Introduction
Hi everyone!
In this post, I will share with you how I automate one of my side hobby which is to grab free second hand things!
I started this project because I was thinking of flipping the free things i get and get some extra money on the side, and as a student, this was an amazing way to get unique things and earn some money on the side.
I mean really, who doesnt like free things 😅.
In this project, I will use mainly 3 things:
- N8N for my automation engine
- airtable for my database
- geev for my data source where i can get the list of free things near me
Steps
The steps needed to set up this project is the following :
- Set up the search parameters in Geev
- Reverse engineer Geev API
- Set up the daily feed to Airtable in N8N
- Start getting things
Step 1. Setting up search parameter
This is the easy part. In Geev, we can do a search on what kinds of things we want to keep an eye on.
Personally, i am not interested in getting big furnitures, but i am interested in tech, and small furnitures, and other things that could be interesting for me.
Step 2. Reverse engineer their API
Now we put our growth hacking hats on 🚀
In one of my posts, i explored different ways we can do data scraping, in this project i used one of the methods mentioned there which is to open the developer tools > network and try to figure out how the front end retrieve data from the backend. Fortunately in this case it is a simple POST request with a basic authentication method, so we can easily automate this.
We will replicate the same request in an http module in N8N. And we have the same items in the json format✨
Step 3. Set up daily feed to airtable
Now that we have our API connector ready, we just need to set up a workflow that runs daily or how ever often you want it to be to add a new entry in airtable everytime a new item is detected.
Step 4. Start getting things
Now that our set up is ready, all I need to do is to start getting free things 😅 here are some of the things i got:
Conclusion
Some might say this is an over engineered hoarder tool, but I just hope that I demonstrated that even a simple hobby can be leveled up with automation, why not appply it to your business.
Let me know if you have an idea on what I should write next!