The Startup Ideas Podcast

I sit down with Imran Muthuvappa to get a hands-on walkthrough of Hermes Agent, a personal AI agent that ships with built-in memory, 40+ tools, and pre-installed skills out of the box. Imran walks me through why he migrated from OpenClaw, how to install Hermes on a Mac or even an Android phone via Termux, and how he cut his token spend by roughly 90% using OpenRouter. We get into agent design (one agent vs. multiple), connecting Hermes to Telegram and Obsidian, and the kinds of prompts that turn a personal agent into a daily operating system. By the end, I have a practical roadmap to install Hermes, pick a model, and start automating real parts of my life and business

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

01:38 – Why Imran Left OpenClaw (Memory, Gateway, Tokens)

04:26 – Hermes Setup Tour and 40+ Built-In Tools

07:06 – Installing Hermes on Mac, Linux, and WSL

12:21 – Telegram and Android Agents

17:09 – Auditing Your Life With Your Agent

20:04 – Must-Know Hermes Tips: Updates, Tailscale, Telegram

21:07 – Should You Migrate From OpenClaw?

25:58 – Hermes + Obsidian as a Daily Dashboard

27:16 – Must-Use Prompts for a Personal Agent

31:29 – Must-Install Skills: Obsidian, Honcho Memory, G-Stack

33:04 – What G-Stack Is and Why It Matters

34:18 – Customization Is a Trap; Output Is the Skill

35:19 – Closing Thoughts

Key Points

Hermes Agent solves OpenClaw's three biggest pain points: built-in memory (writes to SQLite on successful tasks), gateway stability, and token visibility.

Installation is a single command on Mac, Linux, or WSL, and Hermes ships with 40+ tools and popular skills (Apple Notes, Reminders, iMessage, Find My) pre-installed.

Switching to Hermes with OpenRouter can cut token spend by roughly 90%, from about $130 per five days to around $10 per five days in Imran's case.

You can run Hermes on a cheap Android phone via Termux + Termux API, unlocking SMS, sensors, and on-device social posting as a cheap alternative to a Mac Mini.

The real skill is defaulting to your agent for work, then meta-prompting it nightly: "What am I procrastinating? What should I automate? What tool can you build me tonight?"

Imran recommends pairing Hermes with Obsidian for a clean daily dashboard and installing G-Stack (a Y Combinator-style startup skill from Gary Tan) if you are building a product.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND IMRAN ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://x.com/imranye

Alif: https://alif.build

I go live and get my hands dirty with Claude Design, Anthropic's new design tool in research preview. Across roughly an hour, I run a real workflow end-to-end: pulling a product idea from Idea Browser, generating wireframes, iterating into visual designs, building a pitch deck, and attempting a 30-second video ad. I share my first reactions in real time and take feedback from the chat. By the end, I land on a clear verdict — best-in-class for wireframes and visuals, weaker for video — and give you a practical sense of where this tool fits in your workflow.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

00:50 – Claude Design walkthrough

03:48 – Picking a product idea from Idea Browser: Senior Brains

05:54 – Wire-framing Senior Brains

13:54 – Reacting to the generated wireframe

20:44 – Building a pitch deck for Senior Brains

30:39 – Reacting to a pitch deck

34:58 – Reacting to Hi-Fi wireframe

40:40 – Creating a 30-second animated video ad

48:58 – Reacting to animated video ad

58:10 – Final verdict and recommendations

Key Points

Claude Design's wireframing is the strongest capability I've seen in a design tool to date, especially the questionnaire that extrapolates like a product manager.

The pitch deck generation nails roughly 90% of the output with minimal input, which saves hours.

Visual design mockups come through clean and usable, ready to iterate with 30 minutes of back-and-forth.

Video generation lands at about a 5/10 — workable as a social post, weaker as a real commercial.

Start with wireframes first to conserve tokens and sharpen feature decisions before committing to high fidelity.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

In this episode I sit down with my friend Sirio, one of the most creative AI minds I know, to break down Seedance V2. Sirio walks us through the exact use cases, prompts, and tactics he's using to build on top of this model inside his platform Enhancor, covering multi-input generation, virtual try-ons, ad translation, AI influencers with lip sync, video extension, and 3D product template replacement. I wanted this to go beyond the "look how cool this is" tutorials and focus on how creators and founders can actually build businesses, run ads, and produce creative assets with it. By the end, you'll have a practical playbook for Seedance V2 and a clear view of where it fits alongside other models like Kling 3, Veo, and fine-tuned options.

Timestamp

00:00 – Intro

02:22 – Demo 1: Replacing Characters and Background in a Green Screen Scene

08:03 – Prompting Tactics and Optimize Prompts

09:45 – Demo 2: Virtual Try-On in Montreal (Minus 30 Degrees)

13:05 – Demo 3: Ad Translation and Character Replacement (Chinese to English)

16:02 – Demo 4: 3D Product Template with Brand Texture Swap

18:40 – Demo 5: Video Extension and Filling in the Middle

20:55 – Demo 6: AI Influencers and Prompting Realistic Emotion

29:31 – What Happens to Adobe Over the Next Five Years

Key Points

Seedance V2 is the first widely available video model to support true multi-input generation — up to two images, two videos, and an audio file combined in a single prompt.

Treat Seedance V2 as a video editor, not just a generator: character swap, background swap, text preservation, ad translation, and template population all work from natural-language prompts.

Seedance rewards highly specific prompts; I pair my own draft with Claude Opus 4.6 to optimize prompts for vision models.

Strong source reference images remain the single biggest quality lever — the model mimics taste from what you feed it.

For AI influencers and lip sync, describe muscle movements and emotional transitions rather than simply labeling an emotion like "sad" or "happy."

Seedance V2 is the current default for editing and generating video, yet other models (Kling 3 for cinematic feel, Enhancer V4 for talking-head realism) still win on specific use cases.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND SIRIO ON SOCIAL

Enhancor AI: https://www.enhancor.ai

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heysirio/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SirioBerati

I sit down with Amir, who's back on the pod, and we walk through the full stack of taking a business idea from zero to a validated, A/B-tested landing page in a single session. I use Idea Browser's new MCP integration with Claude Code to pull project context, generate a lead magnet concept, design a landing page in Paper, and then wire up analytics and live experiments through HumbleLytics — all without writing a single line of front-end code manually. We cover the tools, the workflow, and why this stack creates massive arbitrage for marketers and builders right now.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro and Episode Preview

02:30 – Building a Growth Strategy with Idea Browser

06:10 – Designing Landing Pages in Paper

08:38 – Refining Copy, Layout, and Components in Paper

20:06 – Deploying Landing Page and Adding HumbleLytics Analytics

28:38 – Running A/B Experiment on the Headline

32:44 – The Arbitrage Opportunity and Closing Thoughts

Links Mentioned:

Amir’s Agentic Marketing Skill: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/amir_marketing_skill

Key Points

Idea Browser now connects to Claude Code as an MCP, letting you pull project context, growth strategies, and skills directly into the terminal for building and iterating on business ideas.

Paper replaces the traditional Figma-to-developer handoff by letting you design, iterate, and refine landing pages visually — all connected to Claude Code so changes stay in sync.

HumbleLytics enables no-code A/B experiments that dynamically update page content without deploying new code, so you can test headlines, CTAs, and layouts in real time.

Storing performance context (A/B results, revenue data, growth metrics) back into Idea Browser compounds your results over time because every future decision is informed by past data.

This full stack — Idea Browser, Paper, Claude Code, HumbleLytics — creates a significant arbitrage opportunity right now because almost nobody is using it at this level.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND AMIR ON SOCIAL

Humblytics: https://humblytics.com/?via=community

X/Twitter: https://x.com/amirmxt

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@amirmxt

I sit down with Ras Mic to break down how AI agents actually work and why most people are using them wrong. Ras Mic explains the mechanics of context windows, makes the case that agent md files are largely unnecessary, and shares his step-by-step methodology for building custom skills that make agents dramatically more productive. Whether you're coding with Claude Code or automating workflows with OpenClaw, this episode gives you the foundational knowledge to stop wasting tokens and start getting real results from your AI tools.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

00:42 – The Models Are Good Now

01:20 – How Context Windows Actually Work

04:55 – The Power of Skills

09:17 – How to create Skills

16:35 – Skill Maxxing

19:05 – What you need too build a project

20:40 – Recursively Building and Improving Skills

29:23 – Context Window Management and Token Efficiency

33:02 – Closing Thoughts

Key Points

The models (Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4) are exceptionally good now — the differentiator is the context and harness you build around them.

Agent md and claude md files get loaded into context on every single turn, burning tokens and degrading performance as the context window fills up. 95% of users can skip them entirely.

Skills use progressive disclosure: only the name and description sit in context until the agent determines it needs the full file, saving thousands of tokens per conversation.

The best way to create a skill is to walk through the workflow with the agent step by step, achieve a successful run, and then have the agent write the skill based on that real context.

Recursively refine skills by feeding failures back into the agent and having it update the skill file so the same mistake is avoided going forward.

Scale for productivity by starting with one agent and building up workflows before adding sub-agents — start simple, then expand.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND MIC ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://x.com/Rasmic

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@rasmic