How to Know Your AI Feature Actually Works (n8n's Founder's Metric) | Jan Oberhauser, CEO n8n

n8n's founder puts the company's GitHub repo, nearly 200,000 stars, right next to the paid signup button, and he's genuinely fine if you never pay. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Jan Oberhauser, CEO of n8n, the open-source automation platform that's crossed $100 million in ARR at a $5.2 billion valuation. Jan breaks down the "fair-code" license bet that let him give the product away and still build a business, how that free version became the on-ramp into enterprises like Meta, Nvidia, Dell, Accenture, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and Mercedes, and why he believes the people with the problem should build the automation themselves, not a centralized team or an outside agency.He also walks through a live build of a personal AI agent (email and calendar), shows how n8n falls back from Claude to GPT via OpenRouter when a model isn't available, and explains how enterprises get automations into production faster because each agent can only do exactly what it's been permitted to do.What you'll learn:Why n8n rejected traditional open source for a "fair-code" license, and how it avoided the community backlash that burned other companiesWhy trust and consistency, not features, are the real center of a communityHow the free, self-hosted version drives bottom-up adoption inside major enterprisesWhy "sprinkling AI on top" kills products, and what to build insteadHow to chain agents so one agent's output becomes the next agent's inputWhy n8n is the "connective tissue" between models, tools, and business systemsHow guardrails (an agent can only do what it's explicitly allowed) speed up enterprise procurement and productionWhy the people with the problem should own the building, not a centralized AI teamHow 10,000+ community templates and 500+ integrations expand what non-technical builders can shipHow one company routes 75% of support through an n8n agent, with customers happier than with humansConnect with Guest (Jan Oberhauser):LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janoberhauserX: https://x.com/JanOberhauserHost: Carlos, CEO at Product SchoolLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/About Jan Oberholzer: Jan is the CEO of n8n, an open-source (fair-code) workflow automation and orchestration platform for building AI agents. He started the company over seven years ago, before LLMs went mainstream, and has grown it past $100M ARR at a $5.2B valuation.About the Product Podcast: Product School's podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech.Social Links:Find out more about Product School hereFollow our Podcast on TikTok hereFollow Product School on LinkedIn here