How To Build a $1M AI Business With Hermes Agent | FULL COURSE transcript

We have been building Founder Funnel for about 2 months. We just reached six clients [music] at $5,000 a month per client. That is $30,000 a month or [music] $360,000 a year. That is not some fake AI side where you make a chatbot and hope someone pays for it. We have run services up to $2 million a year [music] in revenue before. And the playbook here is basically the same. The tools changed, [music] the business model did not.

Businesses do not wake up wanting AI agents. They want more leads, more sales, [music] more consistent content, fewer missed opportunities, less admin, [music] and work getting done without hiring another full-time employee. [music] That is the actual opportunity here. So, in this video, I'm going to show you how we built, [music] and in turn how you can build, a million-dollar AI agent business with Hermes, Claude Code, or any capable AI coding [music] agent of your choice.

I won't just be sharing the tools, I'll be sharing everything you need on your journey from A [music] to Z. How to choose the right business idea, how to find the workflow people will actually pay for, [music] how to turn it into an offer, how to price it, how to use Hermes, Claude Code, or Codex to deliver the work, how to find leads, how to sell it, how to onboard clients, and how [music] to operate the business. I also made a free download pack for this [music] video.

It has all of the resources I'll be covering throughout this video, so you can download it and use it along while you're watching or as you follow through at your own pace. [music] You can grab that in the description, but before you build anything, [music] you need to know which AI agent business ideas are actually worth chasing. The best [music] AI agent business ideas sit in the overlap of four specific things: pain, money, access, and repeatability.

If one of these is missing, the idea usually breaks. Let me explain. The first circle is pain. Is this workflow annoying, repeated, expensive, or often getting ignored? Does the business already know this problem exists? Is someone already paid to do it manually? Because if the pain is not obvious, you're going to spend all of your time educating your leads instead of selling. The second circle is money. Does solving this create revenue, or save labor, or reduce churn, or improve conversion, or stop missed opportunities from businesses?

This matters because a $5,000 a month offer needs a valid business reason. If the client cannot connect the workflow to money, they will compare you to ChatGPT, a VA, or a cheap automation tool, which you absolutely do not want. And the third circle is access. Can the agent actually get the data and the tools it needs? Things like inbox, can it access CRMs, can it access calendars? Whatever it is that it needs to do, can it access the tools it needs reliably and in a way that doesn't break your back.

A lot of ideas sound good until you realize the agent cannot make or access the messy real-world context that makes the workflow actually useful. And the final fourth circle is repeatability. Can you sell this to 10 similar customers without rebuilding the whole thing every single time? Can you reuse the same workflow, the same dashboard, the same agent skills? This is where the business becomes valuable. If every client needs a completely new system, you're going to have an extremely difficult time scaling your business.

Now, with that fourth one, typically, if you're going to have to start from scratch, it typically means higher cost, but it also could mean higher ticket prices. Uh but, the sweet spot is where all four of these overlap. A painful workflow with money attached, where the agent can access the right context, and where the system can be reused across customers. That intersection, if we draw a Venn diagram, that intersection in the middle, right in the middle, this is where the money is.

And if you want to make this practical, you can use the scorecard in the download pack. I want you to score each idea you have from one to five on pain intensity, revenue impact, manual labor today, tool access, repeatability, speed to first result, willingness to pay, and risk level. If the idea scores under 25, in general, I would probably not start there. If it scores above 30, then it's worth investigating. But, a good opportunity map is only step one.

The next mistake is choosing an idea that sounds cool instead of choosing a workflow a business already wants fixed. There are five categories I would look at. The first category is revenue agents. These are usually the easiest to sell because the value is close to the money. This could be services like lead discovery, sales follow-up, sponsorship management, abandoned lead recovery, uh outbound research. If the agent helps a business find, qualify, follow up with, or close more opportunities, the sale becomes a lot easier because you can directly tie your price to a real dollar figure.

Uh, for example, my business can help you make a hundred thousand dollars a month. That's the easiest sale ever. The second category is content and authority agents. This is where our service, Founder Funnel, sits. A weak version of this offer would be if we pitched it as "We help make AI content." I would not pay for that. The better version, "We help you reach your target audience, increase sales and demand for your business." That lands a lot differently, right?

You're not selling content generation. You're selling distribution, positioning, uh, awareness, and eventually revenue. You see how it all ultimately leads to the client making money. That is the outcome you want to sell, but we'll dive more into the pitch or the offer a little later. The third category is operations agents and setup. That could be inbox triage, meeting notes to tasks, uh, weekly reporting, or just simply helping clients set up their own agents.

These are great because the pain is obvious. The client is already spending time on the work, and you're just helping them save a bunch of time and money doing the exact same thing they need done for less. You know what they say, time is money, and there is real value in helping people save time. The fourth category is support agents. Think things like market research, competitor monitoring, uh, customer insights. These can be higher value, but they're also harder because the client has to trust the quality of your analysis.

And ultimately, you will need a lot of strong testimonials to sell a service like this one. The fifth and final category is compliance-sensitive agents. Think healthcare, finance, legal, insurance, anything regulated, basically. These can be valuable, but I would not start by letting an agent make final decisions in any of these categories. >> [snorts] >> If you go here, start with draft, summarize, flag, or recommend.

Do not start with, you know, giving the agent the ability to decide, execute, approve, or even submit. For me, the best first business is usually a revenue or a content workflow. Because the buyer understands the pain, the value is a lot easier to explain than any of the other categories. And the work can usually be delivered with human approval inside of that loop. Founder Funnel, our own service, is a good example for this.

We're not selling "Hey, we use AI to write posts for you." That is a very weak pitch. We're selling a system that helps you reach the right audience, create demand, and turn your content into a growth engine for your business. Here's how I've used my content to increase our revenue by 50% in just the last 30 days. This is what Founder Funnel looks like. They can log into the platform. They can go to Discover to see what has been happening in their own niche.

My niche is AI and tech, so this is my feed. These are the most trending topics in the last 24 hours. And I can go ahead, look at the trends, look at the topics, catch up, especially as if you're like me, you have a busy day, a busy schedule, you haven't had time to check what's happened in your industry, and most importantly, you can stay relevant in your industry and generate content around those trending topics. That is the gist of it.

It's a pain that I have personally that I've solved for myself personally that I solving for others. That is one of the best ways that you can go about it. Solve your own pain, help people solve the same. Uh, through that. Uh, then from there, I reply or answer those questions so that it can be more of my take rather than AI regurgitating random takes. And once I answer, I can generate a draft, but we also go a step ahead, and we've also made a browser extension for our clients where they can do the exact same thing straight from X, so that they don't have to leave X to begin with.

Say I want to react to a post that I really like, like my own, then I can go ahead and do that, click here. It's picking out angles. And boom, here is where I would get to reply to the questions. Then I'm just going to generate a draft uh, based on the things it gives me, just for the sake of uh, time, and insert on X. As simple as that. Boom, I have a quote tweet, I can react to whatever's happening in my industry at a click of a button, but I always recommend our clients to take their time, fill out, answer all questions, cuz the more personalized obviously the more it resonates with people cuz we as founders we have experience.

We have knowledge of what happens in our industry that no one else has. So, not even AI has. Then, I've taken it a step further because I've noticed now that we've scaled to six customers and as you can see the six customers here which for obvious reasons I have blurred out their names. As you can see total it says 12 clients but it's counting our team members as well. Here are the clients with six as you see. And something that we did now that we're at six clients is incorporated also on Telegram which is also where most of these clients live where the bot literally will come to you with a reaction opportunity throughout the day which is which was one of the most requested features.

Literally four of the six founders requested this specific feature. So, here it is. Simple as that. You want to meet your customers where they are. That is why this works as a high ticket service. The client is not paying for posts. They're paying for a business outcome and that is always the case. That brings us to the most important part of this entire video. The offer. This is where a lot of AI businesses die and not just AI businesses in fact businesses in general as well.

They pick a good idea but they package it around the system. They say things like we use the latest AI technology to help you create the best content algorithmically that exists in the world or we build custom AI agents for your business or we automate your workflows with AI. That might be true but it's not what the customer wants to buy. The customer wants the outcome. So, the offer formula I would always use is this.

We help a specific customer get a specific business outcome without the painful thing they hate using a managed agent system. For example, we help B2B founders increase their number of leads without hiring a content team by helping you publish relevant content every day. You see how I'm tying it to the outcome, always to the outcome. The how is very minimal. It's practically irrelevant. You wouldn't care if uh your I don't know, a marketing firm approaches you and says, "We will make you a billion dollars by selling pigs." I I don't care how you make me a billion.

Make me a billion. Although I'm very intrigued how they make a billion by selling pigs. But, that is beside the point here. >> [snorts] >> Another example. We help agencies increase their sales without hiring more setters by recovering missed sales opportunities. We help creators manage sponsorship deals without losing deals in their inbox. That is much stronger than we build AI agents. Because now the buyer knows what gets better.

A strong offer essentially has seven parts. One is the main outcome. Two, the specific customer. Three, the painful workflow. Four, the managed agent system. Five, human review. Six, weekly reporting. And seven, clear guarantee or risk reversal. The guarantee is super important, but you have to be very careful with it. Do not guarantee something you cannot control. Do not guarantee exact revenue. Do not guarantee virality.

Do not guarantee closed deals if the client controls the sales process. Guarantee the controllable parts. Output volume, speed, qualified opportunities, response time, implementation. For Founder Funnel, our guarantee is we will 10x your social growth in the first 3 months, or we keep working for free until we do. You see how this would build confidence from uh a potential lead into thinking, "Wow, this is a no-brainer offer.

For 5,000, I can 10x my engagement, and if I don't, then they'll just keep working free for me until that happens." And this is where having a feel for your product also helps. For example, for us, this product started from me needing it, so I developed it for myself, and then guess what happens? My growth 10x. In fact, it more than 10x, it 100x. But we never want to promise the maximum. We want to promise something >> [snorts] >> that feels jaw-dropping, but that we are reliably able to deliver.

Let me give you more guarantee examples. For a sales agent, for example, it could be if we do not identify and follow up with every qualified stale lead in your CRM within 30 days, your next month is free. I would even make it a lot simpler. Within a week, then your entire month is free. The guarantee has to remove fear from your customer, but it also forces you to build a real delivery system behind your service. And once the offer is clear, pricing becomes much easier.

On to pricing. I beg, please do not price the agent. Price the outcome and the operational ownership. Here's what I mean by this. A client paying $5,000 a month is not paying for prompts. They're never paying for prompts. They're paying because the workflow gets handled for them. Leads end up not slipping by anymore. Content ends up just getting shipped. Follow-ups just happen. Reports are just created. Someone is responsible when it breaks.

That is a massive part of what the value is here. I would think about pricing in three different tiers. In tier one, starter, uh I would think of it from $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Typically, you'd have maybe one workflow here, uh limited integrations across platforms, a weekly performance report, and a basic dashboard. Tier two is $3,000 to $5,000 a month. This is where our service falls. You would have somewhere between one to three workflows.

Daily monitoring, ongoing improvements, uh definitely a dashboard, human quality control. This is where it's important that you make the service a white glove service, and a weekly strategy review. And then, tier three, which I would consider is is more geared towards premium, is $8,000 a month or above. Here, you'd want multiple workflows. I'm talking five plus. Custom integrations, a dedicated workspace, higher touch support, more reporting, and more involvement.

It's not just uh about the workflow anymore. There's an element of consulting, of expertise that is involved here. Now, let's do the math. Founder Funnel is at six clients right now. As of me filming this video, there's leads in the pipeline. There are leads closing potentially next week, but I'm counting at the time of this recording, six clients. At 5,000 a month, that is $30,000 in MRR, monthly recurring revenue, or $360,000 in ARR, annual recurring revenue.

To get to 1 million annual recurring revenue, you need 17 clients at 5,000 a month. 17 clients. 17 clients times 5,000 is 85,000 a month. That is a million point 02 dollars a year. Or, you need nine clients at 10,000 a month. That is $90,000 a month, or 1.08 million dollars a year. So, the path is not sell a $99 AI tool to thousands of people. That can work, but it is much harder, much longer, and it is not the playbook I would personally start with.

The simpler path is high-ticket managed outcomes. Get three clients, improve your product to exceed those three clients' expectations, then go get three more, so go to six clients, improve again, then expand to 10, improve again, then to 15, improve again, and as you do that, productize the parts that repeat. This is where uh and also why Hermes and Claude code matter so much because charging high ticket only works if delivery is reliable.

If the client pays 5,000 a month and your system breaks every week, you do not have a business. You just have successfully sold stress to a client. And nobody wants that. I would use Hermes as the operating layer for the business. Not because the client cares that it's Hermes. Your client genuinely doesn't care what you use. They care about the work getting done. Hermes is useful because it gives you memory, skills, schedule jobs, sub agents, tool access, and a way to turn repeated processes into workflows.

Not only that, its killing creases with time. Something I've also done with Hermes, which is super useful, is a client pulse, what we ended up calling a client pulse, which is a way for it to see how activity and sentiment is with each and every client. So, as I said, six of those clients are for Founder Funnel, the rest are for another different service, but I wanted it to apply it to our entire business across all of our different customers.

So, as you can see, FFAAI for example, is Founder Funnel. Spaces a different service. Amplification is a different service, so on and so forth. And it keeps track of when was the last seen. So, you can see here those four clients are currently paused, on pause. The rest you can see in active conversation along with where sentiment who is good, who is bad. If I scroll down here, you will see our healthiest chats or our most positive ones, uh how active they are as well.

So, those are all great measures and a massively great feature. I've also had it send out reach out to me on Telegram in case there's a client in dire need of support who we haven't replied to in say like 12 hours. Like, what the hell? This helps us stay on top of our business and make sure that we provide the best quality support for each and every single one of our active clients. Then, I would use Cloud Code or Codex, whichever you prefer, for product and internal tooling.

For example, I love using Cloud Code to refine Founder Funnel. If we need a better dashboard, a better onboarding flow, uh a new internal tool, or a cleaner way to show client results, Cloud Code helps me build and iterate faster than anything. Hermes is more powerful and more useful for the daily operations layer. It can help you with lead discovery, with content angles, with follow-up reminders, with daily checks, with process documentation.

The list goes on and on and on. Daily workflows and turning corrected workflows essentially into skills. The stack is simple. Hermes is the operations brain. Cloud Code or Codex is the product builder. Founder Funnel, for example, is the client-facing product layer. Uh Gmail, Notion, CRM, analytics, Telegram, and Slack are the business context, and the dashboard is where the operator sees what is happening. If I was building this for a client, I would split the system into six layers.

Layer one is intake. What does the client sell? Who is the customer? What workflow are we handling, what does good look like, and what should the agent never do. Layer two is context. What are the client's preferences, the approved languages, the pricing rules, past decisions, positioning, and things to absolutely avoid. Layer three is skills. The agent should not improvise every time. If the workflow is lead discovery, create a lead discovery skill.

If the workflow is content creation, create a content workflow skill. If the workflow is sponsorship management, create a sponsorship management skill. I'm just realizing I'm I'm pretty much stating the obvious, but layer four is scheduled jobs. Things like daily intake scan, uh weekly report, follow-up reminders, lead discovery run, broken workflow alerts. And this is very important. You should always have a uh a system that flags whenever something or anything breaks.

Layer five is approval gates. Draft, do not send. Preview, do not post. Recommend, do not buy. So, make sure to know what it is that you're comfortable with the agent just doing on its own without needing approval, and what it needs approval gates for. For example, do you Do you want it sending clients content drafts on its own, or do you want to approve them before? Uh do you want them posting automatically, or do you want to approve before?

Define your approval gates. And layer six is reporting. What happened? What was created? What is waiting for approval? What is being blocked? And what should we do next? That is the delivery system. But tools alone do not solve the real problem. The real problem is what I like to call scope creep. Custom AI agencies die because every client becomes a new business. The client asks you for one workflow, then another, then another integration, then a dashboard, then a custom report, then a weird edge case, then suddenly your $5,000 a month client is suddenly become an unlimited engineering job.

This is why you need productized fulfillment. And productized fulfillment is just a fancy way of saying you need a way to repeat everything that you're doing. And you need clear scope for when you're selling to your client, you can say this is exactly what will be delivering. For every offer, define the system before you sell it. You need an intake form. You need a setup checklist. You need a workflow map. You need agent skills, approval rules, but we've we've been through those.

You also need success metrics. What does success look like? And something super important, you need the first 48-hour win. Every client should get a visible win in their first 48 hours. For Founder Funnel, that is super obvious. It's an instant banger soon as we onboard the client to our platform. For a sales follow-up agent, it could be a booked call within the first 48 hours. Can you imagine? You buy a service for a company that gets you more calls, and within the first 48 hours, boom.

Booked call. The first win is what gives your client momentum. Then the recurring system creates retention. But even the best delivery system does not matter if you cannot find people with the right pain. There are four lead channels I would care about. This is how you find clients or people to pitch your offer to. There's outbound, inbound, ads, and content. Outbound is pretty simple in theory. It's find a specific customer with a likely pain, research them, write a message that proves you understand the pain, follow up, and pitch them your offer.

Hermes can help with almost every single step. It can find target accounts, it can research the company, it can summarize everything for you, it can look at recent content, identify likely bottlenecks, draft literally a personalized outreach message, track follow-ups, and remind you when something goes cold. A simple outbound prompt would be find 50 B2B founders who are actively posting content, but do not seem to have a consistent founder-led content system.

For each one, summarize the business, target audience, recent content, likely growth bottleneck, and a personalized reason Founder Funnel could help. By the way, something you will need to figure out here is the channels through which you also use. Are you going to use X? Are you going to use LinkedIn? Are you going to use Meta? Uh whatever it may be. Are you going to use TikTok? And that heavily, heavily relies on where does your ideal customer live?

Where do they spend most of their time? I mean, if they're uh a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and they're typically around the ages of uh 45 and 60, then they're not going to be on TikTok most of the time. So, know where your audience lives. For us, most of it happens on X. Some of it happens here on YouTube. But, know know where your customer lives and be intentional about where you reach out. Now, inbound is different.

Inbound comes from awareness. It's the lead reaching out directly to you through your content or through referrals or through your videos or through your posts and people essentially seeing your work. This is where Founder Funnel is also the example. The content, my content is not just marketing. The content is also the sales process, the sales system. It shows proof that this very system works. It shows the workflow in real time.

It creates trust before the call even happens. Hermes can help with inbound as well. It can classify your leads, prepare context before a call, draft follow-up after the call, track next steps and remind you who needs a reply. So, as you can see, something I have built for our business is an automatic email watcher and replier. If someone sends me a lead, sends me an email inquiring about our services, then it it automatically watches and replies automatically to them unless rates are involved.

If rates are involved, then it will just pause and ask me, "Hey, do you want to carry this conversation forward? Should I send them booking link to a call? So on and so forth." This is just a cool example of what Hermes can help you do inside your business. Ads are a smaller part for us personally, but they are useful for testing. Use ads to test your hook, your pain, your offer, your guarantee, or different case studies.

Do not start by spending a ton of money. You don't need to do that in my opinion. Start by learning which promise gets attention from the right people. And then, content is the compounding channel. Content should show the business problem, the workflow, the proof, and the before and the after. If you want to sell AI agent systems, your content should make buyers think, "Huh, that person understands my problem, or this person can probably help me." That is the whole game, but leads are only useful if you can turn the pain into a clear sales conversation.

The sales call should not be a tool demo. Do not spend 30 minutes showing features. The client does not care just yet. Start with their pain points instead. Where are opportunities falling through for you? What do you repeat every week? What do you know you should be doing, but you keep delaying? What happens when a lead goes cold for you? How much is one new client worth? Who owns this workflow today? And what would it be worth if this happened every week without you managing it?

That is the conversation. You're not trying to convince them that AI is cool. Trust me, man, AI is so cool. It's the future. You're trying to show them the cost of their current workflow. Then you present the opportunity, or their ability to save, or their ability to make more money with your managed system. And this is a great video by my co-founder Leon, how I run my $3 million business with AI agents, where he's detailed our system that we use to find and score leads, to keep track of leads in our CRM, and to score our performance as closers or as sales setters throughout our relationship with our clients.

I recommend you watch it if you want a deeper dive into how we use AI agents, Hermes or OpenClaw, with our sales process. Here's what we will handle. Here's what happens in the first 48 hours. Here's what happens in the first 30 days. Here's what we need access to or what the agent can do. Here's what it will never do without approval. Here's the weekly reports you will get. Here's the guarantee. Then finally, here's the price.

The more concrete the process is, the easier it is for them to say yes, because they're not buying a mysterious AI thing. They're buying a managed workflow. They're buying an outcome. And after they buy, the first 30 days decide whether this becomes recurring revenue or a painful one-off project. This is how I would onboard a client. Day zero to day two is audit and access. Here, you collect contacts, you define the workflow with the client, you get all the required access you need, the approval rules you might need, you define the success metrics with your client.

What does success look like? And you identify the first quick win. Remember, first 48-hour deliverable. Then, day three to day seven is the first workflow live. Uh build the first termy scale or the first uh iteration implementation. Create the first dashboard or report that you need to run through the client. Run the workflow manually first with AI assistance. Review the output with the client and fix any and all of the obvious issues.

Week two is automating the repeatable parts. Schedule checks, standard prompts, uh lead scoring, whatever that service that you ended up deciding on is, make sure that everything is now running in full automation. Week three is monitoring. See whether there are any alerts, missed tasks alert, uh just do a quality uh assurance every single week and make sure to constantly be bombarding your client with wins. Look at how much we're winning.

You're going to get tired of winning. Man, I love that meme. And week four is providing value and expanding. Show work completed. Um show the amount of time that you've helped them save. Show the opportunities you found for them or the content shipped or the performance that you've had throughout your work together in the first 30 days. Then, this is where you can pitch a renewal or an upsell. That is the real retention moment.

The client does not stay because, "Oh, dude, the agent is so cool." They stay because every week they can see work getting done and they can see you improving. All right. We are very nearing the last piece of the puzzle that is one of the most important because it is a lot easier for you to grow your business maintaining your client than it is to be selling to new clients every single week, every single month. It is a lot cheaper for you to make money from your current clients than to keep trying to grow the machine, grow the engine by having to hunt for new clients.

This is why retention and expansion is the most important part of this entire thing. Every week your clients should be getting a report. Don't bore them with a hundred different things. Give them only what they absolutely need to know and what they absolutely care about. How many opportunities were created? How much money did we generate? How many impressions did we get? And the most important, what is next? This report is not admin work, by the way.

It's retention work. If the client cannot see the value, they will eventually forget why they're paying. The weekly report makes the value visible for your clients. And once the first workflow works, expansion becomes much easier. If you start with content, you can add lead discovery. If you start with sales, you can add content. If you start with operations, you can add dashboards or an internal assistant. It's important that with expansion, as you upsell uh clients, don't just add for the sake of adding.

Add the next obvious pain point. Meaning, if I work with clients on content, what could be their next obvious pain point? As their content gets better, they're going to need someone who replies to their DMs. Upsell. As they get more people, more DMs being replied to, and more leads, they're going to need lead classification. Solve the next obvious pain point. That is how the account grows. You do not sell 10 workflows on day one, you sell one painful workflow.

You provide value and you prove value, then you expand. The $1 million AI agent business is not selling AI agents. Funny enough. It is selling a painful business outcome. Then using Hermes, Cloth Code, or Codex, and productized workflows to deliver that outcome repeatedly. Pick a workflow with pain, money, access, and repeatability. Turn it into an outcome-based offer. Price the result, not the tool, never the tool. Use Hermes as the operating layer, Cloth Code, or Codex to build and improve the product, and find leads through outbound, inbound, ads, and content.

Onboard your first clients with a 30-day plan. Show them the value every single week, then expand from one workflow to more. That is the playbook. And yes, there is obviously a lot more to every single little thing that I said in this video. This video is meant to be an all-encompassing from A to Z workflow walk-through throughout your business journey. But, if you'd like me to make more in-depth content on any part of those, then make sure to comment below so that I know.

What are you curious about? And again, if you want the scorecard, the offer builder, or or pricing calculator, or prompts, or any of the things we've covered throughout this video, I put the full download pack in the description. Comment what you'd like me to dive more in-depth into next. And if you've enjoyed this video, make sure to leave a like. Or if you're new to my channel, make sure to subscribe because I have a ton more content like this coming your way.

Oh, by the way, would you look at that? The algorithm gods just told me you're very likely to enjoy this video next. So, maybe I'll see you there. I don't know.