The Problem
I wanted to build an investment research platform that could do what Wall Street analysts do — fundamental valuation, forensic accounting, peer comparisons — but automated and accessible to individual investors. The catch: I wasn't going to hire a team. Everything had to be built, maintained, and scaled by one person.
That meant every piece of the business — from SEC data ingestion to subscriber billing to cold outreach — needed to run autonomously. Manual steps would become bottlenecks. Bottlenecks would kill the project.
The Solution: n8n as the Backbone
I chose n8n as the workflow automation platform because it gives full control over every node, supports custom JavaScript, and connects to any API. Over the course of building Occam's Investing, I created 187 total workflows. 35+ of them run in production every day. Here's how they break down.
AI-Powered Valuation Engine
The core product is a hybrid valuation system that combines Occam's forensic analysis with Damodaran-style DCF models. When a subscriber requests a valuation, an n8n workflow detects the company's sector (standard equity, REIT, BDC, bank, pipeline, or cyclical), routes it to the correct child workflow, and orchestrates a 3-model AI jury — Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini — to deliver independent analyst-grade reports.
- 6 sector-specific valuation models — each with its own child workflow
- 3 AI models running in parallel for independent analysis
- 100+ valuations processed since launch
- Automated sector detection — no manual routing required
SEC Filing Pipeline
Every quarter, public companies file financial statements with the SEC in XBRL format. I built a 50-node n8n workflow that monitors SEC EDGAR for new filings, downloads the XBRL data, parses it into structured JSON, runs forensic scoring (Rule of 40, zombie detection, dividend risk analysis), and stores everything in Supabase. A separate workflow monitors for real-time filing alerts and notifies subscribers within minutes of an SEC submission.
Subscriber Operations
The subscriber system is fully automated: Stripe handles checkout and payments, n8n workflows manage subscription creation, quota enforcement, magic link authentication, and cancellation. A weekly Monday Scanner emails subscribers with the latest stock ideas, and a newsletter nurture drip sequence onboards new users over their first two weeks. Systemic risk alerts fire automatically when 3 or more companies in a sector trigger SELL signals — no human in the loop.
Cold Outreach: Apollo + Instantly + Facebook Ads
Building the product was only half the challenge. Finding users required a complete outreach system, also built on n8n.
Lead Sourcing with Apollo.io
Apollo.io is the lead source. I built filters to identify our ideal customer profile — business owners, operations managers, and CTOs at companies running AI or automation tools — and export qualified leads in batches. Apollo provides verified email addresses, company data, and role information that feeds directly into the scoring pipeline.
The 4-Workflow Outreach Pipeline
Cold outreach runs through four n8n workflows that operate as a single pipeline:
- Lead Ingestion & Scoring — Apollo leads land in Supabase. An AI model (Claude Haiku) scores each lead based on company size, role, and industry, then assigns them to one of three outreach tiers.
- Batch Personalization — Every 30 minutes, a workflow picks up unprocessed leads and generates personalized email copy using Claude. Tier 1 leads (highest value) get fully custom messages. Tier 3 leads get templated personalization. This runs on a schedule, not on-demand, to manage API costs.
- Send Queue — Personalized emails are queued and sent through Instantly.ai with warmup-aware rate limiting. Two sender domains (insightfulagents.io and theairazor.com) rotate to maintain deliverability.
- Monitoring & Analytics — A daily workflow pulls delivery stats, open rates, and reply rates from the Instantly API and logs them to Supabase. LinkedIn touchpoint reminders fire separately to keep warm leads engaged across channels.
The result: 1,100+ leads processed end to end with zero manual email writing, zero manual sends, and full attribution tracking from first touch to reply.
Facebook Ads for Top-of-Funnel
Cold email handles warm outreach, but Facebook Ads bring in cold traffic. I run campaigns targeting business owners and operations managers interested in automation tools (n8n, Zapier, Make). The ads drive traffic to a free audit tool landing page — a low-friction lead magnet that demonstrates value before asking for a call.
The ad strategy is systematic: launch 6-9 ad variations per campaign across different hooks (security, cost of inaction, DIY rescue), test for 3-5 days at $15/day, then kill underperformers based on cost-per-landing-page-view. In the most recent campaign, 9 of 18 ads were paused within the first week. The survivors — Security v2, Cost of Inaction v2, and Monday Morning hooks — achieved landing page view costs under $0.65.
Quality Control: Auditing Our Own Workflows
With 187 workflows and growing, maintenance is a real problem. That's why I built the n8n Workflow Audit Tool — the same free tool we offer clients. It scans workflow JSON for missing error handlers, hardcoded API keys, dormant nodes, and redundant API calls. I run it against my own stack regularly to catch issues before they become production failures.
The audit tool has already caught workflows calling the same API endpoint in multiple places (consolidated into cached lookups), nodes with no error handling on critical paths, and credentials that needed rotation. It's the same tool we use when auditing client environments — because we built it to solve our own problem first.
Results
Occam's Investing now runs as a production platform with paying subscribers, automated daily operations, and zero manual intervention for routine tasks. Here's what the numbers look like:
- 187 total workflows built across the n8n instance (35+ active daily)
- 700+ stocks analyzed weekly through automated screeners and valuation models
- 8 BDCs tracked with automated SEC XBRL ingestion, quality scoring, and industry concentration analysis
- 1,100+ outreach leads processed through the 4-workflow pipeline with AI personalization
- 3 AI models (Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) orchestrated for independent analysis
- $0.49–$0.65 cost per landing page view on top-performing Facebook ad creatives
- Zero daily manual maintenance — everything triggers on schedules, webhooks, or events