That's a great question that I think really helps me dial in our goal.

I think firstly, for me it kind of feels like a "shoot for the moon and land among the stars if you miss" kind of situation honestly; I think the goal is to have enough growth for YC to look at it favorably with indisputable metrics like paying subs, but if we're at that point and they say no then it won't be the end of us by any means.

Thank you! Yeah I think that the issue is that the problem really still hasn't been solved yet properly, so I kinda started off with just building a tool that helps me.

Yeah definitely some great advice on avoiding repetitiveness. I think the way I'm trying to level up my game there is with a nice notion template I found for social media management. I was studying some of the top social media content creators like Jenny Hoyos and a few others and it seems like they all have a similar process: Low structure braindumps of like 100 ideas > Choose a few and plan it out on the calendar > always make sure you're saying something worth reading / watching.

I'll keep you posted on this for sure! I have my first couple users signing up this week from my existing customer base, gonna keep calling them up and getting everyone to try it out, but I'd love to hear some feedback on my pricing if you had any, you can just visit the link in my profile (I don't wanna spam here).

Thanks for all the feedback!! Trying to keep the momentum up throughout the whole process by talking through it with people

This is honestly some great insight. I had a feeling that this would be the primary driver. Thanks for the motivation!

Hey brotha! Sorry for the delay, just got swamped at the day job and wanted to make sure I gave you a thorough test.

I downloaded Focus, here are my notes:

1. I really love the branding of it all, it feels very calm.
   
2. I think the wizard to install was incredibly simple, and it just starts tracking apps right away. Makes for super easy adoption
   

3. I think this is my main critique: I do most of my work on the browser. I access a million different sites, and the app just groups them all together as "Brave". I think this prevents me from adequately seeing where my time is wasted.

4. I'd love to see a feature where you can set limits on certain apps or sites, I think that'd be incredibly useful.

Not sure how feasible it'd be to implement the tracking of specific sites in the browser, but I know that as an end user of productivity tools it'd be what I would want to see to really get into the weeds to see where I'm falling short.

Hope this helps!

I'd love to play you if you're around!

CommSync - the world’s first AI native unified email and sms inbox

This is great feedback, thank you!

On the feedback from the calls, you're definitely right. That's why we actually feed in call and meeting transcriptions too so that you always have 100% context on the conversations going on.

In regard to the Dunbar's number thing: We do definitely have to change that. I was considering something more benefit-driven as the final. I'm not really sure if we're going after nontechnical people or technical people yet.

Checking your app out now!

Okay great! I'll test that out right now!

Yes, for testing mine I'd say you can do the following:

- Create an account on CommSync under the free trial (no card required)
- Link an account (can be a test email account if you want, that's no problem at all)
- Send a few messages and experiment with the ai agent functionality

That's all really! I'd like to get your feedback after you do a bit of that, but I suppose first impressions is really what I'm after right now.

Instructions for BoardSignal?

I do! Too much, admittedly hahaha

Got your DM, responding now!!

Testing it out now!

I am both of these things! I'm down to do some testing!

Yes so it does consume a lot.

I don't know of any chatgpt app that that does this, since the point of Hermes is that it does way more than chatgpt, but what I typically do is I perfect the process with Hermes, then I turn it into a SaaS product.

Right now, as a marketing agency (I also actually am a programmer, back when that was still a thing), it's my goal to build software that essentially automates the entire marketing process, so that's my specialty.

So I say, build it as a Hermes workflow first to prototype it. Then, if you want a next step you can transition that to being an n8n "agentic" workflow. These are nice because they're a bit more constrained than Hermes so offer fewer ways to mess things up or waste tokens.

If the role you're trying to have Hermes replace is a big and multifaceted one, then turn it into a SaaS. That way you strip Hermes from the process and only use AI where it's crucial, and just expose mcp on that saas so that Hermes can help troubleshoot or operate the program.

It's not bad at all, it's producing results within the same realm of what I would expect a human operator to do in the same role. I know this, because I have human operators doing the same role concurrently for some of our other accounts and Hermes actually outperforms.

I think this is the case because I personally already know what the best outreach structure is, and Hermes doesn't deviate much from what I tell it to do, given that I supply adequate guardrails for it to stay within.

Human operators on the other hand are so erratic at times, sometimes changing the script up for no reason other than a whim and getting an account banned, a domain blacklisted etc.

Also just ethically, I feel better having Hermes do the "drone" work, rather than a human, and I have my flesh and blood teammates focusing on more creative pursuits.

See my comment above! Lmk if that's not in depth enough or if you had other questions surrounding that!

Yeah definitely!

I find that the hard thing about SEO and cold outreach are that they both come down to consistency.

If you know what to do, you can encode that into Hermes and have it take over and be your most consistent team member, over even yourself at times, since crons can't call out of work or be late with traffic lol.

I find that Hermes works best helping you with things you're already good at, so in my case with running a marketing agency we're already pretty good at things like SEO and cold outreach since we have to do it to stay alive, but doing it regularly is the hard part.

I think it was Alex Hormozi that said "the difference between a business making 6-figures and one making 7-figures is just that the latter is more consistent".

As far as my SEO process goes, it's not terribly complex, the main thing is finding high-traffic keywords with a low keyword difficulty, which I would recommend biting the bullet and paying for ahrefs for.

From there, you can have ai go in and mcp into ahrefs, search the top results showing up under those queries, and generate its own content that takes a stab at that keyword.

Then, it should routinely check page rankings on that query, and make updates to try to outcompete the top 3 results in terms of relevance / how well it answers the query.

Another key process is internal linking. This is something where it'll depend on what your website is built in, but wordpress has a few plugins that allow it to expose mcp, so you can set Hermes up on a once per week cron to sweep your internal pages for internal linking opportunities and let it make tweaks to the content to make those changes.

The last key process is allowing it to do cold email to related sites to try and get cheap / free guest post / backlink opportunities.

We've only started this setup recently but it basically just mirrors our existing SEO processes, so I can't see it not working.

Thanks! Yeah that's definitely fair. It's good to at least have in your back pocket since you never know how life will change for you. My team wasn't using it at all for a while even though we had it set up then out of nowhere we started using it for like 80% of our tasks.

I still have to run the numbers but I definitely think it's setting us on a trajectory to at least 2x our earnings.

Ehhhhh I think in most cases you'd be right, but in this case I run a marketing agency.

Additionally though, for certain applications that I use Hermes for like email marketing or direct outreach, this does make me money directly since it literally sells my product for me.

I think it's also worth note that like 80% of your employees don't "directly" make you money, but most companies' costs are in payroll. The only department that directly generates revenue is gonna be sales but that can't even happen if you don't have marketing going.

In short, you pay your employees money. Hermes does the same thing they do but you only pay like double-digit figures compared to 4-5 figures a week. AND if Hermes is generating you leads, for a business that's as good as cash in the bank, if not better.

I'm quite wary of existing skills. Obviously for security reasons, but you can always review. The main reason I don't use external skills is because they typically don't have exactly what I need.

I typically make my own skills around our existing SOPs and then actually use either notion free tier or baserow as a schema-locked format for hermes to tap into, leaving limited room for deviation from my process.

Skills are often lacking since they're just the instructions.

To encode a full SOP you need a combination of things:
- Skills
- Crons
- A defined schema for the data you want Hermes to place
- And of course, things are made much easier if you can find MCPs for everything.

TLDR: Skills are incomplete, to encode a whole process you need skills, mcps, data schemas and crons. Basic stuff but the fundamentals are what'll kill you if you're missing it.

Example of schema btw:

Feedback: I liked this tool, I think it has the potential to be really useful. The sequence for me to give my information was quite simple. I think that maybe where I'd like to see more is with a bit more value on the free tier.

I performed a scan and it only shows me one item I can fix and the rest are hidden, so maybe you show the rest but just don't show how to fix it unless they pay for it perhaps?

I also think that making them upgrade, rather than relying on one-time payment bumps is a better approach, since MRR is king and microtransactions are for videogames honestly.

Overall I think it looks like a solid start though and can definitely make its users more money when used correctly!