My OpenClaw setup that finally works (Complete Walkthrough)

0:00Jensen Wong said just the other day that every company needs an open claw strategy. I mean, he's calling it the new computer. But how do you actually wire this thing up so it holds up in the real world? So I sat down with my friend Moritz and we went through the exact setup that takes you from install to production. This is a super tactical saucy episode. The clearest way to understand all these concepts. How to structure open claw versus clawed co-work. How to set up personalization so it sounds like you. How to make memory actually persist and improve over time. How to configure models and fallbacks so it stays reliable.

0:38How to run heartbeat.md so nothing breaks in the background. How to lock down security so you can trust it with your business. And then what are different use cases? Like how do I use this thing to come up with ideas for me and create content that doesn't look like AI slop? This is the most comprehensive one hour masterclass on how to go from I want to install OpenClaw to I've got this thing running and it's a digital employee that's working for me.

1:15Moritz Kram on the Startup Ideas pod. Moritz, by the end of this episode, what are people going to get out of it? so if you're someone that has heard about open claw maybe you even tried setting it up but didn't see the value and it didn't work very well for you by the end of this episode you will have a 10-step guide to 10x your open claw and make it actually useful you learn how to set it up the right way how to tweak it and understand how it works under the hood so that it becomes basically like a superhuman employee. And at the end, I will also share some of the top use cases and systems I have built with my OpenClone.

1:57So basically how people are using it, how you're using it in the wild. I know you're out there, you've got these digital employees doing things. You're going to show us how to use it. You're going to explain these concepts clearly. You're going to take people through all of it. Moritz, you're an absolute angel. Let's get right into it. All right. Awesome. So I thought to start this out, let's just go over the basics and talk about first what even is OpenClaw for people that may have not heard about it. basically OpenClaw is an agent a personal agent that can do things for you it remembers things and gets better over time it's proactive and it can actually automate things for you it also has access to built-in functionalities tools and skills and you can also bring it into any chat tool basically so it's quite flexible in that sense and so it's kind of the first really personal agent that exists and also currently I would say it's the closest to what we have of a truly autonomous agent so yeah now you might be asking okay but how is it actually different from chat GPT and cloud code, right?

3:27So in chat GPT, basically, if you think of this as you communicating with with chat GPT, what's always first thing, first thing you'll notice is like, it's living in the cloud, right? So you're kind of always communicating with this thing in the cloud, this intelligence in the cloud. Now, ChatGPT does have like things built into it that they've built into it over time. In the beginning, it was kind of just this like just chat intelligence thing. And then they've added memory over time. They've added some tool use over time, like web search and so on. But yeah, you can like fundamentally think of ChatGPT as just just a chat, Right.

4:14Okay. So what was kind of this like next paradigm shift that was, that was when CloudCode came out. And the fundamental difference between CloudCode and ChatGPT is that CloudCode is living locally on your machine. That's the main difference there. Right. And it also has memory in a sense, although it's actually more about context, managing your context. It also has tools, although I would say the tools are a bit more powerful because they're more flexible and you can kind of manage which tools it has access to better. And then the fundamental difference is that it can really write and read files locally.

5:05And so the first big use case that came out of this was that it's really useful for coding. That's why it's called Cloud Code. Because when you're coding, you usually have a huge folder of files locally on your machine. And if you want to do that in the cloud, it's super, super cumbersome. So like you basically need to like switch, upload those files all the time, switch around, copy and paste. And so this made it really useful for coding. And over time, I think people like started realizing that there are all of these other cool use cases too, like marketing. And that's kind of like starting to become more of a hot topic now, I'd say.

5:57Okay, so now what is then actually this next stage, which is OpenClaw? Like how is OpenClaw actually different from CloudCode? I would say one of the main differences is that the communication layer is different. Like you can communicate with your OpenClaw through these apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, and so on. So they're very open about that. You can bring it into any of your chat applications, whereas with CloudCode and the other tools, you're locked into that ecosystem, right? They also, like, just like CloudCode, it also has memory and context. It also has tools, although there are also more built-in tools than CloudCode, I'd say.

6:49It also has this read-write files locally capability. And then one more thing that is like really makes it stand out and makes it different from Cloud Code is this heartbeat and crons. And so heartbeat is essentially like a 30 minute timer that just continuously like makes your open claw kind of alive. Like every 30 minutes, it comes alive and it does something for you. So it really makes it kind of like this living thing almost. And the other thing is also it has cron jobs built in. So you can schedule tasks and you can like say at 8 p.m. I want you to do this and this and it will run and do that for you.

7:43So where do you see Claude co-work in this spectrum of stuff? I saw today that there's a new research preview that came out from the Anthropic team. It's called Dispatch. Basically, it's a persistent conversation with Cloud that runs on your computer, so you can message it from your phone and then come back to finish work. It feels like Cloud is moving towards the direction of Open Cloud. I'm just curious where you see it in the spectrum. Totally, yeah. So I think Cloud Cowork was basically just, they realized that Cloud Code is really awesome. And then they wanted to put a nicer interface on it so that regular people will also want to use it.

8:32So they kind of built Cloud Cowork and put that in the app with just a nicer UI. But under the hood, it's basically the same as Cloud Code. And then when OpenClaw came out, because it was so, so hyped and, and, you know, like so popular, they realized that, okay, like we kind of need to build something that's similar to that too. So we're going to start building some of the features and adding that. And so throughout the last like two or three months, since OpenClaw started taking off, they've been building these features, like the one that you mentioned, Dispatch, which they released yesterday, which is, you know, essentially like you can, you can talk to Claude Cowork through your mobile phone.

9:20And that is kind of the feature that OpenClaw has, one of its standout features, which is that you can, you know, bring it anywhere. And so what I do expect to happen is that it like Claude Code and Claude Cowork and so on, they will all build like their own kind of versions of OpenClaw. Cool. So basically, you know, how do you decide between OpenClaw and Co-Work? If someone's listening to this, like how, why should they use OpenClaw over Co-Work? Right now, OpenClaw is definitely still more, more powerful. It has more of these, like interesting features built in, like the ones where we're going to go into in a bit.

10:10um clawed code is still more limited um but over time i think they will be relatively similar or anthropic and you know all of the big players are going to have their own kind of versions of open claw but open claw will be like the just the open source version so it's it then kind of becomes a question you know it's like why would you use linux over over windows so they're just like some advantages over open source more flexible and people just like it people can contribute to it and so on cool yeah i mean the thesis is basically that it's more powerful ultimately because you have the backing of the open source community contributing to it it's more customizable so you know that that would be one reason main reason why you'd go to open claw but yeah let's continue yeah cool so then let's get into this um yeah optimized setup so um you might have tried installing open claw it's it's like technically um not super hard to do the initial setup um you basically need to go to the the website here and copy this command and paste it into terminal and then follow the onboarding.

11:30But where most of the people then get stuck is when they then start using it and then like all kinds of errors pop up and, you know, things break and they don't know how to fix it. And so these 10 steps I'm going to go through now are to help you just make your OpenClaw setup a lot better. And the first thing I want you to do is to establish a so-called troubleshooting baseline before you do anything else. And basically what I want you to do is go into your Claude desktop app or web as well. Go into projects. You can obviously use ChatGPT2 if you want to. Go into the projects feature. They have that too.

12:18And then just create a new project. Call it OpenClawSupport. and inside of this project you'll want to upload the open claw documentation and the open claw documentation is basically like where all of the solutions are to your problems because like if you run into an error it's like a very high likelihood that somewhere in the docs there's a solution to how you're going to solve this but obviously you don't want to go in here and click through it and search for the answer yourself. So what you can do is go to this site called Context 7, which is just a site that has up-to-date documentations. Search for OpenClaw and just click this link here with the docs.

13:12So they have a compressed version of the documentation, basically. you can copy that and go back into your project here and just add that as a file so add add it in here and then save it so i've already saved it here and what this does is it makes the answers a lot better because normally claude will if you ask it something about open claw it's like it can give you the right answer but it often just makes something up if it doesn't really know it doesn't always go and check the docs by itself through its web search feature and so just adding the docs here is a lot more robust so for example i can say now how do i pair my telegram and And you'll see here that it will, yeah, the first thing it does is let me check the project knowledge and context seven.

14:13So it will actually go and check the, check the context there to give you the answer. This is really smart. I wish I knew this because I was just like, you know, prompting without the context and they would send me to like a random Reddit post that someone, or, you know, and then I try the thing and then it doesn't work. And I'm like, Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Happened to me a lot too. And since I have this, um, it's solved like 99 % of my problems. Cool. So, uh, then that's the first step. The second step then is about personalization. Um, and I, uh, saw your, the previous podcast with Remy, he kind of talked about that too.

15:01and it's a very similar process as with Claude Code. When you set it up, you want to give it like all of the context and the context about yourself and also how it should behave. And so one important thing to know here is that when you install OpenClaw, it essentially installs this folder here called workspace. So I have this here opened up in cursor. You can open it up in any other text editing tool. And inside of this workspace, you then have these important files. So one of them is agents.md. And this is basically the file that defines the agent behavior. So probably the most important file.

15:57you have the soul.md which is like defining the agent's personality we can go into that too so basically like how you want the agent to reply to you you have an identity.md which is similar then you have a user.md which is like info about you as the user and so what you should do in the beginning is to just give it a bunch of context so that it can, so that it has this context and can work with you in an optimal way. And, um, the best way to do that is to either you can create these folders and just dump it in there, or you can kind of like talk to your bot and, um, just give it that information, um, over time.

16:44Um, I think what's also very important to know is that every time you have your bot opened here and are talking to it in a session, these are the files that are loaded in by default. So whatever is in these files, the bot knows about. And so it's important to manage these files well. Does that make sense? yeah i think uh it's remarkable how big of a deal setting up these files properly affect output yeah yeah they're very important and um you want to really optimize them over time and then also tell your OpenClaw to, like when you notice something that you want to happen again or don't want to happen again, just tell your OpenClaw to update these files.

17:51And yeah, get familiar with these files also when you initially set it up, just go into them, read what's inside of them already and so on. Cool, so you have that. now uh memory let's talk about that because that's uh the third point here and um that's something that a lot of people are struggling with when they're setting it up for the first time and using it um they often complain about the open claw just like not remembering stuff and kind of being dumb about things. And the kind of way to solve that is, first of all, I think understanding how the memory actually works inside of OpenClaw. So as I mentioned earlier, like when you're in a session, these are the files that are just always loaded.

18:49And you then have actually a built-in functionality, which depending on like what you wrote, it will go and search for things in the memory. So it's very important that your memory is like locked so that something can be searched, right? That's kind of obvious. And so the first thing you should do is ensure that your memory is being saved. And for whatever reason, like when you initially set OpenClaw up, this file doesn't exist yet. this memory.md. So you kind of need to tell your OpenCloud to create it. And this memory.md file is supposed to be its long-term memory. So it's like where all of the important things, that's like learnings and insights over time, and some of your preferences also should be flowing into and should be logged in there.

19:49So this is kind of like the more high level memory. and then there's also a more granular memory which is saved inside of a memory folder and you can see that here if i go into my my workspace so i have this memory folder and these are created on a daily basis so every day it should basically write things in there and log the things that you've been doing. And these are just more detailed than this higher level memory. So, okay. So that's kind of the first part of the memory problem. Then I found that this command here, which is, it's like, I don't want to get too technical, but it says set compaction memory flush enable to true and set memory search.experimental.sessionmemory to true.

20:52And what this essentially does is you sometimes have the problem that you're chatting with it and the session gets bigger and bigger, right? And it then starts to like, when it gets close to the context window, it starts doing what's called a compaction. And when a compaction happens, it loses some of that information because it's like trying to summarize everything. And what this setting here does is it says like, before you do the compaction, just make sure you write everything into memory. And this way, like none of that stuff gets lost. So this one's pretty useful. I think some of it may be already implemented by default in the newer updates, but this was something that helped me a lot when I set it up in the beginning.

21:49Another thing that I've implemented is, as I mentioned, like the main problem actually of the memory not working is because the memory was not saved in the first place. So I kind of implemented a sort of autosave feature and I just added into my heartbeat this extra instruction of like essentially like just always every 30 minutes saving to memory. so you can see here it says check if today's memory file exists and is up to date and then create it if it's missing and out of all current sessions log a summary of what has been discussed and so on so this just makes sure that every 30 minutes it's really logging the memory and that nothing gets lost makes sense okay moving on so the fourth step is this one's also really important because when I talk to people that want to set it up, like one of the first questions is always, okay, like what model should I use?

22:59And then people start to overthink it a bit because they like see all of these YouTubers talking about local models and, you know, like costs getting so expensive because actually if you use a model through the API, it can really get very expensive. Like every request can be like 20 cents and that can stack up really quickly. But there is actually a really easy solution to this. And that's what I recommend for most people getting started. It's just using the so-called OAuth method. And what that means is you're basically using the model through your existing ChatGPT subscription. so if you have the$20 subscription you can just hook it up with your open claw and you're just using your open claw within the usage limits of your$20 subscription and that's that turns out to be like actually quite a lot you if you're using it normally you don't really run into usage limits that that often and so for most people that's that's actually the best solution what I also recommend is that you set up like backup models basically so you have like your brain number one which is in this case open ai and then you can set up like a backup and basically do the same thing with with anthropic so you create an anthropic 20 subscription and hook that up too.

24:39And what you can then even do is you can add more fallbacks. So you can use services like OpenRouter or KiloGateway to, they're basically like model aggregators. They give you like one gateway to access a different, like the open source models, for example. And so you want to set up this like backup chain because it happens quite a lot that something happens with the you know with your brain number one and if that like stops working and you don't have a backup then you're kind of screwed you need to go into the terminal and like fix things manually whereas if you have a backup brain you can just switch to it and here's how you would do that so basically go in telegram and you just type models and then you can see like the different models that I have set up here.

25:35And so if my default model OpenAI is not working, I'll just like click into one of the, click into Opus, for example. And then at least I have this intelligence I can talk to and I can again tell it, hey, help me fix this so I can keep working. So, yeah. I heard that Anthropic has banned OpenClaw. I think it was last month. Now, in my OpenClaw setup, it still works for me, so I'm not really sure what the deal is. Why is it working for me? I realize that you've recommended not to use Anthropic as the primary model in this example, But, you know, how should people think about using a model that's been officially banned by the company that makes it?

26:34Yeah, that's a great question. So and that's actually exactly the reason why I put OpenAI as my number one. Because OpenAI has stated that they're OK with it. So for them, it's definitely fine to use this OAuth method. With Anthropic, it's kind of a gray area a bit. I think officially in their terms of service, it says you're not allowed to do that. But then there has been this statement by one of the engineers saying that it's kind of allowed. So I don't really know what the answer is. And some people have been getting banned over it. So I do recommend that if you're scared about your account getting banned, just create a new one.

27:19Create a new account and put the$20 plan on that. and then if that gets banned it's it's not uh the end of the world cool i appreciate that appreciate the honesty too yeah cool now let's get into um telegram so how do you actually optimize like chatting with your with your open claw and i think this is also one of the things that people kind of um like struggle with when they when they start out so they have this one they manage to set up their chat with open claw and then they have this one thread where they chat with with their open claw and um you know you start chatting about like uh your content and then you're chatting about you know you're like ordering groceries and it all get starts to get mixed up um and so a good thing that you can do is you can create these groups and like separate the topics a bit.

28:20And you can see here from my setup, I have this like, my bot is called Ari, and I have this Ari general chat where I just like, it's basically for everything and like config stuff and so on. Then I have one group chat for my for managing my to do's and time tracking. I have one for my journaling. I have one for my agency work. And then I have this one group for all of my content stuff. And inside of this group, there are also different topics in Telegram. They're called topics like these sub channels, basically. And each one of these has their own, yeah, their own kind of topic that you can talk about with it.

29:06And yeah, this is just a really good way to organize how you talk to your bot. One important thing to know here is that if you want And so how can you actually make sure that when you're talking to the OpenClaw in this topic, let's say this ideas one to like log my ideas, how do you make sure that your OpenClaw always knows that you're talking to it about this topic? And what you can actually do is you can set a system prompt, which is group and topic specific. so if I go here into the settings here and you can see here I have these system prompts set up which are so this one this is the twitter related content topic treat this thread as the place where all twitter related ideas drafts feedback and tasks should go so I have all of these system prompts for all of these different groups and topics.

30:09And that way my OpenClaw can remember like what we're actually doing inside of this group. Okay. Another huge like thing about OpenClaw is one of its like most powerful built-in tools, which is the browser. And I think like when people talk about talk about open claw and how it can like do all of these things autonomously a big component of that is because it has access to a browser but when when i started out and i start i tried to use it i was super confused because there are actually different ways how the OpenClock can use the browser and can basically access information online. So there are these three ways actually.

31:02So one is kind of just a regular web search and fetch tool. And the way you can think about that is, so I actually tested it here. So I just said, what's the headline of the Greg Eisenberg website? And then it just gave me the headline after searching it. And then I said, give me the link, gave me the link. And then I asked, what tool did you use to get that? It says web fetch. So what it does is it's, you can imagine it like it just using an API and doing kind of like a search through the API and getting information back so this is really good for information that is public and it will default to using that if you ask it questions for like to get public information basically but this obviously is not very useful if you wanted to kind of do things for you in like a logged in application or like fill out forms for you and things like that so that's where this second method comes in, which is the OpenClaw managed browser.

32:18And the way this works is you can, like, I can actually go and say, I have this skill, or actually let's just run my grocery ordering a skill um and what this does is it will open up a browser and i have i've logged into that browser with my like the in germany it's called rewe it's like this uh instacart basically um and it will start like uh ordering my groceries for me essentially and clicking around and ordering my stuff. So I've automated like this whole part, which is awesome. And this is because of this OpenClaw browser that it has. So I can, like, I can't share it on the screen now, but it's actually happening here on this other Mac.

33:19And yeah, the cool thing here is also that it has its own profile. So if you wanted to do that on your actual Mac, not on a separate one, where you have a Chrome profile, where you've already logged into all of your services, it will actually create a separate profile. So it's a bit more secure. So you can like granularly give it access to only the things that you wanted to have access to. So this is the second way. And then there is a third way. And this one was really confusing. for me. And this especially happens when you're setting up the OpenClaw on a VPS instead of on a local machine. It will keep suggesting the so-called Chrome Relay.

34:09And what that is, is it's basically a Chrome extension that you can install on this browser. So on my main machine browser and then when i open up that chrome extension my open claw can then connect to it and so the advantage here is like you know in my in my chrome browser i i've logged into all of these services and if i just quickly want my open claw to take over and do some stuff for me then i can activate that and can take over things for me personally i don't use that too much i've just i just try to use the built-in browser um but it's yeah useful to know and you can see here in the background it's like uh it's starting to order my groceries for me uh so maybe i should uh stop that and just i don't need it right now maybe some apples and some coffee butter yeah maybe maybe it'll be helpful would be a good break yeah okay cool so that's the browser part another really big part of OpenClaw is skills and just like with CloudCode skills are becoming like a huge thing now there are a lot of useful built in skills in OpenClaw so if you just type into the terminal where you have your OpenClaw installed you just type OpenClaw skills list it will actually go and list out like all of the so-called OpenClaw bundled skills so you can see here there are a bunch like 1Password, Apple Notes and so on and you do have to activate them so you just have to say like activate my one password skill and then it will be ready and a lot of these are are really useful so one of my favorites for example is this summarize skill i use it all the time so i can just say summarize and then i'll just grab like a youtube video for example just copy the link here paste it here and it will actually go and do a pretty good summary of this of this video and you can do that for like websites too and articles too um so it's it's actually really useful skill um there's no a notion skill too like an OpenAI Whisperer skill for transcriptions, Nano PDF, Nano Banana Pro.

37:01And then of course you can build your own custom skills. And that's a really good way to like start automating your workflows. Whenever you do something repeatedly, just tell your OpenClaw to turn it into a skill. And that makes this workflow a lot more robust. And there's also different marketplaces and places where you can go and see what skills other people have created and use those as well, right? Yeah, yeah, true. So there's the clawhub.ai. That's the official marketplace. And here you can browse the skills and basically search for them. um one thing you should be you should always be double checking these skills because anyone can create them and there can be like all kinds of instructions inside of these skills so what actually the uh the creator has done they've like added this security scan here and um like i would say most of them are fine but some of them can be a bit suspicious so just like make sure to look at what it actually does.

38:15And sometimes you can also scroll through to the comments if there are any, and people will say whether the skill is fine or not. Yeah, I think someone did a, don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure someone did an analysis of some of the top skills on this platform, and a bunch of them had malicious stuff. yeah yeah yeah uh it's still a bit of the it's still a bit like wild west uh out there right now especially with these platforms so um you do have to be a bit careful um but i think it will get a lot better over time yeah sounds good all right let's keep going all right so um let's go through these so number eight is heartbeat um we already went into that a little bit so um if you go into your heartbeat file so that's the that's a file that runs like by default every 30 minutes when the heartbeat happens it basically runs uh whatever you put into this file here so in my case as i shared before it's like this memory maintenance thing then I've also added a to-do auto update so I wanted to just like understand what I'm working on during the day and update my to-do list automatically so that I don't need to like keep going in and saying hey this is now done this is now done so it auto updates that and then I've added this section here too which is a cron health check because I've noticed that cron jobs sometimes are not super stable yet sometimes they just don't run and um so i've put in the heartbeat that it uh does a like constant check whether a cron job has like failed to run basically and if it did fail to run then just re-trigger it um yeah so i like in the heartbeat uh just like make sure to put only the things that you really want it to run all of the time and if you make this instruction too big then it will start like using up a lot of your your usage limits because obviously it constantly runs so just be very careful about what you want to have included in there okay yeah greg yeah i was just i was gonna say like does I'm sure a lot of people watching this are like, I just want Moritz's heartbeat file.

41:04Like, is that something like, does it, should everyone create their own or what do you, you know, what do you say to that? Well, we can, they can copy this. I think it's, it's pretty useful. Especially this memory part. And like, if you, if you manage your to do's through it as well, and this cron health check as well um so yeah copy it i think it it will help you but um uh if you personalize it and just like make sure that it works for your use cases it's it's probably smart too totally yeah maybe sometimes it's worth going through the process right because then you're like learning about it as you go yeah yeah and like and tweaking it and um seeing if it works or not and then removing it again exactly all right this is a big one security basics yes um obviously it's a big topic around open claw and as i said it it is still a bit of the of like a wild west um right now in terms of a security but i think um like you can mitigate it if you understand some things around it and um i think the first thing to understand is that there are essentially like two types of risk here when people talk about um security and and like risks so one is kind of this idea of somebody getting access to the back end of your open claw right so somebody going into my machine and being able to like do things from my machine kind of how like i would be able to do it and to mitigate that i actually recommend just like set it up on a local Mac because there the risk is much lower than if you're setting it up on a VPS like a VPS is this thing that's in the cloud and it's like constantly connected to the internet and it's just like much easier for hackers to get into it if they want to whereas on your local machine if you install it there it is much harder because you know like companies like Apple they've invested quite a lot of resources to make sure that your machine is actually secure and nobody can hack into it.