— Build a real, working n8n workflow from scratch in ~30 minutes. We'll fetch the Bitcoin price every weekday at 9 AM, branch on whether it's above $100k, and notify either by email or Slack. Free tier only, no prior experience required. By the end you'll understand triggers, nodes, expressions, and conditional logic — the foundation everything else builds on.

I've onboarded a few colleagues to n8n over the past year. The pattern is the same every time: they start with the official "Schedule + NASA solar flares" tutorial, build something that works, then have no idea how to apply it to their actual job. The missing piece is a workflow that uses a real-world API and demonstrates why you'd use each node type — not just how .

Here's that workflow.

Five concepts you need before clicking anything

Internalize these. They'll save you hours of confusion later.

Workflow — a collection of connected nodes that automates a process. One workflow = one automation.

Node — a single step.…