Making $$$ with OpenClaw

0:00How can you make money from OpenClaw? Like, how can you spin up these OpenClaw instances, these sub-agents, these digital employees that can go out and make you money while you sleep? Is it even possible? Well, in today's episode, I brought on Nick and he shows a tactical tutorial for how to spin up multiple OpenClaw machines in a virtual instance. how you can be automating tasks on Upwork and these boring business automations and how you can actually make money from OpenClaw. If this doesn't get your creative juices flowing for the future of SaaS, how people are going to make money and how to actually use OpenClaw from not just a cute little use cases, but actually money making opportunities, then I don't know what will.

0:47I had such a good chat with Nick. It got my creative juices flowing. I think it will yours too. And this is, I think, one of Nick's first podcasts. So give him a like and comment to juice him up because he shared that sauce.

1:09I couldn't be more excited to have Nick on the pod. He's one of my go-to people when I have questions about OpenClaw. Nick, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? Yeah, people are going to learn that OpenClaw is more than just a personal assistant. You can actually deploy this into businesses. You could drive actual business outcomes, generate revenue off of OpenClaw as an opportunity. And yeah, we're seeing it on X, like people who are deploying OpenClaw for kind of executives or individuals who are super busy. They're making thousands of dollars, you know, setting OpenClaw up, getting it up and running for these people and managing it for them.

1:52So I think there's a huge opportunity here. And yeah, just excited to jump in. Cool. And before we get going, I need you to make a commitment to me and to the person listening or watching, which is I need you not to hold back any sauce. I don't want to know just about the opportunity. I want to know how are people doing it tactically. And by the end of this episode, what I want is for people to take away. Like, I want people to know how they can actually make a dollar from this. And is that a commitment, Nick, that you are willing to make to us? Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm not going to hold back anything.

2:28I've, in fact, I think OpenClaw is a tool that allows us to be able to do the things that we have always been able to make money from, like automation with AI, but do it even better. And I'm going to show you how to get it all set up so you can do that and the wedge to get going. So let's do it. Yeah. So I guess jumping right in, as far as like getting set up with OpenClaw, you can see here, you know, this is Orgo. This is our startup. you don't have to use Orgo to get started with OpenClaw. Just full disclaimer, this is what I'm using. And what I'm going to do is I have a project here. You can see I have a couple projects.

3:07And I have Greg, I set you up a project. I hope you enjoy your five computers. And so you can imagine, Greg, let's say you're a business owner and you have a busy life. You got all the podcasts going on. You have all these businesses you're running, the agency, the idea browser, all this stuff. And you need you need help automating some stuff. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in, I'm scrappy Nick, I'm going to come in and I'm going to help automate some things in your in your business in your life. You know, as a busy executive, and I'm going to get you set up with open clause. So when you open up a computer here, you can see I have it open.

3:48This is the cloud bot one computer I made for you. If I actually just type in open claw tui this will open up open claw in the terminal and you can see i i actually already started like hey i'm greg eisenberg and it's all ready to get set up and so actually what i could do is um i could invite you to this project and then you'd be able to do this as well like in your terminal you'd be able to spin this up and now you're talking to open claw so um super easy get set up once again you don't have to use orgo you could use whatever you want you could use. I know Manus just dropped their own version of like one click deployment OpenClaw.

4:27Also, Kimmy launched their version as well. X is down right now. So we can't actually pull it up on Twitter or anything, but Kimmy launched their version. And so there's all these options as far as getting started. You could use a Mac mini, whatever. So the key here, Greg, with OpenClaw and actually creating money from it is to have the wedge to know what is the specific use case in a person's business that we're going to automate like first, because for when you see open call on Twitter, it's very much a personal assistant. It's exciting. It's fun. But all the demos that go viral, including me, I get it.

5:05I'm guilty of this too. All the demos that go viral are a little bit, you know, kind of toyish. They're a little flashy. But the real power is in finding the thing that actually drives business outcomes, saves time for a business, finding that and building the automation around that. So I have something running here. This is my open claw looking up products for a business that I deployed for. This is a promotional distributorship. And what this is doing is it's looking up products and actually downloading all the product information and then like parsing all that information. There's all these reports it needs to download and then uploading that into a Zoho CRM.

5:54Um, so it can essentially, you know, create a central source of truth for this client. So this is a perfect example here of like actually creating a agent that open claw deploys to be able to automate something end to end. So just to recap, are we all good so far? Yeah. So a few things I just want to talk about. So one thing is when you showed that Orgo screen, you had like five machines running. So what's interesting is I've got my Mac mini going. I've got one instance. So using something like this is cool because you can have multiple instances going right and you can see them all in one screen in one view so that's really cool that that was sort of an aha moment for me yeah absolutely yeah it's like everyone you know as far as where you deploy your your main open you can see here i like i starred the main one uh and so that's like you could have that wherever but what people don't realize is open claw can spawn sub agents and i think this is going to be huge for people who start like right right now we're at the phase of having one open claw it's going to happen quickly you're already seeing on it on twitter memes about like oh what if you have a 10 mac minis or all the mac studios are being bought out so this is happening fast or you're going to want 10 open claws you know 100 open claws right now you can have one open claw and just have it spawn up to, I think, eight subagents.

7:28And each subagent could have its own computer. And you could do this, like, this is why, this is like kind of where Orgo shines is you can spin up multiple computers for each individual subagent of your OpenClaw. And in this case here, I had it looking on Upwork for actual things that we could automate with OpenClaw. This is like a little hack here as far as like, well, I want to make money with OpenClaw. Well, oh, I don't know any business that I can reach out to that could automate stuff for a great place to start is Upwork because there's jobs on Upwork that are literally posted. They're asking you, they're like, I want to pay$500 ,000,$1 ,500,$3 ,000,$20 ,000 for this AI workflow.

8:07And you can, I spawned sub, it went viral on Twitter. I spawned sub agents to go find all these jobs and then build out little demos for each of them. And then we picked the best one and okay, let's apply for that proposal with that. So that's a little tidbit there on on Upwork and all of that. So which is just kind of hilarious because I mean Upwork, you know, is designed for human beings to complete work, right? It's not designed for machines, let alone multiple machines to complete work. But I mean, as long as the quality of work is good, you know, customers can be happy, right? Yeah. And I think like, it's good to, you know, it's good to treat it as a starting point.

8:50If you can save time preparing a proposal for a job on Upwork, it's like, what is that worth? And if you could do just 100x volume, what is that worth? So there's a couple things on that of the parallelization of work with OpenClaw. So there's like, could you have 10 OpenClaws working on a given task? And it breaks up that tasks into 10 subtasks. And so each open claw does one of those subtasks. That's one way of having parallelization. But another way is to have 10 open claws working on the same task, just 10 different instances of it. And that was kind of like what I was doing here. It's, you know, four different instances of the one open claw, you know, or four different open claws doing the same thing of looking up different jobs on Upwork that they could apply to.

9:38So that's kind of an interesting topic there um but yeah so like as far as open claw goes it's it's it's uh a huge opportunity i just want to like throw this in here andreason horowitz talks about computer use agents i view open claw as a computer use agent you know you're giving an agent a computer and it's able to do it's able to use that computer it's like it's a computer use agent but that's half the story the other half of the story is for it to be able to like click around actually operate a graphical user interface on like legacy softwares and systems. And so you can imagine like, you know, in here, this automation I built, this is navigating a legacy platform for this client that doesn't have any clean APIs, and it's able to click in, download reports, and actually, you know, be the universal API to be able to solve problems that you couldn't previously solve without computer use agents.

10:32So I think there's a huge opportunity here. And Andreessen Horwitz, they talk about it and they say, we believe that to properly verticalize computer use agents and assist companies in adopting it will be a major area of exploration for startups. And this is like, to me, this screams OpenClaw. Can you create a vertical use case for OpenClaw for a business and actually assist that company in adopting it? I think that's the huge opportunity here um so going back to this like workspace we have set up for you um you know with with with all the people setting up open claw you could set it up as easy as you know i invite greg to this workspace i create him a new computer we could just do it now open claw too i select how much ram let's do let's do eight gigs launch that open that up and then all we need now to get you set up is to get the um let me get the the curl command for open claw i copy that from their website and then as this computer loads we'll be able to then literally just paste it into the terminal and once i see the interface pop up boom okay so now i'm gonna hit enter and now we're off to the races installing open claw so like it's as easy as that and i think there's this this in and of itself is like a workspace where you can invite people and get them set up with open claw or clawed code i think this is like a huge a huge opportunity as well of like just there are executives right now that are like reaching out to me uh like law firms insurance companies they're like can you can i just like pay you to teach me how to use this stuff so that's its own whole thing as well as far as like if you're savvy enough to even know how to install open claw and get it set up in the first place um i just think there's a huge opportunity around like just helping executives businesses adopt it um so yeah you can see it's as easy as this to get set up and then as far as like what specific things can we automate with OpenClaw, it takes a little bit of a design thinking approach.

12:53So when you go into a business, let's say you find a project on Upwork and you want to automate that with OpenClaw. Let's say you go into a business and you're talking to the executive, the decision maker, and it's clear that they have things that need to be automated. Well, as far as design thinking goes, you need to have a clear way of first mapping all the different possibilities. You can see here, this is something I did in the past of like, there's all these different things that you could automate and you want to map them off two very simple metrics. What is the value that we can create by automating this thing?

13:28And what's the relative effort cost and time? And so we ultimately want to start with, okay, we want to automate things with open claw that are high value and low effort cost and time. And that's like your, your, your low-hanging fruit um and so you start there and so like for for this client this was like that this was that this was like okay we're looking at products on this website we're downloading them we're parsing all the information uh that's the low-hanging fruit so start with the design thinking approach of like okay simplest fastest to deploy and then you need to map out like the systems design around how like how is this thing going to be automated, right?

14:10So for this client, she's like, okay, I send an email to a client of hers, right? She sends an email to a client and she has a presentation link with all these products. Okay. And all those products, she needs to look all of them up and get all the information on them and then upload them into Zoho. So then your next step after identifying the opportunity is to literally like map this out. I use Figma, you can use whatever, but map out the actual workflow process of like, okay, step one, step two, step three, what is this automation going to look like tip to tail so that we can do the whole thing?

14:47Because with open call and computer use that now is now you can do that. You can do, you could do things from tip to tail. It's not like, you know, it used to be where you'd have to like go into a website and click a button and then it'd be able to do some 50 % of the whole thing, but then you'd have to copy that and paste that somewhere else and do it on your own. Like we can do it tip to tail. So quick recap, install OpenClaw into a computer, identify the low-hanging fruit opportunities, the highest value opportunities, and then begin to map out what that even looks like to begin with. Couldn't you use OpenClaw to actually do some of the prioritization on the automations?

15:35You as a human being did the Figma, but couldn't you actually just use the OpenClaw or CloudCode or something like that to help you with that? For example, if you go back to the Figma, you could walk into a business and basically say, hey, I want to figure out what we can automate here. And you do customer interviews with different people on the team. You record those customer interviews, you get the transcripts, you upload the transcripts, and then you say, hey, based on that, then you can actually say, you give this as a reference image. Basically say, hey, I want to figure out which automation opportunities have the highest amount of value, lowest amount of effort, cost, and time.

16:23Give me the top three, and then create Figma. And I think there's a Figma MCP even that you can use, and you can say, hey, can you map this thing out based on these customer transcripts? Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely. yeah no that's that's that's the way to do it like i whenever i do any kind of call with a client or cut like potential customer oh my gosh gemini for uh for google meet is amazing you just have it take take all the notes and then actually that's that's how i even got because i don't know about i don't know about you greg but sometimes when you're in these calls you kind of you know this this industry you know you're in a new industry you're helping this customer You don't understand their domain expertise, the lingo.

17:09And so you got to go back and like, okay, like what was it that they said? And so have the Granola or Gemini notes or whatever, and then literally ask it to like, okay, what's the step-by-step workflow? And then map it out. It just helps me to map it out visually. But you could literally ask it. Yeah, like you said, based on this transcript, what is the automation workflow look like? Yeah. And if you don't want to use Figma, you can also even say, you know, do output in mermaid code. And then you can use the mermaid code and insert that into an Excalibur or a TL draw or something like that. So a little pro tip there.

17:51Nice, nice. Yeah, yeah. And the Figma MCP is pretty cool too. Yeah, definitely check that out. So yeah, so then once you figure out what the workflow is, right, this is where like, you have to actually be able to know, okay, how much can I really ask? How much can I just say to OpenClaw right now, hey, build this thing and you just describe the workflow versus genuinely using something like CloudCode to build out what that workflow would look like with Python, APIs, a genuine automation pipeline and process that your open claw can actually just trigger upon whenever it's like contextually relevant.

18:39So for instance, this whole pipeline here of like going to these websites, looking at this product information, downloading the information, parsing it, uploading it to Zoho. The trigger of all of that is, you know, the open claw being CC'd in an email and it's seeing that email, it has a link that is relevant for this type of workflow to be triggered. So that is like the thing, that's like the listening event that OpenClaw can do with like a cron job that it sets up to just like, okay, listen for this trigger. And then once that trigger starts, it can then activate the whole Python script, workflow automation, everything that you would need downstream of that.

19:18So you're not relying too much on OpenClaw's like abilities in and of itself. You're more so creating specialized AI workers underneath the open claw that it can call individually, if that makes sense. You know, you talked earlier about sub-agents. I think a lot of people are confused about what is a sub-agent versus a task and stuff like that. Can you just clearly explain that? Yeah. So sub-agents are, there's a couple ways to view them, right? So like in the context of because they're the reason I say there's a couple ways to view them is because there's a couple ways of using them. So in the context of like OpenClaw, you can ask it to spin up five research sub agents that all go and research some given task.

20:07And like I said earlier, you could have it parallelize that task across, you know, splitting it up across each sub agent or having each sub agent actually go and do the same task, you know, across five different instances. But the next thing around sub agents is that you can actually, like you said, maybe think of them in terms of skills. So if you're familiar with anthropic skills, you can have like these specialized instructions and rules along with actual code that you can provide to your agent for it to be able to go and do a given task. And this is really nice because it gives you a very more powerful general purpose agent that can do many of your specific nuanced tasks across various domains.

20:57but the thing is it's like i want my general agent to be freed up and uh to more so just be the orchestrator and what if the the general agent this one right the the one i have start here can just call a sub agent like worker number four here to do a given skill that you have created so if your skill is that it goes on twitter and finds the most viral ideas and it bookmarks them rather than having your main agent do that. And now you can't talk to your main agent for the next 20 minutes because it's working on that. Can it call that skill into a sub agent and have the sub agent do that? That I think is where things get really interesting.

21:39And in terms of the context of like deploying open clause for businesses, I would think of everything that you have in terms of an AI automation opportunity around workflows, skills, tasks, et cetera. I would actually just create that as its own specific sub-agent with its own skill that your open claw could then call. Does that make sense? It does. It does. Nice. I think the basic idea is in layman's terms, it's as soon as you have your open claw instance do something, they're busy. It's like they've got a mug of hot coffee. And your job is you want to leverage this as much as possible. So you don't want your agent to hold a hot coffee.

22:35So if you ask it to move this desk into this area, it says, no, I'm holding a cup of hot coffee. I can't do that. So what sub-agents do is it basically creates leverage for your open claw. and it basically says, okay, you're going to create a set of sub-agents who are going to be good at XYZ thing. And that way it frees up your main agent to, as you say, orchestrate, to basically be the manager of the sub-agents. And what that can mean is looking at quality of work. It can mean checking for certain things and stuff like that. Exactly. Exactly. I think that's going to be huge. When you start working with these businesses and customers who want things to be automated, once you show them what's possible, their eyes light up.

23:33They get all these ideas themselves. These are high agency people. They come up with creative ideas that they want to start implementing. And then what you realize is there's just a huge a huge list of things that can be automated and they're excited about that. And, and so actually like the, the ability to, okay, first solve a vertical specific workflow for, for a customer and then that opening up their mind. And then them being like, Oh, I wonder if I could, could I text this thing? And it does this, this is kind of where like the whole open claw moment is really powerful. It's like, it's, it's the, it's the, it's the assistant-like capability.

24:11It's the, you know, I have it here. It's like a lot of people might get confused about why is it that OpenClaw is so special? It's the ability that has its own computer. It's running 24-7. You can text it and you can schedule tasks. And really, if we just removed OpenClaw from this card here and you just called this a really good employee, it would just makes sense to be like oh works 24 7 can code can schedule tasks i can text it and they have their own computer um so i think that's like kind of why open call is exciting for a lot of people and if it's not you know if some people think it's it's overhyped you have to kind of look at the whole picture i think and and then you're able to really gauge it so i i'm certainly bought in on this on this idea that you know it potentially it could be be a really good employee i think there's also cases where people aren't setting up their open claw in the right way where it ends up being a bad employee.

25:09And I think that's sort of like the issue with that is sometimes you have a bad employee because the manager, the coach essentially is not doing a good job at giving the right context at the right time. So I think, do you have any tips and tricks around besides spitting up sub agents, how could people listening to this, if they want to go after this opportunity of essentially verticalize open claws and automating some of these flows, how could people actually take their open claw from a bad employee to a good employee? Yeah, I think it comes down to, maybe we should walk through. So I know you have, I was actually looking at this.

25:59So Idea Browser. So for everyone, if you don't know, Greg has this amazing product, Idea Browser. And I love this trend, this idea today. TikTok trend tool that catches viral waves before they peak. So I was actually looking at this this morning. I was like, wow, this is actually something that you can maybe turn into a skill for an open claw to create a specialized skill around this. So let's just do a live. Let's see. I genuinely don't know. How far can we get? Can we build this out now? Let's see if I copy all of that. And now I'm here in the open claw that we set up for you. And you can see it just got set up.

26:38I just told it, hey, I'm Greg Eisenberg. So we're getting started. That's it. And let's just say I want to build a specialized skill to be able to do the following. and I'm just going to paste that entire idea browser idea. And I'm going to ask it as far as like creating these automations, creating workflows or doing anything with OpenClaw. My number one tip is always ask it to ask you questions. So what do you need from me to be able to build this out? Let's create a plan. And so a lot of people need to remember OpenClaw is like almost a little bit of a wrapper around like clawed code in a way.

27:27So let's see. Okay, cool. This is a big vision, Greg. I like it. Let's break down a realistic build as an OpenClaw skill. So now it's saying, okay, I need data access. I need the scope. I need the niche focus that'll shape what we build a lean skill. So the first thing that we can maybe do is here in like Orgo, we have this playground mode and you can ask the playground agent here to do things in this computer, in this computer environment. So one thing I might test first is like, can we get this agent to even just spin up TikTok and just scroll TikTok and identify what is on the for you page TikTok.

28:16So let's like maybe start there. Does that sound good? Yeah, absolutely. Let's do that. Open Firefox. Go to TikTok. Scroll. I'm going to say scroll TikTok looking for what the most common videos are on the for you page. Give me a summary. so let's see how it's able to do this so this is using our our playground mode and boom opens up firefox it's going to go to tiktok and for those listening i'm just going to talk through a little bit about what this agent in our our playground is doing it's it's visually interacting with the screen It's clicking into Firefox. It's opening up the browser. Now it's typing in TikTok.com.

29:11It's going there.

29:16And let's see. This is always such a magical experience. Just watching a computer navigate the web like a human being. It's amazing. You know, this is... Yeah, there it goes. It's on the homepage. and now it's gonna it's gonna actually scroll tiktok it's gonna probably take a screenshot of this get the context of based off that screenshot of what the video is about you could even see it has hashtags movie hashtag for you page so it's going to be able to infer a lot of things boom it scrolls it scrolls it gets a pop-up it's going to close out the pop-up um but on your point greg Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic he just had a podcast with Dwarkesh and it came out a couple days ago and you know what's really interesting what he said in that podcast he said this idea of his around this data center full of brilliant scientists and Nobel Prize winners essentially his concept of what AGI will be like he says the constraint to getting there is computer use agents.

30:31The ability to have an AI that can operate a computer like you and I can, but better, you know, interact with the visual interface, also be able to do things under the hood, kind of like clawed code. This is the constraint, he said. And I mean, it makes perfect sense if it can do anything that you and I can do on a computer. That seems like it can go pretty far. Open claw is like a chat GPT moment, I think for this kind of idea of computer use. And as far as like building these computer use agents out, you can see this is clearly working. So we know this is possible. You can build, a lot of people might get confused with Orgo when they come to our site, they see computers for agents.

31:16And like, what does that mean? Well, I think they get it now. It's like, okay, you want your CloudBot to have its own computer. But also we provide, and I'll show this, we provide the doc in our docs like we're actually provide the programmatic apis so you can create custom computer use agents that um do a given task very well so you can bring any model you can get kimmy 2.5 is like the super cheap um you know chinese model it's very good at computer use and you can give it the ability to click drag scroll type in the keyboard spin up a computer and you can create specialized, really fast performance, low cost computer use agents using our docs.