If you spend five minutes on X or LinkedIn, you’ll be convinced that you’re a failure because you haven’t sold a “Simple n8n Onboarding Bot” to a local dentist for $5,000. These gurus make it look like you just drag a few nodes, connect an OpenAI API key, and suddenly a small business owner is handing you their retirement fund.
It’s a lie. And it’s a lie that’s making a lot of talented people feel like they’re doing something wrong.
1. The “Ease” is the Product
The reason you see so many people yelling about how “easy” n8n is? Because they aren’t selling automations—they are selling you. The product isn’t the workflow; it’s the course, the “mastermind,” or the referral link. They sell the dream of the “Passive Income Empire” because building actual, resilient systems for real companies is—wait for it—exhausting work. It’s not a three-click process. It’s a “staring at a 404 error at 2 AM while your client’s lead-gen is broken” process.
2. The “Dentist” Doesn’t Care About Your Nodes
The biggest myth is that there is a line of small business owners waiting to pay thousands for “AI Agents.”
The average business owner doesn’t want an “agent.” They want their phone to ring. They want their invoices to be paid. When an influencer says, “Just sell them a chatbot,” they’re ignoring the fact that most business owners are tech-phobic and have been burned by ten other “consultants” this month. You aren’t fighting a technical problem; you’re fighting a massive wall of skepticism built by the very gurus you’re following.
3. The “Infinite Scalability” Trap
The “truth” that needs to be hammered on is the maintenance nightmare. * The Guru says: “Build it once, get paid monthly!”
- The Reality: OpenAI changes their model behavior, an API endpoint gets deprecated, or the client’s secretary changes a column name in a Google Sheet, and the whole “passive” system catches fire.
If you have ten clients paying you a “retainer,” you don’t have a business; you have ten high-stakes babysitting jobs where you are one “Unexpected Token” away from a screaming phone call.
So, What’s the Real Solution?
If we strip away the “get rich quick” nonsense, what is actually left? How do the people who are actually making money do it? Based on the realists in the comments, it looks a lot less like a beach in Bali and a lot more like a construction site.
- Stop Selling “Automation” and Start Selling “Sanity”: The people making real money aren’t selling n8n. They are selling the fact that a business owner can finally go on vacation without their email inbox exploding. They don’t even mention the word “AI.” They sell results.
- The “Niche” is a Graveyard, Find a “Workflow”: Instead of “Automation for Real Estate,” look for “The specific way this one type of lawyer handles discovery documents.” If it’s boring, it’s probably profitable.
- Price for the Headache, Not the Build: The pros don’t charge for the time it took to drag the nodes. They charge for the insurance policy that it will actually work. If you aren’t charging enough to cover the “2 AM fire drill,” you’re just paying for the privilege of working for someone else.
- Productize the Pain: The only way to escape the “service” trap is to find one tiny, miserable problem that 1,000 people have and solve it with a fixed, unchangeable tool. If you have to “customize” every build, you aren’t an agency; you’re a freelancer in a fancy hat.
The Bottom Line
The reason it resonates is that it validated the struggle. n8n is a superpower, but a superpower doesn’t make you a hero—it just makes the work possible. The “big bucks” aren’t in the software; they’re in the messy, human, frustrating work of fixing broken businesses.
It’s not easy. It’s not fast. And anyone telling you otherwise is probably trying to sell you a subscription to their “Inner Circle.”
