built a Free system that finds leads in auto-pilot!

A few weeks ago I set up a Hermes agent on a $5/m VPS. I didn't really know what I was doing at first, I just knew these agents had more potential than I was giving them credit for

Turns out I was right

The first thing I did was give it access to my email and ask it to monitor journalist queries related to my product Mentiohunt

When it finds a match, it pings me on Discord with the details. I read it, hit approve, and it handles the reply. My whole involvement is maybe 15 seconds

The second thing I did was hand it an Apify key and three cold email inboxes, then ask it to build an outreach dashboard from scratch

A few hours later it had one running. It finds leads, qualifies them, contacts them, and only forwards the ones who actually engage to my main inbox. I don't see a single cold lead until they're already warm

The costs are $5/m for the VPS, $20 for the OpenAI subscription, and a few dollars for the inboxes. Compare that to Saleshandy or Instantly and you're saving a significant amount every month, for a system that's more tailored to exactly what you need

So far it's gotten me 3 backlinks and 7 customers at $49/m

That's $343 MRR from a system that cost me an afternoon to set up and runs almost entirely on its own

If you're not experimenting with local agents yet, it's worth a few hours of your time :)