0:00 n8n is one of the most powerful automation tools out there and it's a free drag and drop open source platform. If you've ever wanted to create your own AI agents, optimize your business and personal processes, and know exactly how your automations are running, N8n could be right for you. In this video, I'm going to show you how to get started by building a real and simple project together in AI Power Daily Digest that automatically creates a news feed page in Notion every morning checking your overdue tasks and scanning your favorite websites. This will cover the fundamentals on how to use triggers, nodes, work with APIs, AI agents, and more. If you find this video helpful, be sure to like, subscribe, and turn on the notification bell. Let's dive right in! N8n itself is completely free but you do need to have a place to host it. You can see N8n's
0:47 own cloud hosting service here. It's fully managed but comes at a higher price point. For Hostinger, it would look like this and as you can see, it's a much cheaper option. I would recommend the KVM2 option because the two cores means they'll support more simultaneous automations, especially important when you're running AI agents. I'm going to start by clicking choose plan and here you can choose the time period that you want to use. For 12 and 24 months, if you click have a coupon code and type the organized notebook, you can get 10% off on those plans. You can choose to have a daily auto backup and also choose your server location and next you can choose the operating system and we can go ahead and click continue. Then you'll want to create your own password and then we can go ahead and finish setup and now you'll just have to wait
1:36 until the VPS gets set up. Now if you go to hpanel.hostinger.com, you'll see the VPS here. You can also click here to access that and you can go to manage and it's going to ask for some VPS, some questions here. You can just go ahead. Now we have it here. The next thing you'll want to do is n8n is already here so you can already go ahead and go to manage app and then you'll want to create the owner account for the n8n and now it's going to ask about the n8n, what best describes your company and we can go ahead and get started. So now we're ready to get started. All you have to do is click start from scratch. So I think it's easiest just to show you how this
2:23 works by just starting to build. Create an AI agent first which is going to go through new web articles from your favorite websites as well as look through Notion databases to tell you information and kind of give you a daily digest. I'm actually going to go ahead and name this one daily digest. For the first step, we're just going to use a chat trigger. So I'm going to go ahead and click chat trigger and we can already chat with it by opening the chat. So I can type hello and you can see that when a chat message is received, then we can start doing something else. So since there's nothing connected to it, even if I type something, it's not actually going to do anything. So the next step is going to be to add an AI agent. So I'm going to go ahead and add that AI agent.
3:13 And for this one, you can see that the source prompt or the user message is the connected chat node and we'll have the chat input as the prompt. So we can just keep that there. And for the chat model, you have a lot of choices. You can do Anthropic, you can do Google Gemini and even OpenAI. This is really what I like about N8n is just the flexibility on what you want to use as well as how much of it you want to use. Say that we want to connect the Google Gemini chat model, which is free. So I'm just going to choose that. I've personally been using the OpenAI chat model and that's also pretty easy to get set up as well. So I'm going to go ahead and show you how to connect Google Gemini and also give you a brief look into how to connect OpenAI if you
4:00 want to use that instead. The OpenAI costs a bit more. I found that it's very affordable, especially if you use the smaller models. So I'm going to go ahead and choose Google Gemini and you'll notice that you need to attach a credential here. So to create that credential, we're going to click plus create a credential. And to get the key, you can go to Google AI Studio, so aistudio.google.com and you'll be able to click get API key. It's very simple. All you have to do is click create API key. So as you can see, there's a free tier. It's free to get started. I'm just going to name this N8n test and I'll do default Gemini project, create key. And now what I can do is click here to get the key and then copy it. So now if I go back into my daily digest workflow, I can paste that API key
4:49 in and then I can save it. And you can see that it's been successfully created inside of my personal space. And now if I click out, I have a chat model. So what that chat model allows me to do is now if I type hello, it's going to answer back to me. And now it says, hello, how can I help you today? So now the problem is that I can chat with my Google Gemini, but it's not going to remember what I've talked about. So if I say, hello, my favorite food is mac and cheese, you can see that it's running and it's going to give me an answer. But if I say, so what's my favorite food? It's not actually going to tell me what I just said. So you can see I don't have personal
5:34 information about you, so I can't possibly know what your favorite food is. So that's where the memory comes in. So you can set up a simple memory where it's going to remember five past interactions. So I can set that up. And now that I have a memory, I can reset the chat session and say my favorite food is mac and cheese. And then I can say, so what's my favorite food? So that's the purpose of the memory. And what's cool about n8n is that you can actually see the chat history here if you click on the memory. And one more thing with the Google Gemini is that you can actually click here to choose the different models as well. So you have so many options on what exactly you want to use in terms of your AI chat model. If you're interested in using OpenAI
6:22 instead, it would follow a similar path as the Google AI Studio. You would just need to go to platform.openai.com, go to your settings, and then you can see API keys, and then click create new secret key. And you'll be able to create one. You'll just need to make sure that you have enough credits. So OpenAI costs per usage compared to Google Gemini, which has a free tier. So keep that in mind if you want to use the OpenAI. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to add a tool. So the tool is what the AI agent can also access. And that can be things like your Google Drive, your Notion. And in this case, to start simple, I'm going to add something called an RSS read tool. And that's going to allow you to find the latest articles, videos from a URL
7:15 for your favorite website. So let's say that I want to add the TechCrunch as the URL, and then most of them you just have to put feed like this. And then you can just execute step. So you can see the title of the articles, who is the creator, the tags and categories. So this is really useful information that your AI can now read. So if I click out, so now what I can do is ask it what are the latest articles from TechCrunch. And now you can see the latest articles in the startups category like this. So as you can see, it's basically reading through the RSS feed and it's able to access the latest articles for me. I can even ask it, can you give me links? And I even have the
8:06 links to them. So that works really well. I'm going to go ahead and rename this as TechCrunch so we know what this is looking through. Just to give you another example, I'm going to duplicate this one. I'm going to add another RSS read tool for reading through YouTube videos. So you might be interested in that. So let's say that I want to connect Linus Tech Tips. And what you'll need to do in order to use the YouTube channels RSS is to control click and then view page source. And to find it, all you have to do is search inside of here. So you can do control command F channel underscore ID equals and you'll find the link. So I'm going to go ahead
8:55 and just copy that link and I can already just put that in here like this. And then I can execute step to check that it's working. And now you can see that it's working properly. You can see the latest videos. So now if I reset the chat session, I can also ask it, give me a daily digest of TechCrunch and Linus Tech Tips. So now you can see here's your daily digest of Tech News, TechCrunch, and you can find those here. So I think this is really cool. You can basically build out your entire AI agent with all the tools that you wanted to access. The next thing I wanted to show you is that you can connect even Notion to this. So I'm going to go ahead and connect
9:43 Notion next. And for this, I think it's best if you connect like a task database so you can see what kinds of tasks are overdue. And next, what we're going to do is click the plus sign here and look for Notion. To do that, we're going to have to create a new credential to connect with. This way, it's pretty easy. All you need is an internal integration secret. To create one of those, you need to go to notion.so slash profiles slash integrations. Make sure you're logged into the correct account. What we're going to be doing is to connect a task tracker database so we can see overdue tasks and have it create a daily digest for us. And you can really just create a very simple database here. And what you'll need to do next is go back here, plus new integration. I'm
10:30 going to name this n8n daily digest. And you'll choose the appropriate workspace, whether it's internal, public integration. You can have a logo here if you want. Save. Configure integration settings. And here, you'll see the integration secret. Before we do that, we want to go to access to make sure that we have access to the page that we want to look at. So I'm going to click edit. And all you have to do is select the correct page. So I see it here. Save. And now if I use this key, so I can show copy this integration secret. I can paste it in and save. And in this case, what we want to do is get database pages. So I'm going to do database page and I'm going to do get
11:16 many. And we're going to make sure that we have the n8n test task tracker selected here. I'm going to return all so we can get anything we want. You can set filters so that it's more efficient if you want to do that. But I'm going to just go ahead, execute step. And now you'll see the three tasks that are in this database. So now what we can do is click out and go ahead and ask, give me a daily digest of. And now we can see our daily digest. You can see all the links and we'll see also your task database, publish release notes, update help center, FAQ, improve website, copy. So you can basically connect an unlimited amount
12:03 of tools here as you want. And one more thing we're going to do now is that let's actually have this published to a notion page as a feed. So if you want your daily digest to now appear into notion, you can even connect this to your Gmail as well. But basically I'm going to go ahead and create a new database. I'm going to click database empty. All I really want is a feed view. So I'm going to click feed my daily news from N8N and we can get started from there. The next thing is to make sure that we can access this database using the integration that we created. So if you go back to this tab here in your integrations,
12:54 you can go to access and make sure that you add that access to that new database that you created. So now we have two pages connected here. So now what we can do is click the plus sign here, look for notion, and I'm going to get the one where it says create a database page. And we're in the correct credential now that we created at once. We just need to make sure that the database is connected here. So that's the my daily news from N8N. The title is going to be here's my daily news and we can go ahead and execute this step to check that it's working. So now we can see if we click here that the N8N daily digest here is my daily news,
13:43 but we don't have anything inside. So we're going to change that by now connecting these the agent to the created database page together. And now what we're going to do is in the block section here, we basically want to add the chat message coming from the AI agent into our database page. So now what I'm going to do is type create a 2000 character or less daily digest. And now if I click here, we'll see what kind of output there is. And now what I can do is go to the blocks here and add that as a notion block. So I'm going to just drag this in as the output and I can now execute the step again. So now if I go to my daily news from N8N,
14:33 I now see this here, the daily tech digest. And one thing I want is not to have all of these star markers. So I'm going to actually give it more specific instructions now. So now what I can do is type a very specific prompt in here. So I'm going to say create a 2000 character or less daily digest formats, a simple text, no bolding, no headings. Give me also a digest of my notion overdue tasks. And I'm going to click enter. And now you can see it like this. So you can obviously customize this. And if some things are missing, you can really make sure in the prompt that you give it. So what I'm going to next do is actually change the trigger here. So I'm going to replace this with a scheduled trigger,
15:20 which means that every morning I want it to execute and give me that daily digest into notion. So what I'm going to do now is instead of putting the prompt here, there's no longer a connected chat trigger is to define below. So I'm just going to type that prompt in. And what I'll also do is now add an option. So the option in an Asian is basically setting it up so that, for example, you are a helpful assistant, personality, things like that can go into the system message. So I'm going to say you are a snappy and fun assistant writer. And now what I can do is click out, click execute workflow. Before that, I'm actually
16:08 going to remove the memory. So when it's not a chat based Asian, you no longer need that memory. You don't need to chat with it. So it doesn't need to retain that information. I'm just going to click execute workflow. And now let's see what happened with our daily news. And now we can see today's tech bites and we see all kinds of information here. I can also see my overdue tasks information. Unfortunately, with the notion connection, you do have to add links manually. And what that means is that if I click add block and I do rich text, I could add a link this way. And let's say that access your tasks here and then I could add a link to my task database.
16:56 So if I'm in my task tracker, I can just copy the link and I can go back to here, paste that in, and I can check it by executing this step. So now you'll see that I have my link here to access my tasks. If I click it, I go back to my task tracker. So you can really customize this. You could add all kinds of different sources that you want your agent to pull up and create a one unified newsletter for each day. One thing to make sure is always remember to save your workflows as you go or it's going to get lost. And all you have to do now is just click activate and got it. And it's going to start running. So I hope that this gave a really brief overview on how to use
17:42 from creating an agent, using a schedule trigger all the way to actually adding it as a database page. I can also show you a bit more on how I'm using personally for my business. So one thing with is that sometimes if you want it to be formatted in the way that you really want, you might need to use some code. And in that case, you can definitely use Claude or chatGPT to help you generate the correct code you need. What I frequently also do is to screenshot the workflows, paste it in and ask it for how to fix it. And for example, this one, I really like my agent will allow me to basically generate a scope of work using just a transcript from discovery calls. So I've been able to save a lot of time with drafting scope of work documents.
18:34 If you're interested in hosting or who's the sponsor of today's video, be sure to check the link in the description for 10% off with code, the organized notebook. I think that self hosting is so easy and fast that I wonder why I didn't try earlier. Let me know if you'd like to see more tutorials using n8n or if you have any questions or comments, and I hope to see you all in the next video.
