The Startup Ideas Podcast - Hermes Agent App Clearly Explained (and how to use it)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hermes desktop app just launched, but how do you actually go and make money, be more productive using Hermes desktop and Hermes agents in general? So today I have Alex Finn on and he gives you an entire walkthrough of how to use Hermes desktop app, all the nooks and crannies, explains everything so, so clearly. And then we go through some use cases. So stick around to the end where we show you exactly how you can set up Hermes agents that go and build businesses for you. This is the most comprehensive tutorial on Hermes desktop app and Hermes agents on the internet. And I can't wait for you to actually go, learn, build, and have some fun. Enjoy the episode.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Alex Finn, I need you by the end of this episode to explain to me why I need to get Hermes desktop. I need you to walk me through Hermes desktop. I need you to show me use cases of Hermes. that show me how I can make money be more productive. And I need to you to explain me why I need to get off open claw, why I need to shut down my telegram and everything in between. Alex Finn, can you do that by the end of the episode? Greg Eisenberg, mission accepted. We will do that.

Starting point is 00:01:31 We will go through why Hermes desktop is the best AI agent experience on planet Earth. we'll go through every feature, every nuance, every secret, and then we'll show you the sauce. We'll go through all the use cases you can do every person watching this video so they can get tremendous amount of value out of Hermes agent. All right, let's go. All right, we'll do it. Here we go.

Starting point is 00:01:53 I'm going to share my screen. Great to be speaking with you, Greg. I have been deep into Hermes agent desktop the last few days. So they released this a few days ago now. I wasn't expecting it. I believe this is like the moment that Hermes overtook OpenClaw, to be quite honest. And as most people probably know, I was like the OpenClaw guy. I was at a poker tournament last night and a guy I was like, hey, you're the guy getting paid by OpenClaught, right?

Starting point is 00:02:23 And I'm like, no, I don't even talk about OpenClaught anymore. What are you talking about? This is Hermes agent desktop. So before everyone was using Hermes and OpenClaught inside Telegram, inside, signal, eye message, all of that. I think this is the single best way to use Hermes agent now. I don't use Telegram on desktop anymore. I don't use any other experience. This is clearly the best way to be using Hermes agent. There is a lot here. So a few things, one, sessions all here, right? So before in Telegram, if you wanted some idea of sessions or multi-threading, you need to

Starting point is 00:03:07 to set up threads in Telegram, which is kind of like an advanced confusing thing to do. I know a lot of nerds watching would be like, what are you talking about? That's easy. For the average person setting up threads in Telegram isn't the easiest thing to do. You got to like create separate group chats and then add your bots and then like edit subjects. And here every time you talk to your Hermes agent, it just goes into a new session and you can talk to it. So it makes it really nice for like just separating out your context. I think the way most people use Hermes agent by default is they have like kind of like a mono thread, right?

Starting point is 00:03:43 Like just one big thread where they talk about everything in it. The issue is, is you kind of like pollute your context with the hundred different things you talk about. And so your cost skyrocket. Like that's like the number one complaint with Hermes. Oh my God, I'm paying $1,000 a month. If you manage your context and your sessions, well, you are not paying $1,000. a month. You're not paying anything close to it.

Starting point is 00:04:05 Alex, by the end of this episode, can you show maybe a few ways for us to get our Hermes under control, like some tips and tricks? Absolutely. We'll do that throughout. Then we'll recap at the end. I'll give you a whole bunch of sauce on saving money with Hermes as well. Okay. So saving money with Hermes, number one, appropriate sessions. Context, especially if you're using like Opus, which has a million parameters. context can really inflate your bills, like three, four X your bills. So if you keep things individual, right, here's my content session, right? Here's my talking about local model session.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Mode research is my stock research session. With the context nice and slim, I'm saving tons of money because every time I send a message, it'll only be that thread itself. For those who are little less technical. When you send a message to your agent, right? If I were to say, generate me an image of a squirrel with Grock Imagine, with this message, it sends everything said before that. So if you have one big thread like most people interact with Hermes agent, you're sending massive messages every single time, which will cost you tons of money. But if you take advantage of Hermes desktop with its multiple sessions and pinning an organization, you can even put sessions in folders. It keeps your context clean, which means your messages are much more slim, which means you save a lot

Starting point is 00:05:41 more money on your messages. So that's one big thing there. The session management on desktop, it's the best, it's better than Telegram. It's better than the way 99% of people use Hermes agent. There's a lot more to it. That's one of my favorites. One of my other favorites is now the organization of profiles. So if you can see down here, it's a little tiny. Maybe I can zoom in a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. You can see a bunch of names down here. We got default, Billy, Coder, GPT, Me's, librarian, Oracle, and Quinn. These are all my different Hermes agents. So for those not as familiar, in Hermes, there is this concept of a profile. You have multiple profiles. Profiles are literally just separate Hermes agents. Each profile has a set of skills, has a Soul.MD,

Starting point is 00:06:40 which is their personality, has sets of memories, has your history of sessions and chats. They're literally just separate agents. And now, with, Desktop, they're organized really, really nicely. So you can just click. And it takes you to your other profile, right? I can just click. And it takes me to my GPTMees, which is my Hermes powered by GPT55.

Starting point is 00:07:07 I click on Quen. This is my Hermes powered by Quinn 37, sitting on my DGX Spark on my desk. I click home. That's my default. That takes me to Hermes. I named my default Hermes. I just like that name.

Starting point is 00:07:21 And that takes me there. powered by Opus 4-8. Before, like, if you wanted to switch profiles, you needed to, like, go into, like, your terminal and, like, do Hermes profile Quinn, enter and, like, pops open a new, it's, like, very hard to organize. Now it's very neatly organized here, so I can quickly, okay, I want Quinn, which is my local model, to go do this for me. I want GBTMe's, which is my Chad GBT model, to go and code this for me. Okay, now I'm going to go back and go back in my Opus one. and have them do that. And now it's like really easy to multitask.

Starting point is 00:07:58 To give some examples of when you'd want to multitask, for instance, you know, Opus, very expensive model. I think Opus 48 is the smartest AI model out there. It's also very pricely. So if I'm doing high level thinking and strategy, I'm going to Opus. Then I'll switch to GPT Me's, which is my Chad GPT-5-5 model on Hermes, huge limit. on chat GPT. Also very good coding. So I'll come in here. I'll be like, hey, build me this app. Quinn, that's my local model. Free unlimited intelligence because it's running on my desk.

Starting point is 00:08:34 This is for like quick research. Hey, what's the top news in AI? I can have a go and scour the web for the top news and it's not going to cost me a thing completely free. So you got to know which profile is best for which tasks. So is the way to think about profiles more around how fast or slow do you want, you know, a task to be completed or how expensive or cheap? Or is the way to think about it similar to how a paperclip works where you're kind of like designing, you know, your product manager, your marketer, your engineer, and you have different profiles for different team, teammates? Yeah, it's, it's, the way I like to think about it is more on the model basis.

Starting point is 00:09:23 each model has its own strengths and weaknesses. So we talked a little bit earlier, Greg, about saving money. Models, if you use it in the right way, you'll save tons of money. Coding, I actually think Chad GBT 5-5 is better than Opus 4-8 for coding. And you get way more limits. You get way more usage on your plan. So if I'm going to do coding, I'm going to go to GPTVs, which is my Chad GPT-5 profile. If I'm going to do like orchestration planning, doing in-depth plans, I want to go to my smartest model, which is Hermes powered by Opus 4-8.

Starting point is 00:10:01 So I'm more along the lines of what are the strengths and weaknesses of each model. I'm going to be honest, I'm not 100% bought into the concept of like having 50 different like product manager, graphic design. I think that's a lot of, I just think that takes up a lot of context in your meat brain on like, okay, which one of these 50 profiles do I go to? Do I have a product manager? Do I have a designer? Do I have a writer? I think that these models are smart enough and generally intelligent enough where you can

Starting point is 00:10:43 basically get away with, like I can use opus for designing a graphic image than writing a YouTube script and then planning my product. So I'm more think along the lines of what are the strengths of each of the models and how can I use them to their strengths to get better performance and save money. I like that take. It's basically like all that matters is the output and the outcomes. Therefore, just know which model makes the most sense for what you're trying to get accomplish and then use the right profile for that. Yeah, I used paperclip. And I think it's a very very cool, well-designed product. But it's bought into this, the concept that you need to have an AI agent in every role. You need to have a senior product manager, who manages a design

Starting point is 00:11:33 intern, who manages the CTO, who manages, like, and the issue is, is that when you think about it in that lens, which you're totally fine to do because it's a more understandable lens for a lot of people. So if it makes more sense to you and you understand your organization better, that way, then go ahead and do it. The challenge is, I think there's inefficiencies there when it comes to cost. Like if I have to go to my CEO and say, hey, build me a thumbnail for my latest YouTube video, and then they go to like the product manager who then goes to the graphic designer, who then goes to the intern, you have call after call after call looking at the context and the soul and the skills of each one of these. And it's like, I could have just went to Opus for it and said,

Starting point is 00:12:17 hey, build me a, you know, an image. Like, it doesn't have to be that deep. So listen, everyone, you have your own workflows, do it whatever way you want. I just, for me, I found the most cost savings and efficiency, just having it for each model. So those are the profiles. I love going to the profiles. I love being able to go in, quickly talk to, okay, I have a quick research task. I'll go to Quinn, who's living on my desk, give them a research task, research A. I go to GPTMe's, have them go build out an app for me. Profiles, people should be leveraging profiles, setting up profiles for different models, start saving money that way, get better productivity that way. A lot of other really cool things here. Artifacts. So Artifax basically puts all your images,

Starting point is 00:13:06 files, and links in one place. And so if you're anything like me, you've been trying to kind of McGiver your AI agent into like a second brain, which it does really well and it works. It's just kind of a system to maintain. And one of those second brain tasks I have is like, when I'm coming across things, I see inspiration. I see websites that are cool, tools that are cool. I'll take the links and give it to my agent and say, hey, save this link for me. File it away here. Do this for me. Now kind of done automatically with artifacts. So you can come in here and see any links you've sent to your agent. You can see any images, media you've created or sent to your agent, any files you've sent back or forth. They're all organized here. And now you can quickly organize them,

Starting point is 00:13:58 search through them. So now I don't need to go and be like, hey, file this in my second brain under this category and do this. I just send like a link. I got my librarian. My librarians is kind of my second brain organization agent, I'll just drop links into my librarian. I don't even tell them to do anything with. I'll just hit send. And now I can go to my artifacts and all my links are just like tightly organized here. I can search. I can say Reddit and shows me all the Reddit ones. So artifacts is sneaky like a really, really cool place to centralize all your links and images and files and everything. That's really cool. They basically, they basically productize the second brain for an agent platform.

Starting point is 00:14:42 They probably saw how people were using it, and they're like, we're just going to make this really easy, really visual. And that's what I'm liking, by the way, I'm just, I'm seeing this for the first time. That's what I'm liking so far with the whole Hermes desktop experience. It just feels like a more Apple-esque product for the OpenClaw type of experience. that's a really good way to put it because you know i i've switched over from open claw to hermes and and for the record neither these people are paying me neither these people barely even talk to me i i i this is purely for the love of the game um and you know one which is a big deal

Starting point is 00:15:26 by the way you switching from open cloud of hermys like where's the breaking tweet you know what i mean like You, you, you're, like you said, you're an open clock guy, you know, it's a big deal. This is, uh, I was the, I was at the top, you know, not to toot my own hornier, pump my own tires. I was at the top with the game of open. This is like Michael Jordan going from basketball to baseball, you know, in 1994. Like that is, this is basically the equivalent of that. And I did it anyway with basically zero fanfare. But I, like, I have to, I can't keep pushing things that I don't think is strong anymore just because I'm getting a bunch of clicks and views, you know?

Starting point is 00:16:05 Yes. Something, I think a subtle shift happened the last couple months where I think the Hermes team, very much as you just kind of described, went more of the Apple route. Well, I think the OpenClaude team went more

Starting point is 00:16:22 of the Android route in a way where the Hermes updates have been very focused, polished, tested and tied to really nice narratives that are focused on making life easier for the user. While I feel like the OpenClaw updates have been more kind of shotgun, put everything in it, don't test it quite as well, rough around the edges, doesn't work quite as well. We're trying to throw everything in it that will satisfy, you know, the power user,

Starting point is 00:16:55 satisfy, you know, the people who are doing a thousand things at once. And like the updates became very unfocused and worst of all, unreliable where I was updating and I'm like, this is 100% I'm going to break my open claw. And then it did break my open claw. While Hermes is like, their branding is incredible. But like their announcements, like each update will be like once a week and it'll be like the efficiency update. And everything will be very focused on efficiency and like around that narrative. And as you kind of just said, it's like kind of the Apple route where it's just, you know, it doesn't need to be a CLI. It could be a nice desktop experience that's pleasant for the average person to use. Can you walk me through the skills and tools section?

Starting point is 00:17:37 Yeah, a lot of cool things here. This is a nice interface for all the skills that are installed on your Hermes agent. One thing people don't really realize is out of the box, your Hermes agent has like over 150 skills installed. and each one of those actually adds context to your agent. And so that's increasing your cost. Now, with this nice user interface, you can come in and you can turn off any skills that aren't necessary. And you can also see the new skills being generated based on the actions you take.

Starting point is 00:18:19 Not many people realize this. They know Hermes is very self-improving. They don't realize it's actually creating tons of skills in the back. background while you're not looking. Right. Like I have a 3GS one file game because I build a bunch of three JS games just for the fun of it. Uh, YouTube news scripts, real time stock dashboard. Like, there's a lot of skills that get built here kind of in the background as you're doing things. And you can just turn off, turn on anyone's that aren't relevant to you to save money and increase efficiency. Tool sets are groups of tools. So this is a new kind of concept being rolled out right now where

Starting point is 00:18:58 you can group together many skills and tools all in one. So if you're doing something complex, it groups them all together. I got to play around more with this to be quite honest with you. But tool sets something definitely more to be used because it's kind of a new concept inside Hermes where you can group together multiple tools and skills. That is those. You also have messaging. So again, a lot of really nice things here around just being able to quickly see and visualize the features of Hermes. So if you want to set up more messaging services, you just click it, set it up. Before was you had to go into your CLI, Hermes set up, navigate to whatever messaging service. The average person does not want to use a CLI.

Starting point is 00:19:44 Right. Like I guess I think there was this huge trend the last few months. CLIs, we're going back to CLI. CLI is the future. Everyone will be working the CLI. That doesn't change the fact average people do not want to go in the terminal and do anything. Right? They don't want to do anything.

Starting point is 00:19:58 I get so many complaints on my YouTube videos when I do setup videos where it's like, this is so easy, paste this into your terminal. And I still get comments like, I don't want to do that. I have no interest in that. That's not for me. So this makes it just a lot easier. You never have to go into your terminal again. You never have to go in the CLI.

Starting point is 00:20:16 You go in, it gives you like exactly what you need to set up your telegram. And then it just works. So really easy to set things up here. And then one other thing I like is. is the Cron section. So if you click down here on Cron, you will see a lot of your Cron jobs you have set up. One of the biggest complaints I get when I do these videos is, Alex, you said to do this to set up a routine. I did it, but it didn't work. The next day, the routine didn't happen. The issue is, is when you're using things through Telegram or the CLI and you set up these

Starting point is 00:20:54 cron jobs, for those who may not be as a technical cron jobs, just scheduled tasks your computer does, you don't really have any confirmation that they were created when you ask your agent, hey, every morning 9 a.m. do this or every night at 10 p.m. do this. There's no real way to confirm and actually scheduled those things. Now with the Cron section, which is at the bottom, one click, you can see all your Cron jobs. You can see everything that's scheduled. And you can even create it manually here. So if you want to come in and say, hey, make me a morning brief. tell me about tell me all the

Starting point is 00:21:28 unread emails from the night before right you can come in daily delivered to the desktop create the cron you can have 100% confidence this cron jobs being created and will happen every day at that time

Starting point is 00:21:43 because cron jobs are and routines are so important to unlocking the value of Hermes do you have any advice for how do you actually create cron jobs that are worded in a way that actually, you know, have a high likelihood of success? Yeah, I, uh, whenever it comes to doing things more effectively with AI or solving for like kind

Starting point is 00:22:13 unknown unknowns, you know, I know I can be doing this better, but I don't know how to put a better cron job or better prompt in. The answer is always reverse. prompting always. The answer is, I want to, let's do it right now, actually, let's demo it live. I'm going to do a new session. So say you're a new user Hermes. You want to come and you want to set up a cron job for every morning for a morning brief with relevant information in it. So you can go, I want to set up a morning brief with you for every morning at 9 a.m. That's usually where people stop. But here's where you take it to the next level with reverse prompt. And you go,

Starting point is 00:22:57 my interests are generally AI, stock investing, tech, and the Boston Celtics. Right? Controversial. Controversial. The Boston Celtics?

Starting point is 00:23:15 I would say so. You know, I think a lot of the listeners of the podcast are big Knicks fans right now. So you know, that's what I'm seeing in the Yeah, that's what I'm seeing. Enjoy a while last, Nick Spans, it's not going to last because Wembe's coming for you. And everyone in the country is ruined from Wembe on this one.

Starting point is 00:23:33 Sorry, Nick Spans. You got your one year in 30 years or you have a mild amount of hope. Enjoy it. So here's where the reverse prompt comes in, right? You just lost like 100,000 subscribers, by the way. I know. Sorry, Greg. I owe you one.

Starting point is 00:23:52 What? would be the best prompt I can use to set this up with you. So I did a couple things here. I did a couple very important things here. Number one, this is my favorite combo in the world, the brain dump to the reverse prompt. You brain dump in everything about yourself, interest, goals, ambitions, skill sets, things like that. So your agent has context around who you are. And then, and you reverse prompt, based on what you know about me, what's the best way to do this? The issue many people have is they just kind of wing it

Starting point is 00:24:33 and tell the agent to do things. What they forget is you're talking to like super intelligence, right? You're talking to like the smartest thing on planet Earth. So why would you do things your way when you can get help from super intelligence and do it like the best way? So I'm going to hit answer on that. And instead of what most people do is, hey, set up a morning brief that tells me the news on AI and the Boston Celtics and how Jason Tame is the best player in the NBA, now it's going to actually tell me the exact prompt to use. So here's the prompt I'd use.

Starting point is 00:25:11 And now it gives me this really detailed in-depth prompt, right? You are compiling Alex's Daily Morning Brief. It's currently early morning Eastern Time. pull fresh information from the last 24 hours. Do not rely on memory or stale data. Use web search and exact real headlines, prices and scores. Cover these four areas. And then it goes in depth. AI, the three four most important developments in AI from the last 24 hours. You know, what this fix is, usually when you say things like tell me the latest AI news, it'll give you headlines from like two months ago, right? Or it'll even give you headlines from like a year ago because of the model's memory cutoff.

Starting point is 00:25:48 But now because of this better prompting, you'll be sure that it's from the last 24 hours. Market and investing. Yesterday's closed in pre-market direction for the S&P, NASDAQ and notable movers. Flag one or two stock sectors with unusual news. Include any major economic events scheduled for today. Like most people are not going to remember to talk about the Fed CPI earnings or big names. Tech, two to three significant tech industry stories beyond pure AI. Right now it's like going into extra detail. And what happened now, and here's a big one, formatting. Lead with a one line vibe summary.

Starting point is 00:26:25 Use bold letters and tight bullets. Like if we would use the original prompt most people would use, hey, give me a morning brief, everything about AI. It just would have been like a big dump of text. But now it's nicely formatted. So it's easy to read. And so this is the format I'd go. Brain dump to reverse prompt.

Starting point is 00:26:42 You're going to get a lot better prompts, cron jobs, and output from your agent. Great tip. Thank you. Of course. What else we got here? So that is the Cron jobs. Really, really cool stuff. Really amazing to use.

Starting point is 00:26:58 You can see your context very easily, your context window very nicely at the bottom now. So you can make sure, oh, you know, our context window is filling up. Let's do slash new to start a new session. And that'll clear that so you can save money there. You can quickly change your models. This is another really big strength of Hermes.

Starting point is 00:27:17 is they architected their agent a way where you can switch models much easier than OpenClaw. OpenClaugh, like every model is like hard-coded in to OpenClaw. So you have to like ask them to switch models. And when new models come out, you have to wait for OpenClaught to update with that newest model. Hermes, they updated it. They have the agent work in a dynamic way where it can just swap in models and thinking settings really, really easily, and the moment a new model drops, you can just swap it in. And so now in here, we're taking the customization step further, you know, oh, I'm going to do a simple task,

Starting point is 00:27:57 doesn't require much thinking. Let's use like Opus 4-8 with minimal effort or haiku with minimal effort, things like that. So another really nice way to save money with your agent. A lot of other really cool things here. There's this agent window when you go and you're multitasking. You got a bunch agents doing things. You can see all your sub-agents spin up. Usually a question I get at this point is sub-agents, what's there's between a sub-agent in a profile? So a real Hermes agent. So again, the profiles have their own skills, personality, everything. Sub-agents are copies of the main agent. So when I go to Hermes and say, hey, go do research and then build an app based on that research, it'll spin up sub-agents. Those. Those.

Starting point is 00:28:46 sub-agents are just copies of the main agent. So as the same skills, the same personality, the same everything. But profiles have their own skill sets and context and memories and everything. And so the way you want to think about it is, okay, for what you're doing, does it require a separate set of skills? If it does, then spin up a new profile. Is what I'm doing? Can I just use that same set of skills? Just do it multiple times at once. All right. spin up subagents for that. So agents down here is where you can see those subagents work. What's a concrete example of that? Like when would I be in the case where I'd want to use multiple subagents? Like what sort of task? So say I am wanting to build out a microsas.

Starting point is 00:29:41 And I want to, it has many different features, maybe five or six different features, maybe it connects to the X API to pull tweets, and then it formats the tweets in a nice way. And then it allows you to share those tweets on Twitter and then send your own version that tweet to us. So it's like five or six different features, this microsas. I would want to use subagents for this. I would go to my Hermes.

Starting point is 00:30:05 I'd say, build me this microsas. Here's the 10 different features, spin up subagents to build out each of those features simultaneously. And then it'll go and spin up. And they all have. the same skill set, right, which is just coding. I just need a coding agent, but I just need multiple versions of that coding agent. And so it'll spin up five or six subagents to build out that microsas because I just, it's doing many things at once. But maybe I wanted to do something like,

Starting point is 00:30:35 okay, I'm working on a YouTube video and I need a script. I need a researcher that will get the information that will feed into that script. I need, you know, a thumbnail. So I need a graphic designer or an agent that is connected to the GROC Imagine API. For that, I would want multiple profiles, right? I'd want, you know, for the researcher, I'm going to use Quinn, which is my local model, say, hey, research this script, then hand it off to, hand it off to Hermes, which is my Opus 48 model and have them actually write the script based on your research and then hand that off to GPT Me's, which is my Chad GPT model and have them use a Chad GPT image generator to build the thumbnail. That would be a good use case for multiple profiles. So the way to think about it to kind of recap,

Starting point is 00:31:33 different skill sets needed, use different profiles, one skill set, but just done multiple strands at once, use subagents. With that being said, we talked about sessions, so managing what you're talking about, managing context. We talked about artifacts organizing all of your files, images, media, all of that. We talked about skills, managing your skills, making sure the right skills are turned off and on. We talked about cron jobs, so the schedule tasks. We talked about context models. Should we kind of get into the actions, what you can do with all this? Putting it all together? Yes, please.

Starting point is 00:32:19 All right. Let's do it. I will show you one of my use cases I do. This is real life. I have my agents doing this all the time. And let me just pull this open over here. I'm going to refresh this. So one thing as a solopreneur I like to do is.

Starting point is 00:32:42 I like to solve challenges, right? You know, that's pretty much the best, most ethical way to make money in this world is find other people's challenges and then solve those challenges. And so with my agents available to me, you've never had more power or leverage to find challenges other people have. And so I have a cron job inside my Hermes agent. Let's see if I can show it to you. Is it in this agent here? Daily AI Business Opportunity Scan. Every 20 minutes, I have my agent going and using the Quen37 model locally.

Starting point is 00:33:22 You don't need a local model for us. You don't need a DGX bar. I'll give you an alternative in a second. But because I have this unlimited free super intelligence on my desk, I have a do it every 20 minutes. I have a go. This is kind of like idea brow. These two would fit very well together. Idea browser and this agent.

Starting point is 00:33:40 you put them together, you got magic. But what it does is... A lot of people, by the way, a lot of people are using Idea Browser with Hermes, but that's a whole other separate episode. I think I can do if people are interested. That's an hour episode there. You connect Hermes to Idea Brows

Starting point is 00:33:56 and you have it going, just building out each idea. Yeah. Now that's sauce. Yeah. But what I have it doing is I have Quinn, every 20 minutes going and reading Reddit, reading X, searching for other people's challenges.

Starting point is 00:34:14 And I'm going to show you what it builds for me here. And I'm going to show you how I take it a step further. Now, if you want to emulate this, you 100% should. You don't need to do this every 20 minutes if you're using like a cloud. The reason why this works so well with Quinn locally is it's free. So I can have to do it as much as I want. If you're using like Chad GBT or Opus, you'd be paying out the wazoo for this because it costs money every time you do something.

Starting point is 00:34:40 So maybe you do this just once a morning to save little cash. But here's the output of that, this cron job. I get this custom dashboard it built, which does it look like AI slop? Yes, it does, but I don't care. The styling of it doesn't matter to me. But what I get here is Henry going in, which is actually Quinn 36 on my DJX Spark, does it every 20 minutes. and it finds challenges from people on Reddit and X, gives me the source thread so I can see what comments.

Starting point is 00:35:19 The founder said the whole agency was basically four APIs in a trench coat. And then because my agent knows so much about me and my skill set, it tells me why I'm in position to fix this problem. And what should be my first move to solve that challenge? And so now I kind of have this automated business. researcher that's going, knows me to a T, knows all my skills, everything, and finds me challenges to solve, right? It knows about my community. So it knows about my assets, what businesses I have, vibe coding academy. And I'm taking it even a step further. When it finds it appropriate,

Starting point is 00:35:58 it even adds this button here. Henry built a pro, so it automatically built me a prototype for this business idea. And so if I click that, micro SaaS prototype built. for that idea it had. And so now I can be like, okay, is this interesting? Let me test this. Oh, actually, I think there's something here. And then I can productize it and make it shipable. This is kind of how being a solopreneur builder works. You find challenges because you're running efficiently and you're only one person, you know how much overhead. You can go over these tiny, you can go over these tiny slim markets and make a few bucks off of it. And that's enough to pay the bills. So this is a really nice way I have my agent acting as an employee and finding me opportunities around the clock.

Starting point is 00:36:47 Side note. So this is really cool. And at the very least, get your creative juices flowing, right? So it might not even be this idea, but you might be like, you know, I'd like this, you know. But if it was in another market or if it was an app instead of this. But my question to you is, in terms of local models, is your recommendation, that people go out and buy, like what should they be buying basically and why should they be buying it? My recommendation up to this or up until recently was the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio from a speed and bandwidth perspective isn't as strong as Nvidia hardware like the Spark

Starting point is 00:37:33 and other chips. But you got a lot more unified memory which allowed you to run much. cooler models and much better models, just a little bit slower. The challenge is is the Mac Studio is pretty much sold out on basically every level. You can get it right now, but it's small amounts of memory. It's not like the big boys that allow you to run really good models. So now, I think my recommendation for most people, unless you can find, you know, a Mac Studio secondhand or something like that, the DJX sparks a really great plug-in-play device.

Starting point is 00:38:08 you just plug you don't even need a monitor to set it up like you just plug it into the wall and it works um it has a 128 gigabytes of unified memory which basically means you can run any model that goes up to 128 gigs so quen uh i think 27b works really nicely any of the new nemo tron models so invidia got into the model game recently now they're putting out their own open source models they're building it with the spark in mind. So I think if you want plug and play, something to run inference for you, so to run your models,

Starting point is 00:38:45 the DGX Spark is a great option. I prefer the Mac Studio because it's running on the device I have right here, and you can use it. It's like a really nice user interface, the Mac OS, so that's really nice. But the Spark is a good plug-and-play option if you don't have access to like a really good Mac Studio.

Starting point is 00:39:03 Cool. And just quickly, like how much is the price? on that baby? They just raised it, I think, to $4,800, which seems like a lot. And it is. Everyone's in different financial situations.

Starting point is 00:39:17 It for sure is my kind of thesis, which I think is playing out in front of us right now, is we are going to have hardware bottlenecks for a very long time now because the AI buildouts happening. And so memory is Sky. I just bought a memory card from my Nintendo Switch,

Starting point is 00:39:36 it cost me like $100. It's like the craziest thing ever. Like the cost of memory is skyrocketing, all hardware, everything like that. And so hardware is getting more expensive. I think, you know, getting into local models and your own hardware is a very good idea, in my opinion. Playing around with LLMs locally is a very good idea in my opinion, not only for functionality wise, like what I just showed you here, but also for education and learning wise. So, you know, I think if you can, find the room to afford a DGX spark, I think it's a really good investment. My take is play with Hermes, download the app, show that you can make this as a part of your daily solopreneur or just lifestyle. And once you've gotten your hands a little dirty,

Starting point is 00:40:26 then you've proven to yourself that if you have the $5,000, that you deserve it. Like don't be one of those people that goes and buys the latest. And then it's a it's on a shelf. That's my take. You deserve it. That's the takeaway. You deserve it. You owe it to yourself. Get yourself a spark, man. You owe yourself a spark if you actually go and use this thing, right? And understand how to use it and play with it and actually show, like show that you can create value for yourself. Because then at that point, you're going to be like $5,000. Well, if I'm going to make 10x that, then it's a no-brainer, right?

Starting point is 00:41:11 Yeah, I think the, it's always like the number one question. Oh, how much does that cost? What's that? How much is that? I think people have this weird framing around costs when it comes to AI. Like, they see the cost of Claude and they see it's, oh, $200 a month. That's really expensive. It's very, they're comparing it to like the cost of like Netflix and like Xbox Live and Amazon Prime.

Starting point is 00:41:35 Right. Those things, they just suck your money and life forces away. They're not adding to your life. $200 for Claude, $5,000 for DGX Spark. These are investments in yourself to create more value in the world. And you should, if you use the right way, see an ROI. So I would just encourage you to think through different lenses when it comes to costs for these different things. Alex Finn, before we go, is there one question I should have asked you? about Hermes desktop app, Hermes agents in general, that I haven't, that you think that the audience would benefit from me asking, or did you cover it all? I covered it all.

Starting point is 00:42:19 I think if you were to ask me a question I'd get more specific on or spend more time on is how the hell do you make money with Hermes? And the answer would be around a lot of what I showed you to the end there, finding challenges, finding opportunities to solve. And I think if your watches at home, you know, instead of using these agents to kind of play around an experiment with, I think you should be using them to solve other people's challenges because that's how you're going to be able to create the most value for yourself in the entire world. Alex Finn, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for hopping on on short notice, sharing the sauce with us as always. I'll include links for where to find Alex in the show notes in the description, his ex, his YouTube. and everything else in between.

Starting point is 00:43:07 Thank you so much. You always hype me up, and I love that about you. It ought to be fun. You've got to have fun doing this. 100%. It is fun, right? How lucky are we that we can play with these tools that they're coming out so often?

Starting point is 00:43:23 I like that you're not afraid to share your opinion in real time as new information comes in. And so I like that about you. And from my perspective, it's like I like playing with everything and then and seeing what's best for me. So thanks again. Of course. It's a pleasure as always. See you soon, man.

Starting point is 00:43:47 See you.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - Hermes Agent App Clearly Explained (and how to use it)

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