Discover Business Ideas from HackerNews Posts with GPT-4.1 Analysis and Google Sheets

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Built by Ari Nakos Ari Nakos
Created on June 05, 2026

Description

What it is

This n8n workflow monitors top Hacker News posts (in the Front Page) and identifies business-related pain points using AI.

How It Works

It filters posts by engagement (comments > 80, points > 200, and recent date), extracts key metadata, fetches the article content, and uses a GPT-4.1-based agent to detect and summarize pain points.

Results are appended to a Google Sheet for further analysis.

Setup

To run this workflow, you need to set up credentials for:


OpenRouter: Uses an API Key. Generate this key directly from your OpenRouter account settings. (YT Tutorial : https://youtu.be/Cq5Y3zpEhlc)
Google Sheets: Uses OAuth 2.0. Requires setup in Google Cloud Console (enable Sheets API, create OAuth Client ID with n8n redirect URI) to get a Client ID & Secret.

Ensure these credentials are created and selected in the respective n8n nodes (Get Posts, OpenRouter Chat Model nodes, Output The Results).


Nodes Used (5)

AI Agent
@n8n/n8n-nodes-langchain.agent
Google Sheets
n8n-nodes-base.googleSheets
Hacker News
n8n-nodes-base.hackerNews
OpenRouter Chat Model
@n8n/n8n-nodes-langchain.lmChatOpenRouter
Structured Output Parser
@n8n/n8n-nodes-langchain.outputParserStructured