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- WhatsApp, Atlas and Accidental SaaS
Turns out AI can still be pretty smart sometimes.
And I may have been a little hard on n8n in the past.
Not sold on AI browsers though…
Topics for this week:
Events vs Products
Had a really obvious-after-the-fact realization this week while building out Wave payments.
Focusing on giving Wave something to sell before worrying about enabling a full marketplace, I found myself arguing with Gemini about the data models behind the transaction.
I’ve been trying to balance my knowledge of the future vs what is necessary right now.
I don’t want to code things specifically for Wave selling event tickets but I also don’t need to add enough abstraction that I could switch from Stripe to some other payment processor on the fly.
And I was having the same struggle with Products vs Events.
Cover for a bar or Table service sounds like individual products, one time sales with an inventory.
And I was trying to force Events to follow the same structure.
But Gemini was pushing back on that idea, insisting that I needed an events table to associate with the products table.
I’ve learned to doubt AI by now so I wasn’t sure, but I took Gemini’s response and threw it into Perplexity and ChatGPT to see what they said, and they agreed.
I was thinking about things wrong.
I’m not selling the full event, I’m selling a ticket to the event.
So the ticket is the product and that product is associated with the event.
That did make way more sense.
But I still didn’t totally follow that.
GPT ended up suggesting I still treat tickets as products for now.
The extra tables and complexity only become necessary when the ticket sales become complex.
If there’s different tickets, like General Admission vs VIP, for the same event and the event is a recurring event, then things become more complex.
For now, I do just need to be able to sell tickets for one event and one location.
Even multiple different tickets for one location for one event.
Classic over-engineering.
I talked about it a while ago that Gemini surprised me in the past because it would push back on bad practice, and it is still capable of that.
GPT has caught up and even moved things a little further, helping to focus on what’s necessary now, and encouraging me not to “gold-plate”.
So thanks to GPT and Gemini, I have proper understanding of events and products, and a good solution for handling both items for now that’s extensible in the future.
Vibe coding at it’s finest.
WhatsApp Bot
WhatsApp has been a frequent request for n8n integration and I finally got around to making one.
It’s was a bit of a pain to setup the integration because the Facebook developer portal isn’t the most intuitive thing.
Facebook, or technically Meta, makes you jump through some hoops to setup a Facebook developer account, create an app client, create and connect a WhatsApp account, verify your business and username, generate an Access Code, and finally get a test number.
With all that, I was finally able to use the WhatsApp nodes built in to n8n.
But I could see why there’s a little work to get this going.
Automated WhatsApp messages could easily turn from being useful for a business into a nice scamming system that blasts everyone it can find so I don’t envy Meta trying to balance real users with malicious ones.
So I’m sure that’s why it’s a heavily requested topic.
Lots of people use it, but it’s not the easiest thing to use.
And now you can automate your WhatsApp messages too.
I am surprised this didn’t get more traffic, to be honest.
It’s a heavily searched topic and I’ve seen people request it more than anything else, but so far the video doesn’t have great numbers, below 100 views as of now.
I’ll admit the video isn’t great either.
And I haven’t committed to adding stupid faces to every thumbnail so I’m sure that would bring more traffic.
I was in a bit of a rush to get this one done and then it took forever to edit out my phone number so this quick video turned into a 3+ hour endeavor but I was glad to get it out there anyway.
Hopefully it’s still useful.
Plus I figured if it gets enough traffic I could just remake a better one later.
But WhatsApp with n8n is online ✅
AI Browsers
I’ve had access to Perplexity’s Comet browser for a little while now (which it might be publicly available at this point) but I haven’t used it very much.
I’m a little afraid of getting myself banned from websites for showing suspicious activity by automating things within the browser.
Plus even when I did try to have it scrape a couple websites for me, it quickly got confused and didn’t return great results, and I kind of gave up on Comet for the time being.
I do use the ChatGPT chat app all the time, though because I find it super easy to cmd + tab back to it to ask it a question or use the cmd + 2 shortcut to take a screenshot of the last window I was looking at to ask about code or someone’s comment in Skool.
And this week, OpenAI launched their own AI browser, ChatGPT Atlas (for MacOS only as of now).
Since it had been a couple weeks since I tried Comet, I figured I’d give another AI browser a try and see if I like it any better.
Once logged in, I tested a couple tasks.
I tried to have it build a list of YouTube video ideas based on Skool comments, and it kind of failed spectacularly.
It mostly found my own comments which was not helpful and gave up after 5.
I later tried to have it pull a bunch of addresses for Wave locations and it stopped after 2 when I told it I needed 10x that.
The best I could get it to do was 5 at a time.
So my fears about getting flagged for bot-like activity may be solved because these browsers are heavily instructed not to let you automate repetitive tasks to that volume.
Which is probably a good thing.
Needing to do things more than 20+ times is probably getting into API territory anyway.
I think these browsers are more intended for “shop around for this particular item and add it to a list and find me a place to eat” virtual assistant kind of tasks.
So far I haven’t been impressed, but I may the wrong expectation.
Taking too much of an engineering approach to these tools.
Much like I’ve been doing with another platform…
Accidental SaaS
I’ve recently realized the source of my frustration with n8n.
As I’ve been live building a “course generation” system entirely with n8n on stream, I’ve become increasingly annoyed with how the platform works.
But someone pointed out in my chat that I’m pushing n8n way past automations like it’s intended.
I’ve basically been building a full SaaS (software as a service) on a website that’s just meant to streamline connections between a few apps.
Classic over-engineering as always.
With that realization, it became immediately clear why I was turning pretty sour on n8n.
I can’t expect an automation platform to be a replacement for building real software.
This was a good breakthrough though because it made me forgive n8n, and also made me realize I really do just want to build software.
As I wrap up some of these other projects, I’m looking forward to getting back to building more proper software and leaving n8n for the simple automation flows.
More SaaS to come.
Over 100
I remember counting up to 50 newsletters sometime last year and being excited to hit that milestone.
This morning I realized this newsletter is something like #107.
Well passed 50 and over 100!
It’s amazing how time flies.
It’s become my Friday morning ritual and I don’t think I’ve missed one yet.
There may be one or two Saturday editions in there…
But I look forward to continuing the trend as long as I can.
It’s one of the few things where I practice what I preach.
Doing something just because you want to do it.
Focusing on a number I can control - the amount of newsletters I write each week - instead of worrying about how many subscribers it has or how many opens it gets.
So thank you if you’ve stuck with me through all of these, I really appreciate it.
And if you’re new, welcome!
Always open to feedback and hearing your opinions so let me know what you think!
And like I said, this one snuck up on me so I’d like to do another look back at all the previous ones to see what’s changed and what hasn’t.
But in the meantime, here’s to 100 more newsletters in the next 2 years 🥳
Thanks for reading/opening!
And that’s it for this week. Events vs products, AI browsers and over 100 editions.
If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters.
I also have a Free Skool community if you want to join for n8n workflows and more AI talk: https://www.skool.com/learn-automation-ai/about?ref=1c7ba6137dfc45878406f6f6fcf2c316
Let me know what else I missed! I’d love to hear your feedback at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected].
Thanks for reading!