I let OpenClaw run my organic marketing (while I sleep)

0:00I heard about a guy who lives in a random small town in England who was able to turn his open claw into a marketing machine. Basically a digital employee who goes and creates TikTok videos and TikTok slideshows that gets millions of views. And he takes these millions of views and he directs it into a mobile app that generates him money every single day. What's crazy about this whole thing is he gives away all the sauce for free. and in this episode you are going to learn how you can set up your open claw so that it too is a content creation marketing machine and i know it's going to get your creative juices flowing oliver doesn't do a lot of podcasts so please like and comment to get him fired up to share more in public so that we can all learn and i'm grateful for him for coming on the pod and sharing with you all have a creative day and i'll see you in there

1:04Oliver Henry on the Startup Ideas podcast. Welcome, welcome. By the end of this podcast, what are people going to get out of it?

1:12Oliver Henry:People are going to get an automated marketing tool that is going to automatically drive revenue to their apps. I mean, that feels too good to be true, although I hope that's the case. Which tools are you going to use and why is it not too good to be true? So I've got the results on the screen. It may not look like a lot of subscriptions, but this is$300,$400 of monthly revenue coming in without me touching anything using the Larry marketing skill that I created for OpenClaw agents. And we can get into how that is creating content and what it is learning to massively increase MRR autonomously by itself.

1:55Okay, cool. So what we're going to learn today is we're going to learn about OpenClaw and specific skills around marketing, growing your business, automating it. Yes, MRR is hundreds of dollars a month, but hopefully if this works, that can get into thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Is that right?

2:13Oliver Henry:Correct. I'm already trying it on multiple apps, so I'm not touching these apps at all. I've not created the apps. I have just published them live on the App Store and they are generating me hundreds of dollars. It's almost$1 ,000 in total now from doing nothing, which I think is a great start. All right, let's see how we do this. Sure. So one, I use my OpenClaw agent, Larry, who automates all my TikTok marketing. And this is one of the main reasons why it hasn't scaled into thousands of MRR. It's because I am only doing this on one TikTok currently. And then I've got one TikTok for each of my apps that I'm trying to do before I start scaling.

2:53Oliver Henry:and this one is in a very good position to start scaling. To give you the background context of how this app came about, I created the app because we moved into a house, me and my girlfriend moved into a house and we wanted to decorate the house. We were using ChatGBT and I very quickly learned that she was not very good at prompting ChatGBT and it was giving all sorts of random messages. So then I created a lockdown prompt in ChatGBT to keep the room size the same the windows in the same places because it was adding windows where they shouldn't, adding doors where they shouldn't. So we locked down the prompt and I turned it into an app.

3:32And I thought, now I've got to market it.

3:34Oliver Henry:So I started with that exact story, helping my girlfriend build an app and doing facial videos myself, trying to promote the app. Until I then started doing slideshows. So I think this is the first slideshow that we created. and it started to get more views, more traction, but it was taking time. Like I've worked a full-time job. I do, obviously I was developing the app, developing the other apps on the side and I didn't have time. So then I tried going to a SaaS tool that automates your marketing for you. And I love the guys that make the product. I think they're great, but unfortunately their product just didn't work very well for me.

4:20Oliver Henry:but I knew this was the type of content that I wanted to create. So you can see it got 800 views, this one got 400 views, still using the images so you can sort of see how Larry was becoming. And then I posted this one. So I manually created this one again on Canva and this is what got 6 ,000 views and that's where it started blowing up. So I knew that the text must have been something, the hook must have been something and this is where I learned about OpenClaw and at this exact moment I said I created my OpenClaw machine Larry he sat behind me and at this moment I installed him and he had one task I said Larry your goal is to automate my marketing I do not want to do it I don't like doing it I had an app before this that I hated marketing so much I did hook and demo videos where it's a facial reaction and then going into a demo of your app with a text hook.

5:18Oliver Henry:So I would write all my text hooks in a text file. I would then record my face doing a lot of reactions and then I had all my demo videos and I wrote a script to combine all of these and make all the possible combinations of the hook plus demo plus text as it could. And this would generate about 400 videos each time that I could just bulk upload using a bulk scheduler and that was still taking me about three hours but it didn't really work very well with slideshows and i knew that for this niche slideshows are going to work so this is where larry came in quick break to invite you just something now this isn't an ad i just want to invite you to a free event because i think that you're going to get a lot out of it i wanted to take one hour of time where we just talk about building businesses in the age AI.

6:12People say SaaS is dying. I actually believe the quite opposite. I think that SaaS is just evolving. I think right now is an incredible time to be building software startups that help you craft your dream life. And for all those reasons, I said, let's just book one hour of time. It's going to be 11 a.m. March 12th. That's a Thursday where we can go and lock in and just talk about building businesses in the AJI. I'll include a link in the description in the show notes to join. And I can't wait to see you there.

6:43Oliver Henry:And what Larry is, is my open crawl machine. And I gave him access to posting on TikTok, TikTok analytics, and then he could post and look at what posts perform the best. and I gave him X and well I gave him X before there was all the drama with the APIs and them cancelling the usage and having to use the official API so this was early on on a separate account and then also his brave browser and I just said look go find out in my niche what creates a high converting slideshow so then we got started and this by the way just on that like a lot of people think of software software as a service they're like i need this tool social media management tool slideshow tool and then i'm going to go hire people to go or do myself and i'm going to go do it but there's this shift that's happening right now that instead of basically going to a tool to automate a function you say to yourself okay if this was an ai employee how can i spin this up and that's that's what you did right oliver yeah so i just thought of larry as a ai employee almost like a virtual assistant hiring a virtual assistant with one job to do this one thing and that was his sole purpose to go research go find out as much as he could about slideshows in my niche and figure it out himself and he started to do a very good job.

8:26So this is

8:27Oliver Henry:the first slide he created and instantly you can tell it looks rubbish. So this was created with the DALI 3 image model and then it goes into a slightly better model afterwards but because the image looked AI it was a massive turnoff. Users didn't like it, the format was wrong, it had the black bars and that's why it flopped and then we started trying more hooks you can see then he started trying facial reactions because they were trending at the time the problem with this is humans are extremely good at recognizing what a human is which makes us extremely good at recognizing what an AI human is and I still don't think it's fully nailed Gemini just released Nano Banana 2 and I've seen some very good images created on that but I've not tried it myself to go in depth so we kept trying and then we finally hit our first banger of 137 ,000 views here and it was the hook When you say we finally found a banger you mean your boy found the banger my voice yeah so honestly at this point it was still me i felt like i was still hand holding him so i i call my open crawl machine a him it just makes it easier to ignore it but um i was still hand holding him and checking his work before i was posting it i didn't trust him fully so i saw this and what i get larry to do he creates the content and he puts the text overlay on he creates the images.

10:08Oliver Henry:He makes the description, but I was just checking it to make sure it all looked good. And then I was posting it. So there are two ways that you can post to TikTok is fully through the API and post that TikTok live straight away. Or the way I do it with Larry and the way I fully recommend is posting it as a draft and then posting it from your mobile yourself. And the reason to do this is TikTok knows if it's posted through an API and it just assumes like you would that it's posted by a bot and it's just botted content especially in the age of AI and it gives it a very little chance to do well. If you post it from your phone it assumes a human's posting it but the most important thing is by posting it as a draft you can add sound which we all know is a huge boost to the algorithm on TikTok and it allows you to add sound to your slideshow so So every single slideshow, I pick the sound.

11:02Oliver Henry:The description's already created from Larry. So I just get a notification to my phone saying your post is ready from TikTok. Larry also texts me that he's just posted it. And then I just add a sound and press post. So I'm doing that each time. But at this point, I was still flicking through the slides myself, making sure they're okay. But this one did very well. 137 ,000 views. so then we knew that this is the format this kind of look we looked we picked an image model that changed uh we picked an image model that matched what we were showing in our app and then we went back to our previous winner the difference between 500 and 5 000 taste so remember he has access to all of my tiktok analytics so he went back and he found this video here with 6 ,000 views.

11:55Oliver Henry:And he was like, right now we found the winning image formula. Let's go back to the previous winning hook. Sorry. I have a question. Like when you say he's gone and found this or something has happened, is he texting you? Is he using, you know, telegram? Do you have mission control? Like how do you, how, how are you communicating with them? So I don't really believe in the mission control stuff or multi-agent. I just have Larry as the one agent that I text through WhatsApp and we just message like you would an employee. So nothing fancy. Larry, what are you generating today? Take a look back through the previous winners.

12:35Oliver Henry:This was back then. It's all automated in the Larry skill now that he will every now and then go look at your TikTok analytics and find out what the winners were. But this was the stage of building it and building the system, finding out what worked. So it was still very much me saying, hey, go look at the TikTok analytics. Some people say one of the first things you should do when you're installing your OpenClaw is to create a mission control. Vibe code a mission control, vibe code like a Kanban board to kind of see how your AI employee is moving and progressing through your project. But you don't think that's the case?

13:19Oliver Henry:No, I don't think that's the case. I think if that was necessary, it would have been built into OpenCrawl by default. I think the way OpenCrawl works and the way the creator intends is to just have one agent and spin up sub-agents when you want to keep using your main agent. So if I know there's going to be a task that's going to take Larry a while, such as creating an app, I'll tell him to explain it to a sub-agent so then I can keep using him for other tasks such as talking to, maybe even building another product, talking to about my app analytics, how we can improve the onboarding and brainstorming.

13:55Oliver Henry:So I really use Larry to brainstorm and then he creates sub-agents to do most of the tasks. Cool. By doing that, Larry has all the context that he can then pass to the sub-agent as well. So he'll have the context of all the brainstorming and he can feed that to the sub-agent. So we get another miss. the difference between$500 and$5 ,000 taste, this hits 3 ,000. But then this is where I started to get really excited. And in three videos, we get another banger of 170 ,000 views. And it was, I showed my mom what AI thinks our living room could be. And this is where the next section of Larry comes in because we had 300 ,000 views within a day or two days, I believe it was.

14:50Oliver Henry:But the conversions to the app were just not there. And this is the next stage of Larry's growth is we are now knowing how to generate views, but we are not getting high conversions to our app. We're not getting downloads. We're not getting paying users, which is obviously the key point of all this. so we had to look into what was wrong. I sent Larry, go find out what's wrong, and it was our CTA. So our call to action slide is our last slide. And on this one, you can instantly find out why no one's downloaded this app. She's redecorating now snugly. It doesn't say anything. I obviously didn't check this one, or I thought it might work.

15:36Oliver Henry:So no one downloaded the app, no one bought. so that is when I thought right to be clear the app is called snuggly right that app is called see even you had to ask the question so it's a very bad cta the app is called snuggly and that's actually what we we put in now or we feed that in directly to users so they know it's an app and what it does it's really funny though it's actually hilarious because it's like she's redecorating now and then it's just snuggly it's like your poor mom you know she's just she's just she's redecorating and snuggly you know that's where we're at that's where mom's at today it's the most ai slide you've ever seen and you can imagine you can see why it didn't convert at all so then we we realized like okay if we're getting low views the cta is bad uh if we're sorry if we're getting low views the hook is bad if we're getting low views and low conversions to the app the cta is bad but it is possible to have low views and a high percentage of them download the app that day so then we know the cta is probably good but the hook was bad and now Larry is starting to use all of this information to learn but then there's a whole new challenge of when users are on the app they're not paying so we'll get on to that but then that is the last section of Larry and the Larry skill.

17:07Oliver Henry:What I want to say is the Larry skill you shouldn't think of it as just TikTok automation or content creation you can you don't have to do slides you You can plug and play whatever content you want. So you can use video generation and plug that in. The Larry funnel is really the full loop of having your, it's the Larry loop basically of having your TikTok analytics, the content creation, feed the analytics back into the content creation until you get a winner and then also your end goal. So mine is obviously app downloads. So I feed my app metrics back into the top of the funnel so he can iterate on that.

17:47Oliver Henry:But you can be selling a product, you can be getting traction to your website, and it's all just the metrics that you're feeding back into the top of the funnel so your agent can understand, okay, we're getting people to the website but they're not going to where we want. Or we're getting people to the website and they're not paying. And you can do this in as many ways as you want. The funnel is, the Larry Loop is more the iteration rather than it is just the content creation. It's a fuller picture. So then we get, we have quite a good week here, all over 10K, some getting 150K. This one got 400 ,000 and taught us another lesson that the images don't have to be perfect.

18:28Oliver Henry:So this is the exact moment I just let Larry crack on himself because I remember this well. He posted this and it was late at night. I was literally just getting into bed and he said, the post is ready. And I flamed at him like I was in a bad mood I was like why have you put the text to the top we spent ages deciding to put the text in the middle the oven disappears so in the images I said look I'm posting this anyway but this is no good and that was my last message I sent to him and then I wake up it's off it's on hundreds of thousands of views and it's our best performer to this day and you can see he doesn't ever put the text back up um back up to the top to where it was but what we learned is boomers love to point out the mistakes so where's the hob gone how are we going to cook our food and then that's where's the cooker guess i'll be air frying everything then and i was like right this is just helping even more to drive conversions and then on the last slide you can see then on the last side you can see the cta is now the snuggly app helped me finally convinced her to get the kitchen done so there's a direct call to action that they know it's the snuggly app now it's amazing because the boomers think that they're poking fun at you yeah do they know they're helping the content just get more and more viral and the funnier layer to that is i don't even check that look you see my activity i don't even check it i just all i'm doing is going into it and to find out why that video done so well and try and feed that back to Larry.

20:12Oliver Henry:But at this point, that is just when I let him go nuts and just create his own content. I let him loose. You let him loose because you thought that his content was subpar. It turns out to be the best performing content you've ever posted in your life. Yeah. And so now he's the boss. He becomes the boss. And this is what I'm trying to tell people. it is an iterative thing so a lot of people try the Larry skill and they tell me it didn't work I got 700 views I was like that's your first post I got 700 views on my first post you need to keep iterating the content you have to spend the time letting it learn find out what's best and honestly don't mark the work too much make it look how you want like I obviously perfected the text and make the text look correct and readable.

21:07Oliver Henry:But this post proved that they actually know best. They've got all the metrics they need to create the perfect content. Just let them go nuts on it and figure out why. And then you can see here, it starts working extremely well, like 109 ,000, 75 ,000. He has a miss, 25, 76, 200, 130. But this is where it gets so interesting. So obviously the landlord hook was our highest performer and it's our constant high performer. But you can see here it only gets 2 ,000 views. So we do mum and then mum, 100 ,000, 75 ,000. Then we do landlord again and it's only on 7 ,000. Okay, back to mum, 25 ,000. And then landlord, 76 ,000.

21:58So okay, gives him a bit of a boost.

22:02Oliver Henry:Nan, 200 ,000, which is important. This gets 200 ,000. Then I showed my landlord again, 132. So now you can see that we're just switching between the winners and he's iterating the content that's doing well. then at the top you can see that landlord switches to only 8 000 we go back to nan 70 000 landlord again only 7 000 then again 4 000 post nan again 300 000 so here he saw this and saw that landlord is not hitting the percentages it was and it's only hit one video in five posts and Now you can see he's not posted it again. We've actually tried new content today. I've been staring at the same boring kitchen for three years.

22:56Oliver Henry:He's obviously seen that we're not hitting the hundreds of thousands of views in the last four videos. Now he is automating this content and changing it himself. We've gone back to the kitchen but put a new hook. I think this one's only just been uploaded five hours ago. I don't think it's a fair representation yet. This one could still grow. but it's all about learning because obviously the algorithm changes it's not just going to keep pumping the same winning content all the time so it will start failing eventually again but it's all about taking your opportunities when you are getting these when you are getting these high converting videos or high performing videos to try and maximize it back into the app so when you say he's coming up with these ideas on his own now like for example right now like he kind of deviated away from what what you know you initially agreed upon is he did you tell him like hey go and look at other accounts or specific formats like what basically what what was your conversation like with him such that he has become independent and he seems to be coming up with new hooks that seem to be, you would think are somewhat validated.

24:15Oliver Henry:Yeah, so he's going back to his research to see what was working. But recently where we haven't been hitting the high converting videos, I've actually done a bit of manual brainstorming with him today. And I could go into this with you. Let me just try and catch up to where we are. So he's got my analytics. I also sent him some screenshots of things and he got it wrong. but he thought he sent 37 drafts but it was only 37 new notifications for TikTok. Anyway, I asked him why he's chosen some hooks that he's generated because they didn't sound very good to me. So you can see here, he goes through, here are my hooks based on the winning formula, a family member roast plus a specific insult plus showed them AI.

25:02Oliver Henry:So then he explains himself of these are working these were getting views these are proven forms and then i've said i don't think that looks like hooks are actually the best ones i think there could be ones or what ai thinks it could look like ones are so he goes you're right looking at the data again the winners are aren't insults they're reveals and then he explains himself 200 000 views this one got 109 this one I've got 419. And then he realizes the hook is curiosity and AI. And then I'm just like, it gives me some things. To be honest, I didn't even read them. I just saw the numbers were pretty much the same.

25:45Oliver Henry:And I said, just generate one of each. And then tomorrow we'll do one of each one again. So now he's set up a cron job that tomorrow he's going to post this one, this one, and this one, then this one, two, seven, and 10. And then three, eight, and 11. And again, I just trust him with that. We based it off actual analytics that he's getting from TikTok. But we did a whole brainstorm of going into what's driving revenue, what's actually getting revenue. And the most interesting thing he's done recently, I can go back to my analytics. He has completely rewritten my onboarding because he has the analytics from my app.

26:32Oliver Henry:And you can see here, it's massively helped. This got published two days ago. And this is the most new users I've had in a day for a long, long time. So you can see that one day, one day, 22 hours, 10 hours. This one was one hour ago. And the new subs are just coming in. Unfortunately, there's high churn. So people are subscribing and then unsubscribing. That's a whole issue in itself. And if you've built that before, you'll understand that. but it's incredible that as I said it's not just the TikTok creation it's actually the driving driving to the app and I've given this all away for free so this is how a lot of people probably know about me I wrote a viral article because I hate marketing I figured lots of other builders hate marketing it was on my x feed all the time how people don't want to do it etc so I was like right I'm going to free everyone from doing this this is the exact playbook and I wrote the playbook and then I just started learning about skills and how skills are just gonna in my opinion change how we know sass all together so I created the free Larry skill you can install it it gives your agent everything you need to install it that's on larrybrain.com and it's called the Larry marketing skill but how skills are going is is just incredible open claw really feels like when the pc first came into the home and a select few power users were using it and then it got picked up by everyone everyone realized how powerful these things can be how much use they can have and that is where open claw is people are only just discovering the capabilities of it and skills are infinitely powerful because they're not just a black box so anything that you download from Larry Brain you own that thing so I released another skill on there which was to prove that SaaS products no longer have to be hosted in the cloud they don't they no longer have to be hosted on a domain owned by someone else so I made a super x alternative I like the super x product i just used it as a proof of concept that you can build sas products as full skills now you no longer have to pay for hosting you no longer have to pay for a domain you no longer have to pay for storage handle authentication you can download products locally and the whole oh look at what i built local host meme has come true because you can host this locally because open claw is a server on your home machine and it's very important to remember that these skills aren't a black box.

29:15So when I created this excellent skill, I got told that the, um,

29:22Oliver Henry:I got told that the colorway was terrible and they hate it. I was like, well, just ask your agent to change it then. Like you own, you own it. It knows everything about this skill. It's all in the skill MD file. You no longer have to be at the mercy of the developer. If you don't like something, if you don't like the UI, uh, Larry, if you don't like the image generation and what video if you don't use the same back end for the app i'd use then plug in your own stuff it's a skill it just teaches your agent the best way to think about it is when neo gets plugged into the matrix and he wakes up and he knows kung fu that's exactly what a skill is you give the agent the context and then they have it and you let it rip so is your vision for larry to remain as a marketing assistant?

30:10So for example, if you decided like, hey, I actually think I need help with conversion rate optimization. I need help with brand design. I need help with product design. Does it make sense to create a new instance or are you then going to use Larry as both a marketing assistant and a product assistant?

30:32Oliver Henry:So Larry is now my right-hand man. so he has the context of everything so of course I built Larry Brain with Larry's help he has the full context of that and the best thing that we've been doing is where we've been building them as skills he can one revert back to the skill file but also we've been creating our memory files for each of our of our projects so he has a Larry Brain memory file he has a Larry marketing memory file and everything we've been doing he can revert back to so if he ever loses context i'm backing up these files if he ever breaks dies if i ever want to move to a different machine i have these files that i can just move and plug into a new computer i can give back to him or if he loses context just say look go look at these files read through it and learn it again and then he's back in the game don't even don't even mention larry dying like don't even don't even put that be so sad juju out in the in the world come on that's that's just i don't need that Come on.

31:33Oliver Henry:He looks old, but I don't know how well that shows, but the fans have been white for so long that the LEDs are dying and they go in this pinky-purply color. And yeah, so that's how old the PC is. The lights have literally been on for so long that they're losing their color. Are you using any local models? Talk us through what models you're using. There's a lot of debate now around Opus 4.6, chat gpt i think launched a new one what is it five four five three so i i was so close to move into open ai the other day but their their useful model their useful plan that i'll find useful is 200 pounds a month uh the one before that is 20 and that's a huge leap if you're not going to find use and you just want somewhere in the middle ground i use um opus i use claude max plan and I just use the£90 a month plan because I don't need the full one for£200.

32:35Oliver Henry:I do slightly more than the non-pro plan so it fits perfectly for me and I think that's what lets OpenAI down. I've not tried any of these edge case models like Kimmy or something like that just because, to be honest, not that I don't trust them, I just don't think they've had enough real world use. I'd rather go with the market leader in things like AI because let's be honest, Anthropic, OpenAI are the cutting edge. So I'm going to stay there and trust they know what they're doing. New benchmarks coming from OpenAI suggest 5.4 is a little bit better than 4.6, but tough to say. I think for most people, what they should do is just pick, like get started.