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

Jan Oberhauser (0:00)

We have grown 10x in the past year. The week openly I launched H2Kit was one of our fastest growth weeks ever. Even the frontier labs are using us. Many of our users are using Claude Code internally, but still use NNN for business critical use cases.

Aakash Gupta (0:10)

Meet Jan Oberhauser, the CEO and founder of NNN, which was just valued at $5.2 billion and cost 100 million ARR.

Jan Oberhauser (0:19)

If you want to build something that's reliable, audible, and you can pass to your teammates, you really need NNN.

Aakash Gupta (0:24)

This tweet went viral from John Ennis. Remember NNN went irrelevant pretty quickly, huh? Do you need NNN anymore?

Jan Oberhauser (0:32)

There's a lot to untag there. I think we have been called dead probably a thousand times. I don't remember half of the things that killed us over the years.

Aakash Gupta (0:39)

You guys actually existed before ChattGPT, and you talked about in a podcast how you said you were scared a little bit.

NNN was literally the hottest AI tool in the world in 2025 Now people are declaring you all dead.

Before we get into today's show, please take a second to check that you're subscribed on YouTube and following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. If you want access to all of my favorite AI tools, I've gotten them to give you an entire year of their paid plans. Check out bundle.akashg.com for an entire year of bold.new, Airtable, Speechify, Descript, Magic Patterns, Linear, Dovetail, Arise and Mobin. And now, into today's show. N8n was the hottest tool in my newsletter last year. I wrote about it over 25 times. You can use it to learn the basics of AI, like rag and fine-tuning. You can use it to automate your workflows. You can use it to create AI agents using its visual work to create a new workflow builder. And then Claude Cowork came out. And then there was the rise of Claude Code. Today we have Anjan Oberhauser, the CEO and founder of N8n. We're going to get to the bottom of what can N8n do that Claude Code and Cowork can't. What is the role for N8n this year in 2026 and 2027? How should you think about using N8n versus these other tools? We'll also talk about how they build product at N8n, what their new latest metrics are, and much more. Jan, thanks for being on the podcast.

Jan Oberhauser (2:25)

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Aakash Gupta (2:26)

So N8n was literally the hottest AI tool in the world in 2025 Now people are declaring you all dead. I looked at the Google search trends and there might be something behind it, if you look at these trends here. Then this tweet went viral from John Ennis. Remember N8n, went irrelevant pretty quickly, huh? Do you need N8n anymore?

Jan Oberhauser (2:50)

There's a lot to unpack there. I think first, it's probably important to call out that we, I think we have been called dead probably a thousand times. I don't remember half of the things that killed us over the years. We're still here. So I think that probably doesn't hold that too. Also quite exciting, quite interesting. I think if you check out half of the other tools out there, and you type into Google Trends, I think you see very similar trajectories. I think it's just obviously a hype cycle, where it gets a bit overhyped and then it kind of goes into that kind of more normal framing again. I think that's also where we are with the most products there. But yeah, I think my first thing is to talk a little more about Claude Code and other ones. I think it's an amazing tool and really deserves to be out there. But I think the most important thing is like end-to-end and Claude Code are very, very different products. It's like you need both in the end. Like Claude Code is more like the genetic tool, like it runs and tropic models in your terminal, and end-to-end, you can see more this kind of orchestration there. It really connects your kind of tools, your LLMs, your data sources, and it kind of offers you this kind of visual canvas for systems to really run reliably and securely. This is especially important for business critical use cases, where technical and non-technical people really collaborate. I think, I generally think it's also more important than ever for this, like end-to-end is more important than ever for this, especially business critical use cases where reliability, security and audibility really matters. Where you want to be 100 percent sure that you know what is running, like you can inspect what's running, you can see what did run, and they cannot just rely on it's working 95 percent of the times, but you have to be 100 percent sure that it really works. I think this again, where our visual canvas really shines, because it shows you exactly how it works, what it's done, and it's also when you work with other people, where you talk about what is actually running. If you have something like a Claude Code, it generates literally 10,000 lines of code that nobody can inspect, and nobody knows if it's actually doing the right thing. Also, we see a lot of people that use it together. They very often prototype with Claude Code, because again, you can get something started very, very fast, but then actually migrated afterwards to something like end-to-end for the reasons that I really mentioned again, especially for the audibility, when you want to handle large or complex data processing pipelines, they want to be able to more precisely define what actually should happen. And also self-hostability really matters, because people care more and more about data privacy and security. And also one important thing to be aware of, actually, multiple of the model companies are using end-to-end as well.