How to Build a $1M+ Solo AI Agent Business: Complete Playbook

1. The $5K/Month Offer & Positioning

Instead of selling infrastructure or tokens, sell a turnkey 'digital employee' with unlimited agents, unlimited usage, and ongoing support. The key insight: customers think they need 5-10 agents but really need 1-3 well-built ones. Emphasize business outcomes (revenue, efficiency) not time saved. Position yourself as removing all friction—customers never touch tokens, models, or infrastructure.

2. Market Selection & Vertical Niching

Target legacy industries with people-heavy workflows seeking AI adoption: law firms, marketing agencies, insurance agencies, real estate, manufacturers, and wholesalers. Avoid healthcare and finance due to regulatory burden. Solve universal executive problems (too many emails, meetings, context overload) then layer in industry-specific solutions. Start broad, then converge on a winning vertical through market pull.

3. Customer Acquisition via Content & Warm Outreach

Content is the primary acquisition channel in 2026. Build visibility through videos, podcasts, and social media so prospects know who you are before sales conversations. Warm leads convert faster. Early-stage: work for free to build case studies and referrals. Leverage personal website + Calendly for frictionless booking. Let your agent handle email management (use Superhuman for efficiency).

4. Customer-Facing Software Stack

Use Granola to auto-capture meeting notes and sync them to Trello tasks. Trello serves as the customer-facing project board where clients drag tasks into a workflow (backlog → to-do → doing → done). Limit scope to 1-2 requests per 48 hours to prevent fulfillment overload. Send video updates via Loom. Use Superhuman for email efficiency and Sauna for internal tracking. Simple, clear, friction-free experience.

5. Agent Infrastructure & Tools

Deploy Hermes agents on Orgo cloud computers (not local Macs—enables remote management and security). Use Claude Code or Codeex for local agent building. Connect agents to apps via Composio (one MCP for thousands of integrations with auth handling). Give each agent an email via Agent Mail. Use GPT-4.5 for efficiency; fall back to open-source GLM-4 or Opus-4.7 for specific tasks. All agents live in isolated Orgo workspaces per customer.

6. Knowledge Base: Obsidian as Agent Context

Build a personal 'second brain' in Obsidian with markdown files on people, projects, tasks, and business context. Include daily transcripts, notes, and procedural docs. Share with agents as context—this is the difference between generic and exceptional agents. Well-organized Obsidian vaults let agents understand your business deeply and never forget context. This single practice enables personal AGI-like experience.

7. Agents Building Agents: Setup & Automation

Use your own Hermes or Claude agent to set up new customer agents via Telegram. Pass the agent a computer ID from Orgo and let it install Hermes, configure skills, and test. For agent context, equip setup agents with MCPs: Perplexity (up-to-date docs), Exa AI (real-time web search), Context-7 (GitHub docs), and X/MCP (Twitter setups). Have agents spawn sub-agents to parallelize research and validation. This eliminates manual setup friction.

8. Reliability & Monitoring: Watchdogs & Alerts

Set up watchdog agents to auto-restart crashed gateways (OpenClaw has more issues; Hermes is more stable). Configure email alerts from customer agents whenever a skill fails, cron job breaks, or a problem occurs. This alerts you (not the customer) so you fix issues proactively before they notice. Isolation, observability, and quick recovery turn your solo operation into a reliable service.

9. Scaling as a Solo Founder

The dream: go on a walk and have your agent set up new customer agents via Telegram while you're away. Leverage AI to automate fulfillment, monitoring, and setup. You're selling leverage: the combination of your AI expertise + agent technology + vertical domain knowledge. Use Loom videos to show customers the magic in action. Content + warm inbound + agent-assisted fulfillment = sustainable solo $1M+ business.

10. Implementation Timeline & Next Steps

30-day customer onboarding: day 1 = discovery call on Calendly, day 2 = Obsidian vault + initial agent build, days 3-29 = iterative improvements and skill refinement with 1-2 requests per week via Trello, day 30 = full handoff. Pick one vertical, make content, build case studies, then go deeper. The complete playbook (Hermes, Orgo, Composio, Obsidian, Loom, Trello) is now in your hands.