Before any public launch push, Jan published n8n's source to GitHub and lightly cross-posted it on alternativeto.net and Quora, letting early adopters self-select.

“In June 2019, I published the first version of n8n on GitHub and shared it on alternativeto.net and Quora.”

Jan had planned to submit n8n to Hacker News himself around the same time he posted it to Product Hunt, but someone else submitted it first; he then spent roughly two days personally answering nearly every comment on the resulting thread (728 points, 196 comments).

“Thanks a lot for posting! Even though I had actually planned to post it later myself”

The same Hacker News launch triggered a prolonged labeling controversy: commenters accused Jan of misrepresenting n8n as "open source" under its Commons Clause license, one calling it "gaslighting," and the fight spilled into a 330+ comment GitHub issue and a Hacker News mod retitling of the post.

“People started saying that I am lying, misleading them, and wasting their time. One person also said that I am gaslighting people.”

n8n's "proper" public launch in October 2019 was a self-submitted Product Hunt post, which is what a Hacker News user then separately cross-posted.

“Once I launched n8n on Product Hunt, somebody shared it on Hacker News.”

Post-launch growth was driven by the open-source contributor base itself: the repo hit 5,000 stars five months after publishing and 10,000 by November 2019, its first outside pull request landed about two months after publishing, and 100 people had contributed code by November 2020; by April 2021 that had become a self-organizing community of 16,000+ enthusiasts.

“formed a community of over 16,000 n8n enthusiasts from around the world”

Jan attributes the community's willingness to build on n8n for free to the fair-code license itself: because commercial users had to pay while everyone else used it free, the community trusted the project would stay funded and maintained rather than get abandoned or paywalled later.

“fair-code increases the chance of making the project long term financially viable”

For the 1.0 milestone release, Jan again pointed his own following at a Product Hunt listing rather than relying only on owned channels.

“Remember to upvote us on Product Hunt!”