HackerNews Pain Point Extractor: Discover Business Ideas from Trending Posts

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 such as :

• comments > 80
• points > 200
• and date

(You can always change these filters -- I recommend you keep points high, for high value posts.)

It then extracts key metadata, fetches the article content, and uses a GPT-4.1-based agent to detect and summarize pain points.

Final results are appended to a Google Sheet for further analysis.

Setup

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

1. OpenRouter: Uses an API Key. Generate this key directly from your OpenRouter account settings. (YT Tutorial)

2. Google Sheets: Use OAuth 2.0.

n8n Account Setup

If you have never setup an n8n account here's a tutorial, where I show you how to setup an account from scratch. Then I show you how would upload a JSON file and setup credentials for a reddit lead report email workflow.