How to quickly ship an all-around communication app with n8n
Sergio Leon is the co-founder and CTO at ChatHQ, which is a digital agency workhorse that combines Slack-Esque chats paired with omnichannel customer support & lifecycle management. Pair that with project management features and now you have the perfect tool for running your agency.
An additional selling point of ChatHQ is that customers can fully customize the app’s brand scheme, which helps with building brand awareness as well as internal adoption.
How to build a jack of all trades?
Andrew (CEO & co-founder) and Sergio both have a strong agency background. This helped them acquire a deep understanding of the main pain points of modern digital agencies.
These mainly are:
- Communication spread over different channels and usually in silos.
- Using too many apps to manage each stage of the client lifecycle
- Difficulties when sharing project updates via multiple applications and tools.
These issues were the building blocks for the concept of ChatHQ. To create a tool that will allow agencies to have one space for turning leads into clients, projects, and long-term partnerships.
Great ideas require fast shipping
An app that offers so much functionality seemed like a demanding one to build. That’s why when Sergio, a long-time user of n8n learned about n8n's source-code availability, he instantly knew it would be the best option to quickly build ChatHQ.
“If it weren’t for n8n, it would probably take us a year of coding ChatHQ, and it would hinder our time-to-market goals”
Source-code availability as the clincher
Sergio never considered building ChatHQ with custom code as it would seriously lengthen the development time, that’s why popular workflow automation tools such as Zapier or Make (formerly Integromat) were considered.
However, Sergio wanted to build a platform that doesn’t put limits on how much customization can be done.
With n8n’s source code being completely available, there was no question that n8n was the right platform for the job.
Nodes, nodes, and more nodes
The team at ChatHQ decided to build a completely new user interface and have it communicate solely with the n8n backend, giving their customers the user experience they envisioned.
None of this would be possible in a short time if it weren’t for n8n’s capacity to build and host custom nodes.
Three different faces of ChatHQ
With a speedy and customizable n8n workflow engine, the team managed to come up with three unique use cases of ChatHQ:
- A web-chat widget for capturing leads and customer support requests that are transferred into the integrated CRM (HighLevel)
- A scalable team & client communication chat app that scales faster and cheaper than the likes of Slack or MS Teams at just a fraction of the cost.
- Establishing one source of truth for sharing updates and conversations regarding ongoing client projects.
This makes ChatHQ an agency powerhouse that enables them to have one place to manage their client relationships throughout each stage of the life cycle.
“The fact that is source-available allowed me to see exactly how it works and how we can build around it.”
Picking the right partners for the job
Here’s how n8n helped ChatHQ to become the digital agency powerhouse they envisioned:
- Way faster and easier product development from prototype to complete product
- Throwing any 3rd imposed limitations out of the window and harnessing full customizability
- Being able to ship new features without extensive rebuilds thanks to custom node development
Discover how other users power up their businesses with n8n workflows.
