybody's like Ah that's amazing we never thought about that so yeah same thing with in my work my job is to talk to FL grammar and they just teaching me all day just like yourself super if people likeing what they see they're inspired they want to see more and get more and be flow gramming along with you where can they do that I have a YouTube channel where you can go ahead and check out like I have tons of tutorials there also I have my school Community that's where I always say that the best way to learn is learn together our the community is a great space where you can go back and forth with people and ask questions we have daily calls that you can jump in and ask myself or others who are hosting these calls we have live build so there's great opportunity there to jump in and learn very cool Zuber thank you so much for your time I know you're a busy guy between the school community and building Consulting all that so I really appreciate it and I can't wait to have you back on soon cuz I know you're building all the time I'm guessing you're going to have a really cool use case to share with me real soon thanks so much man I hope you have a great rest of your week thank you so much for having me man this a lot of fun thank you it was absolutely my pleasure

ciao really cool stuff S Bear thanks for that one o this was a good one 2014 homemade strawberry liquor from vuko Stefan himself thanks vuko and that's all for today oh wrong one so um where's the brown a brown glass see in Germany like to separate the glasses when we want them mixing ooh I think the lid was on that one sorry shorts what I really like about zub's pattern is how easily can be adapted and changed change your inest sources change some of the filtering logic ways that you're analyzing it afterwards and I mean you're talking about use cases across dozens of roles right another great thing that zuba highlighted is again if this was a use case that was running 10,000 times a day I'm sure you could optimize it was a relatively quick and dirty workflow but it's getting him insights today and I think especially when you think about these automations that we want to set up today to improve our life it's got to be something you can knock out in an hour or two who can block out that kind of time in this modern world this video is part of my work at the studio where I share the story of flow grammas from across edn's Global Community I'm Max the original flow Grammer drop a comment on what you'd like to see next and don't forget to mash that subscribe button happy happy flow gramming