The Exchanges

Q Just to pause on that. It was, you gave him a Twitter account. He started posting on there. People like me were following at one point. He said, I'm selling this PDF. Anyone want to buy? And again, people like me, I bought it. Click the link, went over and bought the PDF. That was the original part of the business.

A That was the first product. Yeah. So that was the, the first day he had his X account. I, that night I said, I want you to come up with a product that you can entirely make on your own and put up for sale. And when I wake up in the morning, I want, I want to review it and then you can launch it. And so that was when he came up, he built this whole site overnight, uh, Built this PDF. He did everything except finish setting up Stripe. He just needed me to give him the right API keys for that. So he got all this put together and I gave it the thumbs up and then he launched it on X. And I think it did like over a thousand dollars in sales that first day, which was pretty cool.

AI assessment note: “That was the first product. Yeah. So that was the, the first day”

Q automations you want. And at the same time, you have something that's super reliable. Computer doesn't have to be up. You don't have to worry about an update changing and breaking things. Okay. All right. I get this now. I want to see the behind the scenes of the business. Can you show me the tools you're using to keep track of what, what you're doing, what Felix is doing?

A It's literally just discord, uh, where we have. Oops. We have different channels for each of the projects that we're working on. And depending on what it is, I can just hop into that channel and reply or kick off new work. So this is one good example is like our, our general channel is where he reports to me on outstanding tickets at the business. And so we're using a tool called paperclip for this, which is, has been an incredible upgrade To our system where Paperclip basically creates a local infrastructure on the computer Felix runs on so that he can delegate tasks to other AI agents so that he doesn't have to do everything. So we have three employees in Felix's Paperclip company. Aside from him, we have Iris who handles all the support emails. And so an email comes in to our support email and 80, 90% of the time Iris can just handle it and respond. But when she can't, she creates a ticket in paperclip to surface it to Felix. And then Felix, if he can handle it, he'll handle it. If not, he'll report it to me here in general. So you can see there's one that's blocked on my input. Um, but other than that, like the queue is clear. So when there's a, uh, a, a coding thing that needs to be implemented, Felix hands that off to our coding agent, Devin, which It's kind of confusing because it's not actually Devin the coding tool. Felix just named him Devin probably, probably like go…

AI assessment note: “It's literally just discord, uh, where we have different channels for each of the projects”

Q And where did you come up with the idea for this? Cause I thought this was such an inspired move to create it.

A Yeah. So honestly, the first thing that we started doing after the PDF is we started building a, uh, like open claw deployment service, you know, where like, cause it was basically like, Oh, everybody wants open claw. Like we'll build a service that, Hosts your open claw and deploys it and manages it for you so that you don't have to deal with setting it up yourself. And at the time we couldn't figure out a workflow that we were really happy with. We didn't feel good about the product. And there were like five of those businesses launching every day. And so it just really felt like this is going to be brutally competitive. There's no reason for us to try to win in this insanely competitive marketplace when we could go do other things. And so we started thinking through like, well, if everybody's going to have an open claw in a few months, what's the next thing they need? And it was very obviously this, it was like, oh, Vanilla open claw is fine, but it's not great. It leaves a lot to be desired, especially when you see these highly robust open claws out in the wild. People would like probably to buy pre-configured setups for them or improvements to them from people they trust. And obviously there's a lot of like free marketplaces, you know, like claw hub and stuff where you can download skills. But my, my philosophy is kind of like, The best stuff is going to emerge when there'…

AI assessment note: “we started thinking through like, well, if everybody's going to have an open claw”

Q And so I don't see why you need paperclip. Why couldn't you just keep track of it all here in discord?

A Uh, well, because what paperclip allows us to do is to create jobs and hand them off. And then Felix doesn't need to remember to do them or remember to check in on them. And for some of these things, we want other agents to do them. So the, the coding is the big example where OpenClaw is not a good programmer. Like OpenClaw just doesn't do a good job of coding because OpenClaw is highly optimized for being helpful and for being a good assistant and getting things done. But you want like good code written. You don't want the quick and easy answer. And so, for our coding agent, um, it's, it's running in a separate session. It's using Codex, whereas Felix runs on Opus, and it has a heartbeat where every 30 minutes it checks if Felix has created a new coding ticket for it. If Felix has, it grabs the ticket, takes the instructions, and then writes the code, and then pushes it up to a branch for us to review. And that way Felix isn't doing any of the coding. He's just identifying what needs to be done and then handing it off to the engineer who's going to do a much better job, uh, than he would.

AI assessment note: “what paperclip allows us to do is to create jobs and hand them off.”

Q Right. Um, final thing about the business ideas. Where did they come from? Is that Felix? Is that you? Is there a combination that's working?

A Usually the way it happens is We'll run into a problem consistently. And then I will say like, this could actually be a good product. So that's where Sondex came from was we started building this memory system for ourselves. And then in the process realized there might be other people out there who could benefit from this. So we may as well put it up as a product people can use. And then we have another one that, uh, we haven't announced this, but you know what, we'll, we'll give you the exclusive here. Um, Which is, so if you go to Claw Mart, we've done something kind of cool with Claw Mart that I hadn't seen anybody else do when we did it, which is we have the Claw Mart daily, which is a daily newsletter for how to improve your open claw. Totally free. Uh, Felix writes every issue, puts it in the queue. It goes out to everybody who subscribed, but you don't have to subscribe by email. You can subscribe through open claw. So if you copy this, These are instructions to create a cron job to check the Claw Mart daily API for new additions. So you copy this, you give it to your open claw, and then every morning your open claw will read the newsletter, see if there's anything useful in it for you, and then let you know if there was an idea that you could implement to make your open claw better. Honestly, this is really cool. Like I love this so much. Because it's giving anybody wit…

AI assessment note: “We'll run into a problem consistently. And then I will say like, this could actually”

Q So agents to remember the client and for human beings to have a self updating system on clients. Is that right?

A Basically just for agents. So it's not really for, for humans at all. Um, and so Felix uses this every day where when a customer emails him, he pulls in the Sondax card on that customer, because that's been enriched with all of the past communications with them, as well as their Stripe purchases. Uh, and so he's getting like much better understanding of who that person is before he responds. And this, this solves the problem of like, Him having to remember to go do this because sometimes he remembers, sometimes he says like, oh yeah, I should go check all my past emails and stripe and like learn everything that needs to know about this person. But sometimes he forgets and he thinks it's like a brand new person. But with this, it kind of like takes out the memory requirement because every interaction, the way we have it set up for his email is he basically can't skip this step. He has to pull in the full client card before he composes a draft. And that's been very helpful.

AI assessment note: “Basically just for agents. So it's not really for, for humans at all.”

Q Why then not just have Felix do it? What's the advantage of building out different agents? I remember you and I were texting. I think it might've been like two weeks ago where I said, why aren't you doing this? And all the other people I'm interviewing have multiple agents and you're not. And you said they're overcomplicating. Why now do you need it?

A Cause now Felix, you know, sometimes he'll get a hundred emails a day. We've got all these projects running. Um, he's got his Twitter to manage. He's got, Uh, you know, the projects we have talked about plus the ones that we haven't, it was just too much stuff polluting his memory in his context that was leading to some of these confusions. And so at this scale where Felix has built, you know, a business that's done almost 200 grand in two months, like now it's starting to make sense to split out some of his capabilities to other agents, but we take a very, very minimal approach to it. Like my philosophy and his philosophy is like, do not complicate Until you really hit a bottleneck. And at that point it makes sense to do it. And so for, for Tegan, uh, you know, I didn't want these, like these stats and these searches like polluting Felix's Cron, especially since this is a deterministic process. It is not a non-deterministic AI driven one. It's much more, it's much closer to just normal code. Than like an AI agent job. And so the more things we can offload to actual scripts that don't require judgment, the better. And so we try to lean on that as much as possible too.

AI assessment note: “it was just too much stuff polluting his memory in his context”

Q What's an automation that somebody would do today here versus somewhere else?

A Whenever I wanted to just like easily update my kit newsletter with my circle, uh, course students, like I'm using Zapier. I'm not going to go custom build something. You can just pay for Zapier and then use Zapier to like automate all those things together. When I was selling my books on my Shopify store, I was using Zapier for some of those automations as well. It's just, it makes it so easy that I really believe that you should have kind of like a bimodal approach to automation where You just use Zapier for most things, but then when you want to get, like, crazy in the weeds and, you know, build Felix, like, then you go to code, but if you're not gonna go that crazy, you just use Zapier.

AI assessment note: “Whenever I wanted to just like easily update my kit newsletter with my circle”