You start by choosing the signals you care about: keywords, competitors, topics, regions, and sources like RSS feeds, Google Search, or social posts. An n8n workflow pulls new items on a schedule, deduplicates them, and enriches them (for example, extracting company names or product mentions). Then AI can summarize, classify sentiment, and group themes. Finally, results are sent to where you work—Google Sheets, Notion, Slack, or email—so your team sees insights, not links.

Usually, no. Most Flowpast workflows are plug-and-play: connect your accounts, set keywords, and hit run. If you can handle a spreadsheet and a few settings, you’ll be fine. For advanced setups—like custom scraping or multi-market dashboards—you will get more control, but it’s still guided and reusable.

If you’re doing research manually, it’s easy to lose about 2 hours a week just collecting links, taking notes, and writing updates. Automation handles collection, sorting, and first-pass summaries, so your time goes to decisions and strategy. Teams often use it to keep a weekly trends brief running without someone “owning” it every Friday. Honestly, the bigger win is consistency: fewer blind spots, fewer missed shifts, and less last-minute scrambling before meetings.

You’ll need an n8n instance (cloud or self-hosted) and accounts for any tools you want to connect, like Google Sheets, Slack, or OpenAI. Pick a workflow, paste in your keywords or competitor list, and choose where outputs should land. Some workflows use web requests or RSS feeds, which need no extra setup. If a workflow includes scraping, you may need an API key (for example, a search or scraping provider) and a short test run to confirm the sources.