Case study
TrendHunterNeo: an n8n-powered product research engine
TrendHunterNeo turns a product name into a GO or WAIT verdict with demand, competitor pricing, margins and ad angles in about 45 seconds. An n8n workflow does the analysis, a Next.js app handles everything around it, and the whole product is live at trendhuntern.com.
- ~45 s
- from product name to full report
- n8n
- runs the analysis behind one webhook, no custom analysis server
- AED
- server-priced payments, verified before access is granted
- 5 hunts
- free tier with per-user rate limits on paid-API routes
The problem
Dropshippers and small e-commerce sellers choose what to sell next by checking whether demand is rising, who already sells it, what it costs to source, what it can sell for and whether ads will pay back. Done by hand that is a long loop of tabs and spreadsheets, repeated for every candidate product, and most of it is the same research each time.
The goal was to compress that loop into one form: name a product, get a structured second opinion before committing any ad budget.
What we built
n8n as the analysis engine
The research logic lives in an n8n workflow behind a webhook. The app posts the product name, description and category, and the workflow gathers market and competitor data, applies the scoring and returns a single JSON report. Keeping this in n8n means the analysis can be changed, extended or debugged visually without redeploying the web app.
The app treats the workflow as an external engine: it renders whatever structured report comes back, saves it, and does not need to know how it was produced.
- Webhook in, structured JSON out, so the front end and the workflow evolve independently.
- Reports are stored per user in Supabase with row-level security, so a saved report can only be reopened by its owner.
- A roughly 45-second progress animation fast-forwards when the report arrives, because a long wait with no feedback reads as a broken app.
Scraping and trend data
Firecrawl extracts competitor storefront products and a public trends page, which feed a discovery feed on the dashboard and a public competitor directory that doubles as crawlable SEO content. A cron-triggered route refreshes trending products and categories.
Payments and abuse control
Paid access runs through Ziina, charged in AED. Price is decided on the server, never taken from the browser, and every payment is re-checked against a stored payment intent for amount and ownership before it unlocks anything.
Because each hunt costs real money in third-party API calls, per-user rate limits sit in front of the expensive routes, backed by an atomic Postgres function that returns 429 with a Retry-After header.
Delivery
The app is containerised and deployed to a VPS by a GitHub Actions workflow on every push to main, behind a reverse proxy with automatic certificates. SEO is handled in the framework: per-page metadata and canonicals, a curated sitemap, noindex on private routes and structured data on the home page.
Outcome
A working, paid-tier-ready SaaS that one person builds and operates. A user goes from a product idea to a structured GO or WAIT report in about 45 seconds, and the analysis can be changed in n8n without touching the web app.
It is early stage. There are no revenue or conversion figures worth publishing yet, and we would rather say that than quote vanity numbers. The measurable results today are the ones above: the end-to-end time per report, the free-tier limits, and a payment path that verifies every transaction server-side.
What we would change next
The first version waits synchronously for the workflow to finish. For longer analyses the better design is an asynchronous callback with a status page, which the app already has a stub endpoint for. Test coverage on the payment and rate-limit paths should also grow before traffic does. We include this because a case study that only lists wins does not help you judge whether we would be straight with you on your project.
Stack
- n8n
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Supabase
- Firecrawl
- Ziina
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
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