He's 18, Can't Code, and Makes $5K/Month From One App⏐Ep. #289

In the last 30 days, I made $5,000.

How technical is your background? Do you know how to code?

I don't know anything about coding, nothing about tech, nothing at all. I still cannot write you a single line of code. And I was able to quit my normal job and I already made $5,000 in my first month. My life fully has changed. This is easily like a $50K, $60K, $70K a year job. And I have agents doing this for me. I just tell them what to do.

Man, my mind is blown right now because I'm thinking of just like all these venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, they're not going to have projects to give money to because what you're doing is something that a similar startup in Silicon Valley would need to raise $1 to $7 million for. You would not be profitable today, period. End of story. If it weren't for these agents, right?

100%. I could have quit along the way, but I'm like, no, I'm gonna put my head down. I'm gonna make this work. I'm gonna take the bet on myself and be a self-motivator to actually be successful.

Dude, that's inspiring. I'm inspired, man. I'm 20 years older than you and like, I didn't know half of these tools existed.

My gosh.

That's a huge find. What other tools are in your tool belt that people have to use like yesterday? Lots of talk lately about OpenClaw, the new AI agent that can, you know, run your life or whatever. But what if OpenClaw is already outdated? Today I'm talking to an 18-year-old that just vibe-coded an app. He has no technical experience whatsoever. This app made $5,000 in the last 30 days. He just vibe-coded it a couple months ago. And it's a pretty complex app. It competes with a company that just raised $50 million. So we talk a little bit about how he built his app, you know, how to vibe code apps. But we also talked a lot at the end about AI agents, what type of agent is better than OpenClaw, a few agentic tools out there that are changing the game. Talks about what prompts we should use to vibe code better apps, what tools we should use, and just super inspiring.

I mean, 18 years old, doesn't know how to code.

Please enjoy. Vadim, well, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hey, I'm Vadim and I'm the founder of Vugola, which is a clipping startup for clippers and marketers. And I'm scaling that to be the number one clipping tool by the end of 2026.

Okay, so talk to people about clipping. Like it's about, it's been around for a few years now. Why is clipping important and what does it do?

So for example, all the streamers you see, all the podcasters you see, clipping's only become more relevant in the future. That's why I started building my startup primarily for clipping. Because like if you think about clipping, it's purely organic marketing and it's a win-win for both your client and the clippers. If like the clippers get paid $1 per 1,000 views and then the client gets like 100 million views, it's a win-win. And in the future, I firmly believe though, the future is short-form content. There'll only be more reels, more like posts. And clipping is gonna be another like branch of this marketing where it's gonna like completely take over. And especially like content rewards, BOP, like the things that they're doing, and like changing the industry in itself, like that's gonna be just the future. That's why how I got into clipping. Clipping essentially just in broken down terms is if you're on a podcast, livestream, whatever you are. So like if you post to your own YouTube channel and then you post your own Shorts to your own YouTube channel, that's only 5 channels of reach you have. But if you have clippers, they make up like 50 sub-accounts in your name, repurpose all the, like they clip like a bunch of clips and short form content on all 50. Now you have like 50 channels eyeballs going all to you. So that's basically what clipping is.

So I think like the big elephant in the room, the big question mark with clipping is how effective actually is it at bringing short-form viewers to long-form viewers or listeners? I, I've done quite a bit of clipping. I've had an agency, I've done on WAP, I've done it off WAP. I've got a bunch of accounts. I've got my verdict. I'm curious what, what you've seen. And I know you're biased. I know you're in the business of clipping. But have you seen any sort of like a correlation or a conversion rate? Like how many short-form views equal one long-form view or whatever?

Yeah. So I can't really tell you the exact metrics of the clipping, but all comes down to how you package clipping. Obviously, like if you're a streamer, you just want more people to know who you are. For example, Clavicular says he has like 1,000+ clippers. So his primarily, like all of his clips are gonna be like him, like quote unquote the mogging like trend or him like looks maxing. Whatever it is. And that's the kind of clips like that the streamer has. But I think clipping, if you want to tailor, like you want to get eyeballs from your short-form content to your long-form, is really good for podcasters. Because if they see your clip and they get value from the clip, like the clip is good quality, they take something out of it on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, on YouTube Shorts, they will go to find your channel, subscribe, because they're going to want to see more of that content. So clipping, like for podcasters, it's like pretty good. But like, let's say for a streamer and like, I just want like you for entertainment, not for value. That's like where the difference is because like it's It all comes down to like, are your clips like for entertainment or are they like actually value driven and for conversions? So that's like you have the streamers of the world, then you have like the podcasters of the world. And I would argue the podcasters have a higher conversion rate of people going and viewing their podcast than just like a streamer probably would. Yeah.

Okay. Now I want to get into this app that you built. Tell me what you built and what inspired you to build it.

Yeah. So it's a clipping, scheduling, captioning tool all in one. And why I built this was before I start building any startups at all, I wanted first to take back like a step back and be like, okay, wasn't we relevant in the next like 6 to like 2 years, like 6 months to 2 years? Because the one thing I see in the startup community is people build 10 apps and they just like quote unquote throw crap on the wall and to see whatever sticks. They don't like actually take time to diagnose, research, and actually see like, hey, let me build one legit complex software that can just go scale. So I'm like, okay, Clubhouse is gonna be the future of marketing. Everybody's going to need clippers. And the one thing I noticed that other clipping companies don't do is tailoring for agents because the future is agentic systems, pipelines, workflows. So I'm like, okay, what if I just build out a prototype MVP stage of just a normal clipping tool, see if people actually want it. And then based on what people say, then I'll start building out the agentic tool, the scheduling, the captioning. So that's how I got into it. And now we have a couple hundred paying users now. We've generated, I think, over 10,000+ clips. And like so far the growth has been pretty steady.

So what is your MRR? What is your lifetime revenue? Let's talk numbers, but both like how long ago did you found it and what are your numbers today?

Yeah, so current day, so in the last 30 days I made $5,000. So the last 30 days I made 5K. I was like no coding experience, nothing at all. I started building in October. I got into Lovable. I don't know what I was doing. I was like cursing at the AI. I was telling it, you're not building me the right page. You're not doing this. And like only then I realized AI, like if AI gives you something bad, it's a skill issue because AI can only act on the amount of context and prompt engineering it gets.

It's a skill issue with the user you're saying. Yeah.

So like, I was like, I was the most noobiest vibe coder you probably like ever see. Like I just like asked Lovable to build me something. Lovable like did not build what I wanted because obviously I didn't tell it enough details and I would get mad at Lovable. So that's how I started my live coding journey. It was on Lovable. Then I moved to Cloud Code. It was like, it's a pretty complex software, like taking clips, framing, cropping, sort. Like it was like complex software. And I like had so much times to quit, but I started like, so when I got into Cloud Code, everything started working out, like start picking it up. And the last probably like 2 months, I actually started marketing it organically on Twitter. And it's purely off Twitter so far, which is also like a bad market for a clipping like in my opinion, like I could scale way better on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, which I started posting now. But yeah, but purely on X in the last 2 months where I actually started marketing it and like the free, like the public beta stage, we made $5,000 in the last like 30 days.

Now is that $5,000 from like monthly subscriptions or lifetime subscriptions? What do you charge?

Yeah, so I have 3 paid tiers. So first is like a $9 plan. And then it's a $39 plan and then it's a $99 plan. So like for these—

Monthly?

Yeah, monthly, monthly recurring revenue. Okay. And then we also, I also figured out that the way I can like upsell, like, 'cause like for, if you're having a software business, like if ideally your churn rate, like a user will go to your software and like, if you like it or not, they're gonna leave probably within the like the first 2 to 3 months, probably 1 to 3 months, they're gonna cancel the subscription and leave your software. So the way I even maximize my revenue even more is when, for example, when I had like a monthly and yearly plan. And then on top of that, let's say they have a monthly, chose a monthly plan. And when they click on the like get monthly plan, a popup appears and sells them a quarterly plan. So you want to keep upselling them like better, better deals, maximizing how much revenue you can take from your user, from the, like from the user. 'Cause from like 1 to 3 months, they're going to leave you. And then after like they pick their plan, then you take them to a custom checkout page where you upsell them additional free credits now. So like, it's like a one-time purchase for like a bunch of more credits. It's like a really good value deal for the user. So that like, when I like start, when I did that, I like saw like my revenue kind of like just like, like spike up on one day. I think like one day I made like $900 just like in one day after I made like the upselling perks and features.

Now, and you're just promoting this on Twitter. You're starting to do short-form video, but mostly just Twitter, right?

Yeah, purely Twitter.

Okay. And how technical is your background? Like, did you know how to code or is like vibe coding your first coding experience?

I don't, I cannot tell. Like, I don't know anything about coding, nothing about tech, nothing at all. Like, I kind of just learned along the way. I'm like basically like your grandma. I'm not even joking. I don't know anything about like coding experience. I'm basically your grandma that got into like tech and that's over time I just like learned like, and now I know like the the basics of it probably, but I still cannot write you a single line of code.

Okay. Why did you start with Lovable and would you recommend that people start with it? I know you have a more complex app. Most people are probably doing more simple things, but what's your recommendation there?

Honestly, looking back now, I would not recommend Lovable at all. First of all, like in my opinion, it's too, like too expensive. And also the designs and UI gives you, it's like, it looks like vibe-coded slop. So like in the AI space, like there's a thing called like They can tell if your website is Vibe-coded or if it's not, it's called AI slop, which just means like your website is like garbage and it's obviously made by AI. And Lobo did like a horrible job on the designs, way too expensive. Like I said, like I spent like $500 worth of monthly credits in the span of 4 days. Maybe that's just a me problem, but I just burned through so much credits. So like if you're just beginning into Vibe coding, the terminal looks very complex. But basically all you need to know is like you need a backend server. So like Supabase, like store all your data. You need Vercel to like, for example, you have a domain, you need to host the domain on the server. So you need Vercel for that. And then for your frontend, that's like your frontend code. So you just like open up Cloud Code in the terminal and you just literally talk with Cloud Code. It makes the local files for you. You push it onto GitHub. GitHub is literally like a Google Drive for your code. And it's basically all you need to like build a startup, a software. So like, it's just like those 4 things and it's like, it seems complex at first, but like, it's not really like, it's pretty easy if you get into it. So like you can skip all like the Replit of the world, the Lovables of the world. You can just kind of like skip all that and go straight into the cloud code.

Okay. So Supabase for the database, Vercel for the hosting, GitHub for hosting your code.

Yeah.

The terminal app on your computer for actually making the code. What is the AI tool that you're using to actually —like VibeCode it? Is it CloudCode?

Yeah, I'm using CloudCode. And also, for example, like I'm using CloudCode Max subscription. So I'm paying $200 a month. And also for you guys that do not know, I just realized this. So when I first got CloudCode, if you buy it on the mobile app, it's $250. I don't know why. But then if you buy it in the web app, it's $200. So make sure to buy it on the web app. So yeah, I use CloudCode. And also whenever my CloudCode subscription runs out, I have a second Codex plan. What's Codex? Codex is basically OpenAI's coding agent. Like how there's Claude, there's Claude Code for coding, and then there's OpenAI ChatGPT, and then there's Codex for coding.

Yeah. It's $2.50 on mobile app because they have to give like 20% to Apple. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

I forgot about that. Apple takes a chunk out of that.

So have you been a clipper in the past? Like what got you into this world?

Yeah. So basically when I started doing this, like A bunch of people start reaching out to me from like the clipping space, like well-known names, like, do you have clipping experience? Like I never clipped, I was never a clipper. I never did anything of that before I started building software at all. I literally just like researched. I'm like, okay, I want to build the actual legit software that is going to be viable and can actually scale in the future. The future is going to be short-form content. Future is going to be clipping. Everyone's going to need like that. So why not me instead of building a simple like walking app? Or calorie tracking app or like some simple iOS apps. What if I just build a legit complex, like almost like it's not an enterprise like software, but like a legit software web application that like I can just scale and will actually be like viable and like it's going to be like relevant in the future, you know? So that's, that's, that's why I got into it.

So you saw clipping as a tidal wave and you said, I'm going to hop on this tidal wave. I'll have an easier chance of success, right? Yeah. This is here to stay. Now, what about Opus, right? Like, is that the biggest clipping app in the space? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So are you— do you even like look at them or are you just thinking like, this market's so big, not everyone's going to use it, there's room for everyone? How do you look at them?

Yeah, so the way I look at it, obviously, so I like, I tested out all my competitors first of all, like before I started building my software, I tested all my competitors and I started like deep analyzing with myself and AI because like if you don't know, your AI can actually go and like do things. For example, I use a tool called Hermes Agent. Essentially, it's Open Claw but on steroids. And there's a thing called Chrome DevTools MCP where it can literally go and open tabs for you, take screenshots, and analyze. So my Hermes Agent, my, like, you'd say Jarvis. So my Hermes Agent would go analyze, take screenshots, click through buttons while on my MacBook Pro. I'd also be researching and analyzing these competitors. And one thing I realized is, first of all, like they're, like, I also, I went through like the customer reviews, but like one thing is it's too expensive. The clipping process takes too long. Opus Clip also, it clips the same clips at the same time. Like if you post a podcast at Opus Clip, since they like, since they have a good, it's like a clipping logic. And like, for example, if you clip a minute and 5 seconds of a video, in one clip we can have that clip. And then in clip 2, it can have the same clip. It can be like a minute 5 and then jumps to a minute 10 and then a minute 20. I don't know if this is making sense, but like, it reuses the same clip moments in multiple clips. So you're spending credits basically getting the same exact clip. You're not going to repurpose that same clip over time because all these algos look at your content and see if it's the same content. They're not going to boost you at all. So I deep analyze all my competitors seeing like, okay, they're not agentic. The user is saying XYZ, I can improve in this, this, this way. So let me start building. And if I can make my product 10% better than theirs and heck, like the market share is so big, why can't I not just take a piece of it as well? So I had that mindset as well, like you said.

So how long did it take you to go from, you know, your first prompt in Lovable when you first had this idea and you started building it to your first dollar in the bank account?

First dollar in my bank account, I think it was in the beginning of February. I think it was like February 2nd. I got like my first like Stripe notification. And by the way, like my product, I did not market it anywhere. I was just building in public on Twitter. And I saw like, I saw someone bought like the creator plan. And mind you, my product probably sucked back then. Like, it probably was horrible, but someone still paid for it and used it, you know? So like, I remember, so yeah, February 2nd, I think that's when I got my first like notification and first sale.

And when did you first start prompting it in Lovable?

First start prompting in Lovable, it was October, November. Okay.

So you spent like a few months kind of tinkering with it, learning the hard way, and then first dollar on February 2nd. Yeah. And then March, your first full month, you did $5,000 in revenue. Yep. $5,000 in revenue. And how much of that was profit?

Profit? I have 80, 85, 80% profit margins.

That's amazing. Now, are you using AI credits on the backend when they generate videos? Is that part of your cost or no?

Yeah. So there's a whole system with like the face analyzing, transcript analyzing, looking at the emotion of the speakers, where they're at, like Everything's basically on API credits. And yeah, I'm basically outsourcing. And like when I'm pricing my packages, I'm making sure, hey, like if I package it in this amount of price, this amount of credits, like ideally you want 70 to 80% profit margins in the SaaS world. Yeah.

And are you using Claude API on the backend, like for generating these videos?

No, I'm not using Claude. I'm using Gemini API. That's like, that's the most effective. 'Cause like Gemini does a good job at reasoning and also Gemini also has a VLM, which is basically, so you have LLMs, it's like a language learning model. Then you have VLMs, which is a visual learning model. So not only can the AI look at the transcription and analyze which parts of the clips, which part of the video will be good clips, but can also look at the video itself and dissect, okay, who's the speaker? Where are they at? What are they talking about? Oh, it's a podcast. Oh, this is like a stream. This is like a gaming.

Thing and stuff like that. Okay. Now, how have you used OpenClaw throughout the process of building and/or marketing this business?

So I started using OpenClaw, I think a few months. Yeah, I think like 2 months ago, 3 months ago, I started using OpenClaw when it became viral. And the way I got my first like 400, like I, before I had like a free plan, which like as a bootstrap company, I was getting burned through credits because people were making multiple free accounts. But the way I got like my first 450+ users Even though like a bunch of them were free, but I got so much feedback from them was through Reddit marketing. So essentially back when I used OpenClaw, I switched from it, but we'll get back into that later. My OpenClaw, I made like a marketing agent. Essentially it would go on subreddits, it would go on LinkedIn, it would go on X, on Twitter. It would see where people are talking about what's the best clipping tool, what's the best AI video tool. And I gave it a bunch of these specific keywords tailored to my SaaS. So hey, look for like users complaining about clipping. Look for users complaining about Opus Clip because even Opus Clip back in the day, they had like a 48-hour outage. And in that moment, I told my marketing, hey, go like give me a list, like bullet, bullet, bullet, their usernames, the posts where they're complaining so I can go and shoot them a DM. Hey, I'm building a clipping tool. I would love for you to try for free. So that's how I got like my first 450 like free users on my software and got a bunch of feedback on things to improve on, to remove, simplify and stuff like that with Opus Clip.

OpenClaw. So how many total users do you have today, both free and paid?

Well, I switched from— what's it called? I switched from— there's no free plan anymore. So just a paid plan. And right now we have like 267 paying users right now.

Okay. So you got— you had a pretty easy time getting unpaid users with your OpenClaw agent just by posting or commenting on Reddit, but then your paid users mostly came from X. Is that right? Yeah.

Because one thing I noticed is like I was giving way too much free value on the free plan. Like I was, because not only is it's not just clipping, it's also scheduling. Like you can like schedule, it's like a whole social media scheduler as well. Unlike these like clipping tools, they focus on clipping and stuff. Like you can clip and schedule natively all in one ecosystem. So like these people will literally make free accounts, clip, schedule, and then they make another free account, another free account, another free account. And I would get burned through a bunch of credits. And like, I'm like, okay, the way I can filter this is let me just make a simple $9 a month instead of the free plan, I'll do a $9 a month plan. And that'll filter just the people just to test it out and the actual real users that actually want the product and want the software. And mind you, when I had the free plan, my revenue, like I was not seeing any revenue at all. Like maybe it was like one sale in like a couple weeks or something. And then in March, in March, I think like the end of February, that's when I like, I made, okay, I made a decision. I'm not gonna have any free plans. I'm gonna make like the $9 plan like minimum. And that's gonna filter people. I'm actually gonna see if people actually wanna use my software. And right when I did the $9 a month plan, people just started buying it. I'm like, oh wow. So like it was a good filter. Like it was a good move in the end, at the end of my day.

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Do you have any numbers as to what percentage of people upgraded from free to paid versus just bounced?

That's the one thing I had a mistake on. So there's a thing called PostHog, which is it look at your whole entire website and like your analytics and stuff. I did not have proper conversion and data set up from the beginning. So I can't really tell you, like I can probably go in my Stripe and have my AI analyze all like the Stripe IDs and the users and see which users upgraded from the starter plan to the creator plan, and then from maybe from the creator to the agency plan. I could probably look at that right now, but from the beginning I didn't have that set up, but I have it set up now. I at least set it up yesterday with PostHog Analytics, but I didn't have proper data. I didn't have onboarding, I didn't have offboarding, I didn't have any of that, which looking at this now from a marketer's perspective, I'm like, what was I doing?

I mean, it's like that's the alternative to not starting. Oftentimes people check all those boxes and then they, all that friction causes them to never launch in the first place. So that's usually how I do it too. Like I'm so anxious to get revenue in the door. I don't set up all the necessary tracking things, but in the end it doesn't really make that big of a difference. You know, like a year from now you're not going to care about that. Yeah, sure.

It's all about learning the process.

Yeah. But would you say that you were surprised by what percentage of people actually upgraded to paid?

Yeah, I was actually really surprised. 'Cause like, yeah, I'm like, I'm like, 'cause like my competitor Opuskill, they have a free plan. I'm like, why not just like, why not me make a free plan? I'll see if like people are going to go to me and like no one was buying at all. I'm like, what the heck? So I'm like, okay, let me just make a free plan and let's see if there's a demand. If like people actually want the tool, started marketing it more, started talking about it more on Twitter and people started funneling in and then I started getting more emails, more feedback, things that they like, they didn't like, what to improve on, what to add and stuff like that.

Like that. Sorry, did you say that Opus did or didn't have a free plan? They have a free plan. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. I would have thought that they, that they didn't because clearly your data has showed that it's not a good idea. Yeah.

Well, I think the thing with Opus, they raised $50 million, by the way. And like, if you look at their ads, their marketing, it just, they're just burning money just to get big names like, like, like MrBeast or IShowSpeed just to use the products. If you look at their pages, It's just like well-known podcasters around the world. So I'm like, why not? Like, I can like literally niche down and go after smaller podcasters, entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers, whoever it might be that need clipping. And I can niche down and take a big chunk of the market share as well that way.

Have you thought of building an OpenClaw agent that will go to WAP and start DMing clippers, just like spamming them links to your thing, giving them free credits or whatnot?

No, I didn't think of that. But what I did think is, so Daniel Bitson, he's the founder of Content Rewards. He was like a clipper back in the day, YouTube Shorts guy, pretty successful young lad. And he's like, yeah, Daniel Bitton, B-I-T-T-O-N. And he's the founder of Content Rewards. And I have an idea and I messaged him on Twitter and on messages. Essentially, I want to build out a Gen-Z clipper where like the future of clipping is not going to be like human clippers. It's literally going to be agent clippers clipping for you. Okay, like think about it. They can go take your video so they can go analyze on WAP, what campaign it is. Find that video on YouTube, copy the link, like paste it into Vugola, clip it. They download the clips, they add the trending sounds, the B-rolls, everything. And then they submit it on their like social media platforms because they can schedule as well. And then the way clipping works, you take whatever you schedule on social media, you take that like Instagram link, TikTok post link, and then you just submit it on Content Rewards. You submit it on Wapp, and that's how you start tracking you for your views and giving you like a CPM. Which they pay you like 10 cents, 30 cents or whatever, like a dollar per 1,000 views. And like I thought about, hey, why not like Contentwards build out like an API key or like WAB build out like an API key and just build it for agents. So like I'm in the talks with them. So like we'll see where the future leads, but that's where I think where clipping will be like fully agentic.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of these patterns like 20 years ago in the early to mid 2000s, you know, the smart thing to do was to build your business internet first. Right? Like, if you're starting a business, it doesn't necessarily have to be an internet business, but it needs to be optimized for the internet. And then 5 years later, mobile became everything, right? Facebook launched in '04, and then Instagram a few years later, and then the iPhone in '07. And so everyone was saying, like, your business has to be mobile first. And Instagram was really unique because it was the first social media app to be mobile first, whereas Facebook was web first and then they made an app later because there weren't even apps in '04. So it was mobile first for a while. And now, like 3 years ago, it's like your business has to be AI first. Like AI, like it can be a normal business, but you have to lead with AI. And now it feels like today in the next 5 years, it needs to be agentic first, right? And it seems like that's what you're doing. Like you're building the framework for your business to be agentic first because eventually like agents are going to be buying these apps and a human will record a podcast and then an agent will just pick it up and take it from there. Agents will be doing all kinds of tasks. They're going to have our credit card info. They're going to go buy things for us because they know we need it. Like, that's what the future looks like. And that's how businesses need to build their foundation to be agentic first.

100%. And if you're a viewer watching this podcast right now, if you're building your startup or software, whatever it might be, start tailoring it and thinking, okay, how can I build it out for agents? Because literally the future is agentic workflows and enterprise companies. Literally, like, your agent is going to go download my agent skill. Like, for example, People are saying a software is going to be dead because like Claude can build you anything and you don't need to buy any subscription. Well, no. If I have an agent that knows clipping, but then it sucks at scheduling, instead of building my own scheduling tool, why not like I just outsource and grab an API key and get like this scheduling skill and hook it up to my agent. So now my agent can clip and then schedule.

I love it. What are you building or playing around with on OpenClaw today? That people can learn from and copy?

Yeah. So I actually switched from OpenClaw, spoiler alert. So I switched from OpenClaw to Hermes Agent. Essentially Hermes, so OpenClaw is like, the one thing about OpenClaw I had a big problem with, I don't know if you experienced this as well, but the memory and like the self-learning loop on OpenClaw, it was just not like, I found myself repeating to OpenClaw time and time again that like, hey, you're forgetting this, you're not doing this. It had contradicting memory. And then a thing called Hermes Agent came out. Essentially, it's like OpenClaw. It's an agentic tool where you plug in like Claude code or you plug in Open, like Codex, your subscription to it. It can do things with it. And Hermes Agent has like 40, like 40+ built-in skills. They have a built-in self-memory system. So on OpenClaw, you have to build out this memory system by yourself, which I had to do. But Hermes Agent has everything built in natively already within, like within when you install it, it's already built in. So I switched from OpenCart to Hermes Agent, and so far it's been incredible. So like, I have like a Hermes CEO agent, like a brain rot agent. I have a marketing agent, a growth agent, and a specific coding agent, all tailored for Voguola. So that's like basically the whole entire company and team you could say behind Voguola.

So like, wow. I mean, if you were to like, if you were to hire a human to replace everything that your agent is doing for you, Would that be a full-time job? Would that be 2 humans, 3, part-time job? What do you think it would take?

Oh my goodness, I don't even know. I'm spending about like, I don't know how much tokens worth of like Claude Code tokens and Codex tokens I'm spending just on coding itself. And then like I have a customer support agent literally setting up post-hoc analytics, doing a bunch of metrics, having cron jobs in real time. Like this is easily like a $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year job. Just for like one department of Bugola, like moderating full-time. And I have agents doing this for me all for like $200 a month, $400 a month, like everything for my own behalf. And like I'm the CEO and I just tell them what to do and they do it for me, you know?

Man, my mind is blown right now because I'm thinking of just like all these venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, like they're not going to have projects to give money to because what you're doing is something that like, a similar startup in Silicon Valley would need to raise $1 to $7 million for, right? And hire that $50 to $100K person over and over, like 2 marketing people, an admin person. Like you're spending hundreds of dollars a month on agents doing the same thing. Like you would not be profitable today, period. End of story. If it weren't for these agents, right? Because $5 grand a month ain't going to pay all those bills.

100%. And the thing also, like, so if you don't understand how Cloud Code works for your user, So essentially when you buy the $200 a month plan, they're giving you like $15,000 worth of actual credits and tokens. And if I'm spending that all the time and then I go to Codex and another Codex $200 plan, that's another like $15,000 worth of coding and like token usage and credits. So essentially these like these companies, because not everybody hits their usage limits and weekly limits every single week. Only for me, I'm maxing that thing out every day. Like I kind of have this like anxiety almost that If I don't maximize my token usage every week, every day, I'm losing money, you know? So like, if you're like, if you're on Cloud Code, if you're on Codex, maximize your output. You're supposed to be like hitting your limits every single week, you know? So, cause like you're really spending like $30,000, $45,000, $50,000 worth of credits for like $400, $600 a month.

Oh my gosh. All right. Hermi's agent, that's a huge find. What other tools are in your tool belt that people have to use like yesterday?

So I literally was researching with my Hermes agent and like he literally like talked to me like, hey, you don't have any like analytics set up, nothing. So like for your software, you want to set up like, not sponsored, nothing. Like it's called PostHog. It's actually really good. Essentially PostHog can literally go on your software and it can see where users are clicking, how long they're on a page for, what they're going to. Like the whole entire user journey. And then you can build out post-hoc called events where essentially it's like your whole onboarding flow. Or for me, like the first user, they sign up, then it tracks for their first clip, their first download, their first post, the first caption, and literally tracks every single user's journey saying, okay, here they canceled their subscription. Here they got more credits. Here they got this, that, XYZ. And it's basically like a whole entire like analytical tool that you can like fully deep dive and have your agent just running for you. So like I got PostHog, I'm on a free plan also, by the way. I don't know how, like, I don't know why I would need a paid plan.

How are they making money? That's what I'm saying.

Like maybe there's like a limit I'm going to reach or something. I don't know. I literally got a free plan, put the code, like I just told my agent, Hermes, like put this code, embed it in my software. I grabbed the API, he gave it to me. I'm like, okay, you start setting all these analytic tracks. The thing with like, if you don't know what to do for your software, the beauty of AI, it's supposed to help you and brainstorm with you, you know? So like, I couldn't come up with all like the post-hoc events. Like it literally like went down like step by step. Hey, you need to track this, you need to track that, you need to track this, boom, boom, boom. And like I was brainstorming with Hermes and then I'm like, okay, go build it out. And it started building it out for me. And the thing with Hermes agent as well, like I don't know if I, like I wish I could share my screen right now here, but you can also see in like Telegram what it's working on, what tools, what MCP service it's calling. So you can track its whole entire like, and look like its whole journey and its coding thing as well in real time. Unlike for OpenClaw, you would tell it, hey dude, like build me this thing. And it would just like go quiet and then just spit something back out to you. So you couldn't really know what it was doing, what it was working on. Maybe like it took the prompt the wrong way or something.

It's funny 'cause it reminds me of like my hiring process. The key question that I ask all my potential employees is how well do you work in ambiguity? And it sounds like OpenClaw does not work great in ambiguity, right? It needs more handholding. Whereas Hermes Agent, like, it's just accountable. It has autonomy. It just goes and does things.

And also another thing. So do you know what Paperclip is? Have you heard of Paperclip? It's like a new AI tool that built out.

It's pretty— I can't keep up, man.

Twitter is something new every single day, but essentially there's a thing called Paperclip. It's an open source GitHub project. Essentially, it's a whole like AI orchestration structure for you. So essentially it's like you have like a CEO, you literally have a CEO agent, and then it can break down into like your CMO, your CTO, and then those agents can have agents. Essentially, like it's literally a agentic AI company. So like you can literally hire a CEO, tell it, hey, hire me this kind of agent. You tell it your goals, you tell it your to-do list, you make issues. Essentially it literally works for you around the clock, 24/7. And the thing with Paperclip, so the founder of Paperclip went on a podcast and talked about a maximizer skill. And in my Hermes agent, you want to tell your agents, if you're using Hermes, OpenCloud, whatever it might be, is you want to build it out. So like, hey, if I give you a task, make sure you go and fix it and do it no matter what. Because like if agents, they have access to like click on your web, they can like with Chrome DevTools, MCP servers, they can go click on tools, they can take screenshots, they can like, if you give it like your login password, make like a dummy account so it can log into Instagram, it can log into TikTok and log into Google. And like I built out a native like custom skill where like, hey, if I give you a task, you work on it no matter what, you do not bug me at all until you like figure it out and you literally self-improve. Guru, if you run into any roadblocks, if you work, if you go into like an unknown error page, you yourself figure it out and only like tag me and like message me back if you only need my help like 100%. And the thing with Hermes, it literally figures out and clicks on stuff and sending me screenshots proactively now because like I give it a task and it runs for me until it literally finishes it. So if you have like agents, I would like advise you guys to set that up as well that like Give them the access they need and just let them run and only ping you when that task is actually done.

I call it the let them cook prompt. Keep cooking. What other like killer prompts like that would you suggest or hacks or tools to get your agent and/or LLM to run better or more efficiently?

So another good thing is like, I think like the term is called reverse prompting. Essentially after like when you're setting up your OpenClaw or for example, now my Hermes agent, you want it to ask you questions back. So for example, like you obviously talk with it, like you want to tell your goals and also like be super specific with AI. Like if you're a vibe coder, no coding smarts like me, like once I learned this like quote and like embed it into your whole entire workflow, if AI gives you a wrong prompt, a wrong build, a wrong UI design, whatever, if the AI gives you something that's not your expectation, it's a skill issue on you. It's a you problem. Like whether you like it or not, the AI can only do so much on what you tell it, like on context and prompt engineering. Like think about AI, like we might have, like I had a wrong impression of AI that AI is so grand, it knows everything about me. Like it doesn't know everything about me if I didn't tell it stuff. It's not going to go on the web and like search everything and like know my personal goals, my ambitions.

Even if it did go on the web, it doesn't know your insecurities, your thoughts, your mind, your history, your background, a conversation you had offline. Like it doesn't know any of that.

Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. So like once I found this out, like, hey, like be super specific about the context and prompt engineering. Like for example, if you look at like one, like this is a good like side note. Like if like, if you go on a website and you look at design website and you want to implement it for your startup, literally pull up a notes tab on the sidebar of your computer and start writing like in description, not your AI, but just like for yourself and a doc. Like I like this nav bar, I like this header, I like this prompt. And you want to take screenshots of it. Because your AI can also like look at screenshots. Don't forget that. Like you want to make a huge note prompt of like things you like, take screenshots of the website, give it to your agent, and now it has so much more context. So rather than saying, hey, I like the website of xyz.com, copy it. Like you have to be so much more specific in how you prompt engineer your AI. Yeah.

Any other prompts or hacks that you can think of like that? Ask your agent.

Hey, what tools and what API keys, what kind of MCP servers, what do you need so you can be fully autonomous? Because for example, I don't know, Chrome DevTools MCP, essentially. I'll talk about this again. I did not know anything about it. And every time I was asking my agent to go take screenshots of XYZ web or this website, whatever, it couldn't. And then I told, okay, how can we make you do it? What skills do you need? Go look on open source. GitHub repos, go look on Twitter, go do whatever. And then it told me, okay, there's a thing called Chrome DevTools MCP where I can, where you can allow it on your Mac mini, your MacBook, and I can go open tabs for you. I can go do this for you. So tell your agent, like to make it fully autonomous, tell your agent, hey, what skills do you need? What API keys do you need so I can help you so we can improve our work, like work relationship and like our workflow?

Yeah, I love that. Any other tools that you would recommend? We've got Hermes Agent, we've got PostHog, we've got Paperclip. Anything else that is just blowing your mind lately?

Honestly, as of the moment, that's about it. Like, it's like, it's like, I don't want to like over like complicate everything. That's really all you need to like build like a good like startup business in today's world. And literally I have no coding experience. I have nothing at all. And I was able to quit like my like normal like high-paying like agency marketing job and like build like a decent income for like just the first month of me building like fully marketing my software. And I already made $5,000 in my first month just like that, you know? So like, it's like, it's super like simple. It's simple work, but it's not easy work if that makes sense. Like the time to build a business, it's so like simple, but obviously success, if success was easy, everybody would be successful. Obviously like there's, like to be entrepreneur, it's still hard. And you just have to go over these roadblocks. Like when I was building my software, one little like last thing, like when I was building my software, like I was running into roadblocks, like the face tracking, the cropping, like everything was like super off. 'Cause like a clipping software, OBS could be like raised $50 million to build theirs. And who am I to fuck with my own, you know? And like I could have quit along the way, but I'm like, no, I'm gonna put my head down. I'm gonna make this work. I'm gonna take the bet on myself and be a self motivator. To actually be successful. And now looking back now, I'm doing a legit like startup company under my belt. It's like fully autonomous AI agents. Like my life like fully has changed in a span of like 4 or 5 months.

Dude, that's inspiring. I'm inspired, man. I'm 20 years older than you and I'm like, I didn't know half of these tools existed. You're inspiring a lot of people. Last question I'll ask you. You obviously did a bunch of research in finding this clipping opportunity. What tools or what methodologies, frameworks, whatever, can people use to find profitable, uncovered, undiscovered niches?

So essentially you want to like take a step back and like really like, for me, for like, for this like part, I didn't use any AI. I didn't use like any, like I literally just like, I came up with this gig by myself. Like you want to take a step back and actually look into the marketplace. Like I don't care if it takes you like a week or maybe like 2 weeks, like you actually want to do deep research by yourself. Like you want to understand the market that you're going to go into. You want to understand what your competitors are doing. You want to understand where the future is headed. Like in this podcast, we're talking about how the future is agentic software, agentic workflows, building skills and endpoints, webhooks for other agents. And like now having that kind of info, you can start thinking, okay, what can I build that every other company or every like, or maybe like one niche market will need? So like maybe like automated leads, but like take it like, take that. Okay, automated leads. How can I make automated leads agentic? Okay, I can build out an agent that literally goes and has like a cron job. So it's scheduled, it runs every single day and it can go find me leads on my own behalf. And then I take another step further and go and message those leads. It can go follow up with those leads. It can go like, so like you can think about a whole like agentic workflow. Like you connect one dot, you think about it. Oh, mind mapping. This is huge. You want to go and using mind mapping tools and like build one point. Okay, where does this lead to? Goes here. Okay, it goes into here. And you want to mind map your whole entire research, like your research thing about whatever niche you want to go into. And that's basically all I'll say. Like, it sounds cliché, but literally like you want to, you want to be the expert in your own field. Like, I know everything about clipping. I know what my competitors are doing, where they're lacking. What they're not doing. And like, that's how I'm going to take the edge on all these like multimillion-dollar companies and competitors on Vogola. So whatever you're building, you want to be the expert in it and really use your own creativity in mind mapping so you fully understand your whole entire market.

This is the original Disney like master plan from like 60, 70 years ago.

Was this a mind map essentially? Yeah, essentially that. And that's like, and like the thing about this mind map, like I bet you when Walt Disney was doing this, he probably first started with just like the, maybe just the music or maybe just the TV like section.

He kept building onto it over time.

Yeah. And he just like started building and strategizing those mind maps. Okay. I should like, this connects here, this connects here. And like you strategize on your own and research on your own behalf, you know? Yeah.

Are there any mind mapping tools that you would recommend?

I think Miro, Miro is a good one. That's probably the best one I would use.

Okay. Oh, I've heard of this one. Yeah, so this looks familiar. Okay. Where can we find you? Where can we find your app or you?

Yeah, so if you guys want to test my app, it's still in beta stage right now. And we're like, I'm obviously like making and polishing it out, like working on it nonstop. You can find that at vogolai.com, basically V-U-G-O-L-A-I.com. And then where you can find me on social media. So I have, I'm mainly on Twitter. I built up my personal brand on Twitter to like 27,000 followers. And then I've started posting on Instagram, so you can find me at Vadim and then underscore and then Stryzheus. So S-T-R-I-Z-H-E-U-S.

Okay, gotcha. We will link to you there. Well, Vadim, this is amazing, inspiring. Thank you for all your tools. Speaking of mind map, my mind is blown right now. Thanks for coming on, man.

Thank you, Chris, for having me.