n8n CEO: Why we aren’t dead, how to build great AI products, and what I look for in an AI PM

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Today's Episode

n8n was the most written-about AI tool in this newsletter last year. I covered it 25 times and ranked it A tier, above Zapier and Make.

Then Claude Code and Cowork arrived, the Google Trends line bent downward, and a tweet went around declaring n8n irrelevant.

So today I went to the person with the most to lose.

Jan Oberhauser is the founder and CEO of n8n, last valued at $5.2 billion after SAP's strategic investment. He says n8n has been declared dead roughly a thousand times, including the week OpenAI shipped its own agent builder, which turned out to be one of his best growth weeks ever.

His argument is not that Claude Code is bad. He uses it. His argument is that they are different products and you need both. Claude Code is where you prototype in ten minutes. n8n is where the thing goes once it has to run every night, survive a model outage, pass an audit, and be handed to someone who did not build it.