Oliver
138 lines
11 KiB
HTML
138 lines
11 KiB
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<title>Building a Company — How We Use Hermes at derez.ai (Series Intro) | derez.ai Blog</title>
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<meta name="description" content="We're building a company on top of our own product — and packaging everything we build so you can reuse it. This series follows how derez.ai uses Hermes Agent to run daily operations, and the next story will open-source the entire setup." />
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<meta property="og:description" content="We're building a company on top of our own product — and packaging everything we build so you can reuse it. This series follows how derez.ai uses Hermes Agent to run daily operations, and the next story will open-source the entire setup." />
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<a class="back" href="https://derez.ai/#blog">← Back to Blog</a>
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<h1>Building a Company — How We Use Hermes at derez.ai</h1>
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<div class="meta">
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<span>July 7, 2026</span>
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<span class="area-tag">story</span>
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<span class="chip-tag">Hermes</span>
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</div>
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<p>We sell Hermes Agent instances. So we use Hermes Agent to run our business.</p>
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<p>That sounds obvious, but it's not as common as you'd think. A lot of companies build a product they don't actually use themselves. The sales team uses Salesforce. The support team uses Zendesk. The product they sell is something <em>other</em> people use.</p>
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<p>At derez.ai, we decided to go the other way. Every Hermes agent we sell is the same product we use internally. Our cold emails are written by a Hermes agent. Our CRM is managed by a Hermes agent. Our inbox is sorted by a Hermes agent. Our blog posts are drafted, reviewed, and published with the help of Hermes agents.</p>
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<p>This series exists to inspire <em>you</em> to do the same. Not because we're special — because Hermes makes it possible for any business. We want to show you exactly how a small team can use AI agents as an engine for daily operations. Real workflows, real prompts, real results, real mistakes.</p>
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<p>And we're structuring everything we build so you can take it and use it yourself.</p>
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<h2>Why a series?</h2>
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<p>Because the real story isn't "we use our own product" — that's a one-liner. The real story is the <em>how</em>, and that "how" should be something <strong>you can copy</strong>.</p>
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<p>Every workflow we build is designed to be reusable. We're not writing custom scripts for a one-off setup. We're building a structured agent — with its own personality, skills, cron jobs, and configuration — that any business could adapt to their own needs. Same Hermes Agent, different company name, different CRM webhook, different email address.</p>
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<ul>
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<li>How did we set up a cold email agent that sends 5 personalized emails per day without any human drafting?</li>
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<li>How did we connect a Hermes agent to our CRM so it can read, write, and update contact records automatically?</li>
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<li>How did we build an inbox sorter that runs every hour and keeps our inbox clean?</li>
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<li>How did we structure our sales agent's personality so it sounds like a human, not a bot?</li>
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<li>How do we handle the awkward moments — when the agent drafts a bad email, or misclassifies a prospect, or sends something Oliver wouldn't have written?</li>
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</ul>
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<p>Each post will cover one workflow, start to finish. The setup, the prompts, the mistakes, the fixes. Real numbers, not theory — packaged so you can use the same patterns.</p>
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<div class="series-card">
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<h3>What to expect</h3>
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<p>Posts in this series will be tagged with the <strong>story</strong> badge. Planned topics include:</p>
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<ul>
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<li>How our sales agent uses Hermes to send cold emails every day</li>
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<li>Building a CRM agent that talks to our n8n backend</li>
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<li>The hourly inbox sorter — spam classification, client routing, auto-reply</li>
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<li>How we use cron jobs to run business processes 24/7</li>
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<li>Dogfooding mistakes: what broke, what we fixed, what we learned</li>
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<li>Why we deleted the old cron job that sent 5 emails per hour (too many)</li>
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</ul>
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</div>
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<h2>This is not a tutorial</h2>
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<p>There are plenty of Hermes Agent tutorials — speed runs, guides, how-tos. This series is different. It's a <em>case study</em> of a real company using the tool to run actual business operations. Think of it as the behind-the-scenes look at how derez.ai works.</p>
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<p>Some of it will be specific to our setup. Some of it will be useful patterns you can adapt. All of it will be honest — including the parts where we got it wrong.</p>
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<h2>Where we are today</h2>
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<p>As of this post, we have:</p>
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<ul>
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<li><strong>4 cron jobs</strong> running daily — email sorter, cold email batch, reference feedback check, weekly strategy review</li>
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<li><strong>8 skills</strong> installed on our sales agent — cold email, CRM, email sending, pain point tracking, affiliate program, and more</li>
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<li><strong>Hundreds of emails</strong> sent through the agent — some replied to, most ignored, a few productive conversations started</li>
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<li><strong>One dedicated sales profile</strong> — a separate Hermes agent that only does sales work, isolated from the main agent</li>
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<li><strong>One reusable distribution</strong> — the entire sales agent packaged as a template with {{VARS}} instead of hardcoded values, ready for any company to adapt</li>
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</ul>
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<p>It's not a perfect system. We still have spam filters learning our patterns. We still send emails that get no reply. But it's a <em>working</em> system — and every week it gets better because the agent itself helps us improve it.</p>
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<p>That's the part I find most interesting. The sales agent doesn't just send emails. It also reviews the results, suggests improvements, and updates its own approach. The cron job that reviews ICP strategy every Saturday? It's run by the same Hermes agent that sends the cold emails.</p>
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<p>The agent is not a tool we use. The agent is a colleague who works on the business with us.</p>
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<div class="pro-tip">
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<p><strong>Coming up in the next story:</strong> We're releasing the entire sales agent profile as an open-source Hermes profile distribution. Every skill, every cron job, every template — with {{VARS}} placeholders so you can plug in your own company name, CRM webhook, and email address. One command to install, five minutes to configure. That's the whole point of this series: build it once, share it, and let everyone run their business on Hermes.</p>
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<div class="pro-tip" style="border-left-color: #888; margin-top: 40px;">
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<p><strong>Want to build your own sales agent?</strong> We're using the same product we sell. Get your own Hermes Agent instance at derez.ai — full SSH, dashboard, backups, and a prompt builder that makes setup take minutes, not hours. Use code <strong>blog950</strong> for your first month free.</p>
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<p style="margin-top: 8px;"><a href="https://derez.ai/#pricing">Get Started →</a></p>
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<p style="margin-top: 48px; font-size: 0.85rem; color: #666;">
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<a href="https://derez.ai">derez.ai</a> —
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<a href="https://derez.ai/#blog">Blog</a> —
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