Aggregate tech trend signals from RSS feeds into Google Sheets and Slack

Description

Who is this for?

Founders, product managers, content strategists, indie hackers, and anyone who wants to automatically monitor tech industry trends across multiple sources — without manually browsing Hacker News and Product Hunt every day.

What this workflow does

This workflow scans public RSS feeds from Hacker News and Product Hunt daily, scores every item against configurable keyword groups (AI, SaaS, No-Code, Dev Tools, etc.), clusters the results into ranked themes, and delivers a prioritized intelligence report via Slack and email. All signals and themes are logged to Google Sheets for historical trend analysis.

How it works

Daily trigger fires on a configurable schedule (default: every 24 hours).
Fetches RSS feeds from Hacker News (posts with 50+ points) and Product Hunt in parallel.
Parses and normalizes all feed items — extracting titles, descriptions, URLs, and publish dates from RSS/Atom XML.
Scores each item against 7 weighted keyword groups. Title matches receive a bonus multiplier. Source weights (Hacker News 1.5x, Product Hunt 1.3x) amplify signals from higher-authority sources.
Clusters into themes — groups scored items by primary category, calculates theme strength using source diversity and volume bonuses, and classifies each as VERY_STRONG, STRONG, MODERATE, or WEAK.
Builds an intelligence report with theme rankings, top 10 signals, and action items for surging topics. Generated in both plain text (Slack) and HTML (email).
Delivers and logs — posts to Slack, sends HTML email, and appends both individual signals and theme summaries to separate Google Sheet tabs.

Setup steps

Connect Google Sheets OAuth2 credentials and update the Sheet ID in both "Log Signals to Sheet" and "Log Themes to Sheet" nodes.
Create a Google Sheet with two tabs:
signal — headers: date, title, source, score, category, url
themes — headers: date, category, signal_level, theme_strength, item_count, sources, top_keywords
Connect Slack OAuth2 credentials and configure your target channel in the "Post Report to Slack" node.
Connect Gmail OAuth2 credentials and update [email protected] in the "Email Daily Report" node.
Activate the workflow.

Requirements

n8n instance (self-hosted or cloud)
Google Cloud project with Sheets API enabled
Slack workspace with a bot configured
Gmail account with OAuth2 credentials (or swap for SMTP)
No API keys needed for RSS feeds — they are publicly accessible

How to customize

Add more RSS feeds** — duplicate a feed node (e.g., TechCrunch, Reddit, Lobsters), connect it to the Merge node as an additional input, and add the parsing logic in the "Parse All RSS Feeds" code node.
Edit keyword groups** — modify the keywordGroups object in the "Score and Classify Signals" node. Add your industry-specific keywords, adjust weights, and rename categories.
Adjust source weights** — change the weight multipliers in the parser node to reflect which sources you trust most.
Theme thresholds** — modify the strength cutoffs (30 = VERY_STRONG, 15 = STRONG, 8 = MODERATE) in the "Aggregate Signals into Themes" node.
Schedule** — change from daily to hourly for real-time monitoring, or weekly for a digest format.
Add AI analysis** — insert an LLM node after the report builder to generate strategic commentary on detected trends.