Ship a live automation
without writing code.
A 4-week cohort for operators, marketers, and founders. n8n + Claude. By week 4, you've built and deployed a working automation that runs in YOUR business every day — not a toy in a sandbox.
Capstone-required. Your automation is reviewed by a Nolola partner before you certify. We'll fail you if it's held together with hope.
Operators who want
their week back.
If you're moving data between SaaS tools by hand, this course replaces about 60% of that work — without needing an engineer.
- You spend 1+ hours/day moving data between SaaS tools by hand
- You tried Zapier but couldn't get the AI step working the way you wanted
- You can drag-and-drop and read a spec — you just don't write TypeScript
- You want AI inside your existing workflow, not in a separate chat tab
- Your team has 5+ tools that should be talking to each other and aren't
Want the automation built FOR you instead? Hire a vetted builder from the marketplace. Need it owned end-to-end by a team? Productized builds handle the most common workflows.
A working automation.
Not a toy.
Connected to your real tools, running on your real data, every day.
A live automation for YOUR business
Not a demo on a sandbox account. Connected to your real CRM, your real Slack, your real spreadsheet — running every day.
AI in the right places
You learn where Claude wins (extraction, classification, drafting) and where to use a deterministic step instead. The fastest path to reliability.
Production-grade workflow hygiene
Error handling, retries, alerting when things break, secret management. The unglamorous half of automation, but the half that keeps it running.
A repeatable pattern
Once you've built one, the next 5 take a quarter of the time. You leave with the mental model, not just the workflow.
Week by week.
Ends running daily.
n8n fundamentals
Workflows, nodes, triggers. Your first AI step — Claude pulling structured data from an email. By the end of week 1 you have a working automation running on a schedule.
Connecting your tools
Bring your real tools — CRM, helpdesk, sheets, Slack, Stripe, whatever. We integrate the ones you actually use. The capstone scope gets fixed this week.
AI in the loop
Claude as a classifier, extractor, summarizer, decision step. When to use AI in a workflow and when not to. Cost math + reliability tradeoffs.
Production + capstone
Error handling, retries, monitoring, secrets. Your capstone automation deploys to your real environment. Partner review + certification.
Build it yourself,
or hire someone who has.
AI Automation with n8n
- Deliverable
- Live automation in your business + Nolola-verified cert
- Right fit
- You're operations-minded and want AI in your existing workflow
Running daily.
Months later.
“I'm a non-engineer founder. Capstone was a lead-routing automation: form fills come in, Claude classifies them, routes to the right Slack channel with a summary. Running daily, six months later. Not a toy.”
“I'd been begging engineering for this automation for a year. Took the course, built it myself in week 3. Saved them, saved me. The Claude classification step is the magic — Zapier alone couldn't do it.”
“Marketing ops nightmare: 8 tools, 4 data warehouses, weekly reports done by hand. Built a workflow that consolidates everything overnight. The capstone is still my favorite piece of internal tooling.”
Common questions
No code required to finish — n8n is drag-and-drop. We touch a tiny amount of JavaScript in optional “expression” fields for transforming data, but every code snippet is provided. Most students who've never written a line of code complete the capstone.
n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool — think Zapier with no per-step pricing, way more flexibility, and the ability to self-host. We picked it because: (1) free / cheap to run, (2) you keep your data on your infra if you want, (3) the AI nodes are first-class, (4) the patterns transfer to Zapier and Make if you ever want to switch. By the end you can architect workflows on any of them.
Yes — that's the point. The capstone is a live automation connected to YOUR real tools. We've built workflows over HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Stripe, Notion, Airtable, Google Sheets, Slack, Linear, Intercom, Zendesk, Gmail, Outlook, Calendly, and a long tail of others. If your tool has an API or a Zapier integration, we can connect it.
An automation running in your real environment. 30-min review with a Nolola partner before certification — we check that it works end-to-end, has error handling, and would survive your boss looking at it in a week. We'll fail you if it's held together with hope.
n8n cloud starts at $20/mo for small workloads. Self-hosted is free (your server time only). Claude API costs per workflow run are usually pennies — most capstones cost $5-25/mo all-in to operate, depending on volume.
~3 to 5 hours: 1 live session (90 min), 1-2 hours building, 30 minutes Slack + peer review. Week 4 is heavier as the capstone comes together — closer to 6 hours.
Lead-routing, content-repurposing pipelines, candidate triage for hiring, AP/AR follow-up, support-ticket classification, sales-pipeline updates, newsletter drafting, podcast-to-blog conversion, vendor onboarding, weekly metric digests, customer-health monitoring. Most are 10-30 nodes. Boring on paper, transformational in practice.
Top certified grads can apply for the Nolola AI Talent Marketplace. The no-code track tends to have steady demand from small businesses that need an automation built but don't have an engineer — your skill maps directly to that. Not auto-listed; you still go through expert vetting.