A challenge starts with someone else's problem
We do not invent challenges. They come from businesses in the community and from partners: a store drowning in order updates, a sales team losing leads overnight, a clinic booking appointments by hand. We turn that into a brief with a scope, a stack and a deadline, and drop it into the Arena.
The current featured challenge is a good example. The 7-Day Sales Machine: build an end-to-end system that qualifies leads, answers FAQs, records customer information and alerts the sales team automatically, using n8n, WhatsApp, OpenAI and Supabase.
What a cycle looks like
- Brief drop. The problem, the constraints and the definition of done, in plain language. No hidden requirements.
- Build. You work in the open. Questions go to the community, and tutors run live sessions each week to unblock people.
- Checkpoint. Mid-cycle you show what is working. Half-finished is fine; invisible is not.
- Ship. A working system, a short demo and a written note on the decisions you made.
- Review. Tutors and other builders review the submissions, and the strongest ones go into the showcase.
Constraints are the point
Every brief carries limits: a deadline, a fixed stack, sometimes a budget cap on API calls. Constraints are what separate a tutorial from a job. They force the decisions clients actually pay for: what to automate, what to leave manual, and what to do when the API you planned around does not do what the docs promised.
XP, and what it is not
Finishing a challenge earns XP, and XP is visible on your profile. It is a record of what you have shipped, not a score you can grind. Nobody has ever been hired for a number, so XP exists to make the work behind it easy to find.
What you leave with
- A working system you can demo on a call.
- A write-up of the problem and how you solved it, the thing clients actually read.
- Feedback from people who have deployed this stuff for money.
- A place in the showcase, which the opportunities board points at.
Who it is for
Beginner, Intermediate and Expert entries run in parallel, so the same challenge is scoped differently depending on where you are starting. If you have never built a workflow, start at Beginner. If you deploy n8n for clients already, Expert is where the constraints get uncomfortable.
Build it with us. The community is free and the build track opens with a first-100 discount: see pricing or join the community.