Automating Cold Outreach with Hermes Agent

0:00In this video, we're going to be using Hermes Agent to automate some cold outreach for an app that I built called the Magic Hand. The Magic Hand is an AI photo editor for real estate agents. Essentially, real estate agents can drag and drop their photos and then click one button and their photos come out upscaled and automatically edited in 4K. You can also transform your photos into videos. So, the goal of this video is to use Hermes Agent to build out a workflow that can do cold outreach to agents on Instagram and as well as doing cold outreach on email. Hermes Agent over something say an open claw setup to do this is because I built my open claw

0:45setup to produce content, something that is totally different than this project here called the Magic Hand. So, I want to keep them separate. And the one thing that I like about the Hermes Agent is that it has a self-recurring learning loop. It also builds skills on demand. So, as we do cold outreach, it's going to learn and work on what's performed well and discard what has performed poorly. So, as we start getting responses and getting people to actually pay for our product, we're going to double down on what's working and ignore the stuff that's not working. And you're going to see me build this out live in just a few minutes. It's going to be easy. It's going to be straightforward. Follow along if you're trying to build out something similar and I'll try to deep dive as much as I can. So, I have Open Claw working on my

1:31Mac mini and I also have Hermes on my Mac mini as well. These are going to run 24/7 around the clock. And with Hermes, there's a bunch of different ways you can access it. You can just use it right in the terminal. You can chat through Discord, Telegram, or you can use this Hermes workspace. I'll put the link to it down below. It has a lot of pre-built skills, a lot of pre-built prompts ready to go to start building. And it comes with a nice little UI where you can visualize all your work. So, the first thing that we're going to do is we're actually going to connect our Telegram because I want daily reports, who it outreached to, how many responses it's gotten, and how many sales we made from those responses. So, I can start to keep track of who is responding to these

2:16direct messages. So, the thing that I like with Hermes is that it just figures stuff out. I should back up and say we are using my Open AI plan and I'm using ChatGPT 5.5 for all the work. You know, if you've watched the channel for a while, I'm loving Opus 4.7, but it uses a lot of tokens where GPT 5.5 can help cut down and help me spare some of my Anthropic tokens for my Open Claw setup and we can use Open AI for Hermes. So, let's get it going. I just use Whisper Flow. I think everyone should be using Whisper Flow voice dictation software. Check it out. I'll put a link down below. It's going to help you be more productive when you're talking to these LLMs. So, hello. My name is Bo Johnson. I'm looking to automate my product

3:02called The Magic Hand.io. It is an AI photo real estate app. Real quick, before we keep going, if you're watching this and you want to actually build with some of these tools, not just watch videos about them, then you're going to want to check out our community down below, Shipping School. We have a full Claude code course, a full Open Claw course, and four live bootcamps every single week where we actually help you get set up from scratch. Like actually set this thing up, not just watch a tutorial and figure it out by yourself. And we also provide one-on-one coaching so you could book a call with me, we could share screens, and I can help you get Claude code or Open Claw running on your machine. That's it. No fluff. I built this community because watching YouTube's only gets you so far. We

3:48launched it just 3 days ago and we have over 55 members. You need people around you who are actually building, people who hold you accountable, and coaches who can help you when you get stuck. I'll put the link in the description down below. Get in now before the price goes up. That helps real estate agents edit photos within seconds. I need help from you doing marketing. We're going to be doing cold outreach via DM on Instagram and on email. Let's focus on Instagram now first and build that pipeline out. I want this to happen daily. I want at least 10 DMs sent per day regarding our app with a link to our app saying that they should use it because they get free 10 credits upon sign up. So, the first thing though, we

4:33need you to be able to communicate with me on Telegram because I want daily updates on who you reached out to as well as who has converted into a sale. And we're just going to send that prompt and see what it does. And that took 15 seconds. So, it says, "Hi Bo. Got it. I can help build the out Instagram outreach pipeline for the Magic Hand and I have noted the key product context, AI real estate photo editing app targeting targeting real estate agents. We do offer a free 10 credits upon sign up. But before we automate and send everything or send anything, we need two things in place, Telegram communication. So, yes, if you're already talking to me from Telegram, great. I'm not. I'm using the Hermes workspace. If not, you need to connect Hermes to Telegram. So, we'll do

5:18that right now. All right. So, I just configured the Telegram so I can get the daily reports. Here's some other things we need to figure out before we start this automation. So, the report is going to include the Instagram handles to the agents that we reached out, messages sent, profile notes, and lead type, replies received, follow-ups needed, and then sign up conversions, which is huge. So, yes, this is great. This is great. Something to note is Instagram outreach constraints. This is why we're choosing just to send 10 messages a day. We don't want to get our account banned. So, we want to keep the volume low. And then what it needs from me is the app URL, which it already has it correct there. So, we'll just put that there. I'm talking with you through the Hermes workspace and I have Telegram connected

6:05with you as well. The Instagram is The Magic Hand.io, which I have pulled up here. Nothing really going on here. The Magic Hand.io target profile criteria. We want to target real estate agents inside the US. And yes, realtors posting listings. We want to target brokerages, luxury agents, also agents using poor quality listing photos, maybe houses that, you know, are being done as fix and flips. And then, yeah, we want to ideally target agents with 1,000 to 5 to 50,000 followers. And then, yes, we can do conversion tracking through Stripe or I have a polar.sh

6:50dashboard I can give you access to. Maybe for now we just track it all manually in a spreadsheet or build out our own CRM. Cool. Let's let it cook. That's enough context. What I like, since I've been using Opus 4.7 for a lot of the building today, it's been kind of slow and this is quick. GPT 5.5, I use it for all my cron jobs in my Open Claw, but I don't use it as like a main agent like this. It's been pretty quick, which is nice. And if you aren't using Hermes, there's web there's Open Web UI, which works the same as like this workspace. It's just a great way to visualize the work being done. Yes, you can use Discord or Telegram, but I just like this so much better. You got files that you can manage here. You can go right into the terminal. You can see what cron

7:36jobs are created, tasks, and memory, skills, and profiles as well. You can start a new session. I just like the interface a bit better. So, here's what it got back. Let's see. Perfect. We have enough to define the first version of the Instagram outreach system. I also created a local CRM template. Perfect. It's got the product, the offer. Perfect. Who it's targeting. Suggested DM structure. We should avoid sounding like spam. Yes. The messages should be short, relevant, and tied to their actual listing content. Yep, exactly. And this is great. This is pretty impressive. It's pretty easy, which is what I've been hearing about Hermes Agent. It's just simple to set up and have it attack one automation. And that's the thing. With the Magic Hand, I just need help with one thing. That's

8:21outreach. So, very cool. I like the the different variants it came up with. And then the manual CRM, I think that's perfect. Important Instagram automation automation note. So, it says that it is uh on the automation note for Instagram, which was going to be the tricky part. Um the Instagram DM automation is risky if done with raw browser automation or unofficial bots. Accounts can get rate limited or challenged for safety. Human-approved semi-automation. I don't want that, but we'll we'll correct that here. Yeah, that all sounds good. It looks great. But I want to clarify I want this happen on autopilot. I don't want to be in the loop at all. I want you just to do it and figure it out. I know we can use Playwright or Puppeteer

9:06for the browser automation. Also, look into Comet browser as I heard that that was good for browser use without being bot detected. Or look into Claude browser to be able to help us with this. Okay. So, change of plan. We're going to start with email first and then we'll figure out the Instagram strategy later because it is not wanting to break the rules. Okay, then change of plan. Let's do it with email first and start with 10 emails a day. Maybe we could scrape their data from Instagram or Zillow listings. Okay, so email is something we can automate easier. It's just I didn't start with email because real estate agents get so many emails every day. It's going to be harder to stand out. My other thought too is that we could sign up If you're struggling to keep up with

9:52content, what I'm about to save you about 40 days' worth of work. [music] I built something called content machine. It's 10 AI agents that run on the open claw orchestration and they handle everything. Scripts, thumbnails, X [music] posts, blogs, outreach, clips, newsletters, all of it. So, I went from 1,000 subscribers to 4,000 subscribers on YouTube in 7 days using this exact system. Every single morning I wake up [music] and the content's already done. I spend maybe 15-20 minutes reviewing and approving them and I move on with my day. [music] It works for any niche, fitness, finance, real estate, marketing, [music] whatever you are building and it is 100% completely customizable to your use case. So, you

10:38get the mission control dashboard, all of the cron jobs, everything I've built over the last 40 days helping me gain more and more people to subscribe and join the community. So, you plug in your own thing and it molds it to you, it learns how you talk and it writes so it doesn't sound like AI $97 one time, it's not a subscription. I'll put the link down below and you'll thank me later. With a separate account through the X API, connect that to my magic hand account and start doing cold DMs through TikTok, through X. So, that's another option. So, it's going to use Zillow listing pages as discovery sources and then Instagram as a discovery source only as well. Agent brokerage websites. Okay, this all looks really good. I think for now I'm just

11:24going to give it my magic hand Gmail. Actually, let's use resend. Let's use resend. Simple. What I like with resend is you can just essentially blast emails out really quickly in bulk. So, if you go to resend, you can set up a bunch of different automations. Let's see if we could go to the actual site. So, here it is. Email for developers and it's very, very cheap, very cost effective. So, it'll allow us to at least get the ball rolling on this. Maybe we could switch to something in the future so we could have email warm-up happen automatically cuz that's the problem with sending emails in bulk is you will be bought spammed detected very quickly if you start selling out multiple hundreds

12:09of emails per day. So, it's very cheap on the pricing, too. You can send out 3,000 emails a month for $0. So, let's just get it going and see how it implements this. So, it's set up the resend side of the pipeline, which is awesome, looks great. So, it needs the resend API key. Okay, I set up my DNS records for the magic hand email. Here is my email. I think it might take a few hours to update. Here's more information. The whole goal of this video is just to start getting some automation for the outreach for our product, the magic hand. Like I said, it's a great app, it works amazing, but I don't have distribution and that's the hardest part when building and shipping apps is now I built my app, now nobody knows about it. How do I get some more

12:54traction? Yes, I could create content around it, but right now I just want to go direct to the source, start drumming up business by outreaching to agents. Unfortunately, we're going to have to just use email for our first target. This is going to be an ongoing series and we can see how this works out for us amongst other automations we could build with Hermes, but for now let's focus on this being episode one. We automated email. Let's focus on automating maybe cold outreach on X using the X API, which is very cost effective now cuz it's pay per use instead of a $200 a month subscription plan. And then maybe we could start to figure out how can we have content happen on autopilot as well. So, I think in combination between all of these is going to help us get more users. We do have already a few

13:41sales on here. Let's see if I can log into the admin dashboard. This is like the history of the magic hand and I haven't even advertised at all. So, we've had 86 total users. We have 42 active users, three recent sign-ups and unfortunately it doesn't say. So, 1,272 credits have been purchased. Let's see if I could pull up my polar dashboard. So, this is all time and we launched the app back in late September and we made $400. Um also the profit margins are very cheap or very good on here. It's like 90% profit margins. So, for an app that took me a week and a half to two weeks to build and some refinement along the way. Um you know, it's made $400.

14:27That means people have paid for it and you've used it and kept coming back. So, that's amazing. Whether we turn it into a monthly subscription or not right now, our plans are just pay for a credit pack and they use it as they need. But, yeah, that's can also be refined down the road, but let's see what Hermes said. Let's see what Hermes said. Okay, done. I configured it. From Bo, the magic hand. Bo@themagichand.io. One important DNS issue. I checked the current DNS right now and there are two SPF text records, one for lead connector. That's a problem. A domain should only have one. Okay, so let's fix that. Okay, so I had to verify the domain through resend. I had to plug in and update the DNS records. I had to get

15:13the magic hand email connected to my domain. Now that we have all that connected, we are seeing what the next steps are going to be. I think at 10 emails a day, we can start to test and then circle back to this episode to see where that leads us and maybe I make videos every week keeping you guys up to date. Maybe we do 100 emails a day and maybe we look to integrate the X API to start reaching out to agents on X and then go from there. Um I think that, you know, just wanting to show the power of Hermes agent to be able to handle cold outreach is very doable and there's many ways to go about it. That's why I wanted to build this setup live in front of you to just show you that you don't need to be technical, you don't need to get into the terminal

15:59to start figuring out these workflows. You connect in GPT-5.5 or Opus, whatever you want to use for your main agent and tell it what you want to build and go from there. I mean, what? It's been 18 minutes and we've made a ton of progress already. Okay, so after and what I like is this has been really fast. Just compared to using Opus all day today, it's been much faster in the responses. So, I just asked, domain has been verified through resend, everything's been looking good. And what's the next steps? It says, great, the next step is lead generation plus first live daily send. It also tested the resend sending already through the API and accepted and returned a successful message ID. So, sending works. I then fixed the sender script to use the working resend request method and verified it runs cleanly.

16:44Beautiful. The daily job will run at 9:00 a.m. daily. It will find public business emails for qualified real estate leads and then it will add them to the outreach CSV, draft personalized outreach emails, send up to 10 through resend and then update the CRM rows as sent. It'll produce a daily report. Recommended next immediate step. We should run the job once manually now to seed the CRM to confirm the first batch works. I can do that next. But, because this will potentially send real outbound emails, run the first email outreach batch now. Yes, I want to test now to see if it works and also I want you to send the reports to me on Telegram. I think you have the information already.

17:30It's the magic hand agent bot, I believe. Also, where are you getting the emails from? Zillow, Instagram? Another thing, too, that has always been a problem for me, especially when it comes to open claw, is the memory issue. But, with Hermes agent, it has a memory system called Hancho and basically, okay, sorry. I was in the middle of an interview. But, Hancho memory is really useful because with open claw, you have to really take the time to set up your memory correctly between lossless claw, QMD, active memory, memory wiki and all these other plugins. It's like, really? I got to get all this set up just for my agent to remember who I am. What I've noticed with Hermes is that it just remembers and I don't even need to tell

18:15it to remember, it just picks up where I left off. I just went on my Telegram and chatted with my Hermes and I said, do you know what we're working on? And boom, right away it knew that we're building out an email integration for the magic hand. So, quickly, Hancho memory for Hermes agent is persistent cross-session memory and user modeling. So, Hermes agent is an open source AI agent from new research with tool calling, terminal access and with Hancho, it gives Hermes persistent cross-session memory. So, I love that. What Hancho provides is it acts as a long-term memory system and user model layer alongside Hermes with built-in memory files. It gives Hermes these three capabilities. Prompt time context

19:01injection, which is durable context about user loaded into prompt before generating response, cross-session continuity, it recalls of stable preferences, project history and working context across conversations and durable write-back, which is stable facts learned during a conversation stored back for future turns. These sit along Hermes local session history and session history remembers the current conversation and Hancho remembers what should still matter later. Very cool. I've noticed it has just worked flawlessly and yes, you can integrate it with your open claw, but I love that it just works and I don't need to tell it to work. Okay, awesome. So, that all worked. Secondary discovery signals,

19:48current day workflow. Every day the job will try to find qualified real estate leads, verify that the email is public business contact info, and then dedupe in the CRM so we don't sell send doubles. Very cool, very cool. Reports to Telegram. The real first daily batch is scheduled for tomorrow. Okay, number answered. Where are we getting Oh, maybe it did answer. Okay, here it is here it is here it is. So, primary sources are public agent websites, public brokerage roster, public real estate listing pages, Google index public business pages, and then Zillow and Instagram. I love it. This is sweet. This is awesome. I'm going to report back and keep this thing going. Maybe we'll just do a weekly one-off series of Hermes and me, what are we building? I think if we just

20:33keep it related to our product here, the magic hand, it can keep consistent. Um, so we'll see if we can get any more sign-ups just doing 10 a day. Um, let me ask Hermes, what do you think the limit is we could what we can send per day without going into the spam folder cuz we haven't warmed up any emails. 10 a day is great, but can we push it even more? See what it says. Okay, that was quick, like 5 seconds. For brand new sending setup, I would not push much higher yet. My recommendation is start with 10 a day, 15 a day, 25 a day, and then by week four we'll do 50 a day. Um, why I would not jump higher immediately even with resend and verified DNS, your domain sender reputation is still new for cold outbound. The biggest spam folder risks are new domain sending

21:19identity, cold recipients, low engagement, similar copy across many messages, link to the first email. Um, your domain is now technically set up, but mailbox providers still need to learn that people want to mail though. Okay. Um, safe warm-up plan is just to prove deliverability and then track the bounce rate, compliant rate, replies, even negative replies. Oh, that'll be fun. And um, and then we'll scale it up from there. And we'll just keep this as a series. We'll circle back and see what it uh what it did. Um, those tools. Yeah, so we could do instantly, but that costs like $500 a month. Well, I'm just trying to be cheap here and get this going, right? Um, so yeah, I like it. I like it. One improvement for deliverability, I'd test a version with no link in the first

22:05email because links can hurt cold deliverability. Hmm. Yeah, I said just keep it the same. That is our first installation in setting up Hermes and getting it going for cold outreach. Like I said, we're going to make this into a series, so if you want to see more, I'm going to be releasing a weekly videos keeping you up to date. Make sure you hit subscribe, and if you want to build out AI automation workflows like this, whether it's through OpenClaw or Hermes, I run a school community with over 200 members, and I launched that community about 35 days ago, and we do nine live boot camp calls every single week. In addition to that, we have one-on-one coaching, and that is unlimited. You can book thousands of one-on-one calls if you're subscribed to our school community. Millions, if you want. Lifetime one-on-one calls for the rest

22:52of your life, join the community, and we'll see you in the next one. Have a blessed day. Bye-bye.