← Behind the Craft
Behind the Craft
How This 5x Founder Runs His Startup Solo With AI Agents (OpenClaw, Codex, Devin) | Ryan Carson
00:39:26
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- [00:00]
Ryan Carson
The big thing everybody needs to remember about agents is that they are cron jobs and markdown files. I'm probably shipping at least 10 PRs a day, sometimes a lot more.
- [00:09]
Peter
It's almost easier to onboard and train agents than to train humans.
- [00:13]
Ryan Carson
It's a million times easier. In startups, we used to say, just do the bare minimum to get the MVP out. Do not spend time on systems or processes or documentation. That's literally reversed now. So now as startup founder, you have to spend a lot of time to set up your documentation, your reference images, build all that into a cron job, a skill file, and then you suddenly are unlocked and you're doing the work of 10 people.
- [00:39]
Peter
So let's talk about OpenClaw first. So I think both you and I have set up Open Claw. It's still a little bit janky, but I think you guys who work with do a bunch of stuff and you wrote this awesome article. Maybe you can use that as a framing of walking through your setup.
- [00:51]
Ryan Carson
So like Peter said, the truth is that this stuff is still really hard to use. Right. So anyone who tells you that they're, you know, waving a wand and getting Open Claw, you know, to change their entire life and their entire business is not being truthful to you. So basically, you know, I've been fortunate to run a number of companies. I've. I've had several real executive assistants that are humans in the past. And my goal was to turn R2, my openclaw, into an amazing executive assistant or chief of staff. So I started working on that and I built a system called called Claw Chief. What? Claw Chief is basically a set of markdown files. And that's basically it. It's really simple. It's some cron jobs and some markdown files. And here's what it does. So R2 schedules meetings for me, parses booking links so calendlys. He can actually click a calendly and go in and book time for me. Every 15 minutes, he does a sweep of my inbox on my calendar and my priorities, and then pings me in Slack. That's our primary communication channel. R2 follows up on emails. Proact. So if he notices that an email that he sent to schedule a meeting that hasn't got a reply, helping that person does business development outreach. So one of the cool things that Archie does every day is he goes out and does research for me, puts potential business development contacts in a spreadsheet, and then reaches out to them as me to try to book a meeting. So this is Open Source. So if you want your open cloud to behave like an executive assistant, basically just go grab this repo, tell your openclaw to look at it and then to install it. And you'll find that there's a couple basic things in here. One of the most important things is this thing called priority map. And so the priority map essentially says these are the projects and the people in my life that are a priority. And that way it can make good decisions. Autoresolver is something that if R2 can resolve, you know, a question or a task, then he does that. And this is the way of telling them how to do that, how it works. Okay, so what is going to happen here is let me. Let me switch over to another screen, which is how I actually manage my open cloth. So I use VS code. I also have Codex open. I also have cloud code open. I also have Devin open. Right? So VS code is what I use to mess with R2. And the way I do that, you'll notice that I'm ssh into the MacBook Pro, which is down here in my closet. And that's where R2 lives. So SShing through tailscale is like a perfect way to configure your open claw, Right? So that's what's happening here. Now you'll notice as well. We'll start a new thread that I'm using codecs here, right? So I've installed the Codex plugin. I'm logged in with my ChatGPT Pro subscription because everybody knows this. Like, right now, OpenAI is really subsidizing tokens. So for 200 bucks a month, I mean, I'm probably getting, I mean, probably 2 to $3,000 worth of tokens for 200 bucks, right?
- [04:16]
Peter
Yeah, you got to take the moment while it lasts.
- [04:19]
Ryan Carson
Yeah, I'm like, hey, I have investors, man. I need to be as frugal as I can with this. So I'm going to take it while I can. So, you know, the way that I configure R2 is mostly by talking to Codex. You know, I could go in, I could mess with the actual configuration files. I could go into the OpenClaw dashboard, but I say I don't want to. So, you know, let's just ask codecs to do something. Check on our OpenClaw setup and make sure that it is healthy and operating correctly right now. All right, so Codex is going to go off and check an open claw. So I have an open claw workspace. And this is actually a clone of the open source open claw project. And the reason why I do that, and this is kind of a pro tip, is that you want to allow Codex or your openclaw to inspect its own code. Right. So often what I'll, what I'll say to Codex is gonna pull the latest changes on the Open Claw repo and look at the source code and tell me, you know, how to update yourself to do X, Y, Z. And then it can go and actually look at its source code, right. And then say, oh, this is how I work. I'm going to go ahead and do this and update that.
- [05:31]
Peter
Okay. So it doesn't break my updates. Is that the idea?
- [05:34]
Ryan Carson
That's part of it. Or if it does break, it can go and figure out why. Right. So to zoom out, what's hap. You know, what's happening here in Vs Code is this is essentially an agent that is fixing OpenClaw, right? Because often OpenClaw will break or it will break itself and it can't fix itself. And so by having this kind of agent on top of it, you can.
- [05:55]
Peter
I see. Otherwise you have to go open your Mac and go like, clean up yourself.
- [05:59]
Ryan Carson
Right? And you know, and like I said, my Mac lives down there. Like it's on a laptop and I can't really get to it. And also, as you know, I was in Japan and it's like, man, if openclock goes down, I can't go fix it unless I can SSH into the machine with, with, you know, codecs and have it fix it.
- [06:18]
Peter
That's very smart. Yeah, that's very smart. This episode is brought to you by Whisper Flow. Whisper Flow saves me at least three hours a week and is one of my favorite AI apps by far. It's just so much faster to dictate to AI using your voice than to type. You just talk naturally and it outputs clean, ready to send text. Whisper Flow even removes filler words and formats your sentences for you. I use Whisper Flow for everything, including drafting user posts, writing product specs, replying on Slack and more. It works on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android across all of your favorite apps. Try it free@whispersflow.com and use my code PETERWHISPERFLOW to get six months free. That's Peter WhisperFlow. Now back to our episode.
- [06:59]
Ryan Carson
So just to recap for everybody watching, so we talked about a couple things. We've got Claw Chief, which is my specific flavor of openclaw that allows openclaw to be a really great chief of staff and executive assistant. And you can see here, this is the Claw Chief directory Right. So when you clone that repo that I open sourced, this is where these files end up. Right. And I'm not going to show you priority map because it has some very personal details about what my priorities are and who the important people are in my life. But that is in the priority map file. You know, one of the key things to understand here, like the big thing everybody needs to remember about agents is that they are cron jobs and markdown files, right. And so if, if your agent has a good cron and a good skill, you know, markdown file, it can do a lot.
- [07:48]
Peter
And priority map is just a. Is it kind of long term priority or is it every week? The priority is like a task list is long term, right?
- [07:54]
Ryan Carson
It's long term. So in, I would say long term and like think of as like quarterly. And so right now my main priorities for the business are X, y, Z. So R2 knows that. And then, and then super long term is the people in my life that matter. Right. So my family, my friends, you know, key business contacts, et cetera.
- [08:11]
Peter
And then you have like some sort of agents MD that loads it into context.
- [08:15]
Ryan Carson
Yes. So in Agents MD it says, okay, your main priority is the priority map. But in this cron job. So I'm going to close this so you can see this. Let's actually look at what crons we've got. Right. So this executive assistant sweep, right? This is the main cron that causes R2 to operate. You can see it happens every 15 minutes. So executive assistant sweep, use the existing executive assistance skill. Right. So you can see that this message is really minimal. It should actually be. I actually probably want this to be even shorter. I would probably delete this, for instance, and just say use this skill.
- [08:58]
Peter
Is this basically like the heartbeat? You kind of made a custom heartbeat?
- [09:01]
Ryan Carson
Yes. So the thing to know about OpenClaw is you can't really rely on heartbeats. Like heartbeats are not actually a time triggered thing. It's basically Open Claw saying, whenever I think about it, you know, I should do this thing. Whereas a cron is a deterministic, repeatable run, right? So every 15 minutes I want this to run and I want it to run this executive assistant skill, right?
- [09:24]
Peter
Oh, I didn't know you kind of rely on heartbeats. I thought like, you know, it's a heartbeat, it triggers like every 30 minutes or something.
- [09:29]
Ryan Carson
It supposedly does, but I've found it not reliable. And so by I found crons to be more deterministic. Now maybe someone from the open Claw team will correct Me. Or maybe that's gotten better. But I find crons are the bulletproof way to do something deterministically. And then, you know, then you. Then you want everything to be dry, right? Do not repeat yourself. You don't want to. You don't want a big message in this cron that is then sort of repeated in the skill, right? So let's go into our executive assistant skill. But the idea is this is how to do an executive assistant sweep, right? So check these email inboxes, get these things done.
- [10:11]
Peter
Why don't you try asking your. Do you have your open cloud set up on Slack or something? Can you just ask it to talk about what the executive skill does without, you know, like, don't, don't, don't share any confidential information. Like.
- [10:22]
Ryan Carson
Yeah, I noticed you tried to prompt inject R2, by the way. I thought that was fun.
- [10:26]
Peter
Yeah, it is, actually.
- [10:28]
Ryan Carson
How did it do?
- [10:29]
Peter
It did pretty well. It only gave me some generic information. Didn't give me your credit cards or anything, so.
- [10:34]
Ryan Carson
Which is great. Okay, so let me, let me open up Slack here. I actually told my sisters. I was like, hey, guys, try to hack my, my openclaw. Okay, so what you're seeing, this is another really good, I think, OpenClaw hack. So I have a channel called Ryan R2 and the reason why I do that versus direct messages is it makes it really easy to have threads. And so what I can do in here is create a thread. So we'll call this chat with Peter. This is a little extra work. But now I've got a thread and it's just kind of nice, like I can contain all my thoughts for something. And so we'll ask R2 tell us how the executive skill works.
- [11:19]
Peter
And to set this up on Slack is just like hooking up to like there's like some sort of connector or something, right?
- [11:25]
Ryan Carson
Yes. So what R2 is, is an app, right? So you can see right here. This is a pain in the ass. I'm not gonna lie. Like, a lot of this stuff is very fiddly. So I had to go through and create a custom Slack app. You know, there was like a manifest. It was a whole thing. And I think the reason why I'm persevering here and persisting is because I really want this to be as custom to me as possible. You know, for instance, every just launched, I think they call it like a plus one, which is like open claw in the cloud on demand, and you can just plug it in. I think that people are going to build billion dollar businesses doing that. Like I think that's absolutely smart. And everybody is going to want digital, you know, digital employees and they want to plug them in quickly. But I want to be as close to the metal on this as I can right now.
- [12:13]
Peter
Yeah.
- [12:14]
Ryan Carson
And so by by booting this all up myself and really getting to know how open cloud works inside of a business, I think is valuable. So R2 saying the executive assistant skill is the ops layer for inbox plus calendar. It works roughly like this. It starts by checking the live priority and auto resolution rules. We talked about that. It reviews current todoist tasks. So this is one little upgrade I made. So todoist is just a great to do app. It's, it's not, you know, it's nothing rocket science y but it's a, it's a good app, it's got a good API, it's free. And so instead of using markdown files for my tasks, I use Todoist. So R2 can write to Todoist, he can update it, he can change it for email. Uses the Gmail helper. So I'm using the, the Google CLI right now instead of gog. It's a little better, you know. So this is basically how it works.
- [13:04]
Peter
So every 15 minutes it kind of runs through this stuff. Let's take an example. Like for email, it just checks is there any new messages and then sends you any important stuff.
- [13:14]
Ryan Carson
So it has its own email address and so at my domain. Right. So R2 has his own email, he's got his own GitHub account. I think it's good to treat your OpenClaw the same way you would treat a real human employee. So real email address, you know, real permissions on that email address, a real GitHub account, as much as you can. I'm starting to use Agent Mail a little bit more, which is a cool YC startup that allows your agent to have an email address. But I think that's important.
- [13:47]
Peter
It has its own email but it. Can you give me a read access to your email?
- [13:51]
Ryan Carson
Yes. Yep. So and again like an ea, like you would give usually an EA access read access to your email to your calendar and then you would give it write access to your calendar as itself. Right. So it's, it's never creating things as me. Right. So all the time like I'll get an email from someone and they'll say yep, I want to meet and then I'll copy R2 in. I'll say hey R2, find us a time right. And then what R2 does is, you know, he. He looks at all my calendars and then sends a list of times at work. I mean, we did this for this call, right? Where.
- [14:27]
Peter
Yeah, yeah.
- [14:28]
Ryan Carson
You know, he's checking stuff and, and, and then he books a meeting. But it comes, the Invite is from R2, and then I'm added as a attendee, just like a real assistant would.
- [14:38]
Peter
Yeah. I think just that setup alone is probably going to save people a lot of time.
- [14:41]
Ryan Carson
Yeah. So, you know, we're going to get into how do you run a whole company by yourself now? Right.
- [14:47]
Peter
Yeah.
- [14:48]
Ryan Carson
And, you know, so I've raised a $2 million seed round. Like, I have money to hire people, but I'm not going to hire anybody for a while. And the reason why goes back to, like, the purest sense of a startup founder. Like, you want to understand every job and do before you hire to fill. Right. And you want to feel the pain and know that you need to hire before you do. Right. So I'm, you know, I'm using all of these agents to do these skills and to learn directly how to run them myself. And then I'll hire an agent, augmented person, you know, to then start doing that.
- [15:26]
Peter
Yeah. I mean, it's almost easier. I mean, I hate to say it, but it's almost easier to onboard and train agents for some of this.
- [15:31]
Ryan Carson
It's a million times easier. It's like, I mean, I love people, right. I am a person. But the. The reality is like an. An agent is hundreds of times easier and faster to onboard, and they retain all the training and you can improve it. Right. And then they retain, you know, throughout. So the problem is if a human leaves you, they exit with all the training. Right. Whereas, you know, the agent always retains his training. So that's what I'm doing.
- [16:01]
Peter
Got it. Okay, so we covered the executive assistant sweep, the cron job every 15 minutes. Maybe you can just talk about at a high level what other cron jobs you have going on. And I love how you're using Slack, by the way, because I still use Telegram and it's way hard to organize the conversations. And also I get random porn bots messaging me. I can't block it.
- [16:22]
Ryan Carson
You're like, what am I doing here?
- [16:24]
Peter
It's not very serious work environment.
- [16:25]
Ryan Carson
Yeah, it's like working in the alleyway or something. You're like, what am I doing here? Yeah, Slack is great. It's very professional and the threading is important. I mean, I don't understand how you would not have Threads, and obviously you can't. All right, so this is a nightly backup. So clearly you. You know, if you. If your MacBook goes down or wherever you're running, your OpenCloud goes down, like you don't want to lose all of your setup. So R2 actually backs himself up to a simple git repo every night. That's pretty straightforward. Oh, yeah. So this is my prospecting skill. This is kind of fun. So this runs once a day, and this goes out and finds people for me to meet with. And so you can see there's a prospecting skill. And this is awesome, y'. All. I literally have gotten, I mean, already in the. Probably the last couple weeks, like 10 to 20 meetings this way. And these are cold outreach meetings. So basically what I've said here is add Verify Connecticut prospects to untangles Outreach sheet. So we have a Google Sheet. It's kind of. I'm using Google Sheets as my main CRM. You know, eventually we'll probably have a postgres database or something, but this works out pretty well. Everybody already knows my email address. That's fine. This is basically saying, okay, we want to find out folks that are family law attorneys. We want you to find their LinkedIn, and then we also want you to find Mediators. And I've also plugged in. I use the API for Fire Crawl on this. So by default with OpenClaw, I think it tries to push you towards the Brave API for search. And I just.
- [18:13]
Peter
Browsing. Yeah. Okay.
- [18:14]
Ryan Carson
And I just don't think it's very good. So, you know, it's like for whatever it is, 20 bucks a month for Firecrawl, I think it's really worth paying for a really good API for Agent Search. Agent Crawl. Right. So the unlock there is. Hey, these tools are important, like augment your agent with a good tool and, you know, make sure that it's equipped with the right thing. So this goes out every night. So Fire, it's using Fire Crawl Scrape, you know, doing all sorts of stuff in there. So.
- [18:42]
Peter
So it's basically just doing web searches for diverse attorneys and stuff. And it's adding to a spreadsheet and then it drafts the email and actually sends the email.
- [18:51]
Ryan Carson
Yeah. So this, this is one instance where I've given it the right to send an email as me. So. So my. Obviously, Ryan Carson dot com. I've had it probably literally for, I don't know, 25 years. So it's a good domain for deliverability. And so I, I decided to give it, you know, Send access to that. And it basically has a service key to do that, which was a major pain in the ass, but it's done.
- [19:16]
Peter
How do you prevent it from, like sending. Let's say I'm a diverse attorney. How do you prevent it from sending me the same email twice or something using that spreadsheet too?
- [19:23]
Ryan Carson
I think it's. It's pretty good. Like, so, so honestly, I. That hasn't happened once. Um, and. And the reason why is because you. You have to take the time to set up Claw Chief or something like it. Like, okay, here is the system, right? So you've got contacts in this spreadsheet, right? The rule is always checking, you know, if you've sent an email before to somebody. And it's a little painful because, like, you wouldn't have to say that to a person. Right? So I think, unfortunately, you still have to be overly specific and pedantic, I would say, when you specify these things. But you do it once and then you don't have to specify ever again.
- [20:01]
Peter
Got it.
- [20:02]
Ryan Carson
So there's some weird bugs, though. So I noticed that it would. It seemed like R2 would reply to an email by sending a fresh email instead of replying in the thread. And I was like, why are you doing this? This is crazy. Like, why are you sending a fresh email instead of replying in the thread? And I couldn't figure it out. It was driving me crazy. And I figured out I had specified in one of these markdown files you should copy in my other account. So I have, you know, my untangle account, my personal account. And what was happening is that R2 is copying my other email address. So it looked like a new email to me. And so basically it was doing exactly what I said, and it was replying in the thread, but it was also creating a new email. So the point is, you have to pay attention to what you're saying in these markdown files because the agent will do it.
- [21:01]
Peter
It'll follow your instructions. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Okay, so let's kind of wrap up the open call stuff. So I guess basically you've set this thing up to be your kind of chief of staff, but also your salesperson to a certain extent, and also helping you manage your tasks and other stuff. Right. Is that kind of why that's.
- [21:20]
Ryan Carson
Yeah, that's the basic. And then the unlock is if it really knows all these things about your priority map and what's going on, then you can have a conversation every morning about, what are we doing today. Right. Like you would with the Chief of staff. And I think if you're, you know, a solo founder or you're operating by yourself, it's very helpful to have that very knowledgeable, very informed, you know, entity to. To chat with for a little bit when you're trying to figure out, like, are we focusing on the right things today?
- [21:48]
Peter
Yeah.
- [21:49]
Ryan Carson
So it's very, very good for that.
- [21:50]
Peter
That's what I use mine for, just to get therapy and chat with it.
- [21:54]
Ryan Carson
Yeah, it's good. I mean, I mean, you have to know, obviously it's going to be a little sycophantic and it's going to try to please you more than you wish it would, but overall it's pretty good. I will say it's funny, though, because I'm going to show this briefly. This is a written piece of paper. And as of this week, I've decided to switch my weekly priority task to paper. Which sounds crazy, but what I was finding is that it was becoming more and more difficult for me to have visibility on the week. Like, am I doing the right stuff this week? I know about today, you know, I know about this quarter, but what about this week? And is my resolution level correct for my tasks? And honestly, like, having a list and, you know, and being able to see did I do everything? This week has been very cathartic and very good. And I want to give my wife props because that's her system.
- [22:46]
Peter
So I just use a whiteboard, dude. I just use a whiteboard where I can only list three tasks. It helps you focus too. Smart.
- [22:52]
Ryan Carson
So you already figured this out. Like, it. I think I was bouncing too much between today and this quarter and I just needed something that was more at the weekly level and it's been a big unlock.
- [23:03]
Peter
Do you have to do anything to fix openclass memory? Because I feel like it's kind of spotty there too.
- [23:09]
Ryan Carson
You know, I haven't. I've stuck with out of the box memory. I've been tempted to go with QMD and some other things, but I've decided not to mess with it. Um, and this kind of goes back to, like a question I think all of us are. Are battling with now that we can build so easily and quickly. There's this. There's this, you know, temptation to say, screw it. Like, I'm not going to use Open Call. I'm going to build my own. Like, I'm going to you. You know, I'm just going to build my own harness, make it exactly what I want, keep it really simple. But then you end up maintaining it instead of working. And so I've decided as much as I can, I'm going to just do out of the box open claw with custom skills and custom crons and I'm just going to call it a day. I haven't even tried Hermes yet.
- [23:55]
Peter
Yeah, that's not real work. Like just trying to switch to these different agents and trying to optimize them. It's very interesting. You can make good YouTube videos off of it, but it's not real work.
- [24:03]
Ryan Carson
It's not real output, it's not real work. People, you got to do real work. And so at some level you have to find this perfect line between customization and personalization and power tools and not building all the tools. Like, you got to let go and buy a couple tools off the shelf and then get a, you know, get a custom drill, but not build a custom, you know, machine.
- [24:29]
Peter
Okay, cool. All right, well, let's, let's move on to your AI building stack. Right. Because I don't think you use open cloud to code. Right? So, like, what, what do you.
- [24:38]
Ryan Carson
This is Devin. The whole thing that matters here is that Devin uses cloud environments. It's only cloud, right? So you do no local development at all. And I think a lot of people use Devin, like one or two years ago, and it wasn't very good. But the truth is, now it's freaking amazing because this always works. So, you know, I can say, you know, tell me about our code base and what this is doing. It's saying, setting up. It's actually spinning up a vm and it's a perfectly configured real production vm. And so I never, ever, ever now have to be on my, well, not very often on my local machine, trying to figure out, like, what port I'm on and if my dependencies are up to date or if I've got some weird conflict with homebrew. None of that matters anymore. It's all in the cloud.
- [25:31]
Peter
I see.
- [25:32]
Ryan Carson
And this is a big unlock. So I think what's going to happen here is most serious people are going to move to just use cloud engineering. I don't think it makes sense to really code on your local machine very often, if ever. And so I use Devin for all my engineering.
- [25:51]
Peter
But what about, like, you know, all the clis and stuff? Like all the stuff they can install locally? I guess you can install it on here too, right?
- [25:57]
Ryan Carson
It doesn't matter. Yeah, you spend about an hour setting up your development environment, right? You know, you carefully make sure all your dependencies are installed. You make sure it all works. You make sure NPM run dev works, like you do all that and then it works and then you can use it over and over again. So the other big unlock here is this. So I'm going to show you. A lot of people are doing this. These are called schedules. I think everyone, again who's doing this stuff seriously is using automations. And so what you'll find here is that if you're running your own startup or if you're trying to augment yourself or your team, you're going to be running things on schedules. And so for instance, weekly full case coverage. So this is an automation that literally runs the entire user experience through my app, from signup to completing a divorce case and it does it automatically once a week. And the way this works is it uses a playbook. And again, so this is kind of, I just want people to think whether you use Devin or not. I think the idea of having automations that use Playbooks and then increase and then making those playbooks better and better is a very powerful mechanism to use.
- [27:15]
Peter
What is a playbook?
- [27:16]
Ryan Carson
Yeah, so a playbook is similar to a skill. So what this is telling Devin how to do is how to do this entire run through process. So it's like what's needed from the user. Okay. Read the skill, set up everything, it's just how to do it. And so that is being used by this automation every week.
- [27:37]
Peter
So it's like using some playwright kind of thing to click through.
- [27:40]
Ryan Carson
Yeah, and that's the other thing about Devin that's just amazing is like the browser testing just works. So the agent can use its own browser in the cloud absolutely reliably and deterministically.
- [27:52]
Peter
Got it. So those are just like cron jobs, right? Like they're, they're basically just.
- [27:56]
Ryan Carson
These are cron jobs with skills attached. Like I said, the whole thing with agents is cron jobs and skills. Right. So if you can nail that down, you know, a couple others, like I do a lot of these smoke tests where it's like sign up and use this feature in the app and make sure it works, record your screen and then tell me if anything breaks. We're doing all that. All right. So that is my engineering. I use Devin. I love it. I think it's, I think it's, I think it's state of the art. So I do a lot of this. Now as you know, GPT5.5 just came out yesterday and we know that it's really good in codecs. Right. So I'm going to share My Codex screen.
- [28:33]
Peter
Let me ask you this. While you share screen. Since you're a solo founder, do you even do PRs and stuff? Like, how do you review your code?
- [28:39]
Ryan Carson
Okay, so what you'll find is that if you have a good code factory, and what I mean by code factory is that agents are writing as close to 100% of the code as possible and reviewing and shipping 100% of the code. If you actually want to do that, you need to actually have a software development lifecycle that feels like it's designed for a very large team. Because what you find is that your agents are just like humans and they need reproducible processes that don't rely on you. Right. And so PRs are absolutely key to that. So, like, if we go. So everything is a pr, what I do is when a PR is ready to ship, so it's actually working on some stuff. So I have this playbook called LAN pr, and LAN PR basically explains to Devin exactly how to review Resolve and then merge a PR without me. And I use this probably, I mean, 10 to 20 times a day. And I. I really don't look at code anymore. I mean, maybe occasionally, but I'm reading a lot of PRs. I'm reading a lot of. I wouldn't even say I read the PRs as much as I read the markdown, and I read what the agent is saying to me about it.
- [29:59]
Peter
Okay, Ryan, so I love to hear, just like, end to end, now that you're a solo founder, how you ship a new feature for untangled.
- [30:07]
Ryan Carson
Yeah.
- [30:07]
Peter
Like, what do you use to plan? What do you use to ship?
- [30:09]
Ryan Carson
Yep. So I start in Devon, and, you know, I've spent a lot of time customizing that environment. So there's. There's a lot of agents at MD files, there's a lot of knowledge, there's a lot of skills. So I think everybody has to start there. Right. So now that that's set up properly, then I go in and I basically use whisper flow. Like, everybody and I just talk for a while and I'll say, okay, you know, here's everything. I'm thinking about this feature, and I just brain dump. And then I'll say, help me make a prd. And then I have a skill, and it's not rocket science, but it's basically how to turn something into a prd. And really all that is is. Is encouraging the agent to ask me questions and clarify. And so we'll go through that process for a while, and then I'll ask it to write The PRD as a markdown file and then I'll say build it. And the interesting thing is, I think, you know, with Codex or Devin or some of the tools, they're starting to do auto compaction pretty well now. So I actually work in one thread and I know there's auto compaction happening magically in the background, but I don't really have to think about, you know, stopping a thread and restarting anymore. I think the really good agent harnesses do that for you now. And it's pretty, it's pretty good. And then honestly, you know, good tools like a Devin or a Codex or. I don't use cloud code. I haven't used cloud code in a long time. But I think between Codex and Devin, honestly, I'll walk away at that point, you know, or I'll completely switch context to something else and, you know, I'll let that, you know, work for 10, 20 minutes and then I'll come back. I think the other important thing is the reason why I ended up going with Devin is because of the testing feature. So it has a really good feedback loop where the agent can use a browser and try the feature. And this is what I tried to set up locally, where you're trying to get the browser to work, you're trying to get the feedback loop to work. It was hard, whereas it's just all built in Devin. And so it will do a screencast, record it, and then it will often notice problems with its own PR and then it will fix it and then it will come back and then I'll do some feedback and then I'll use the landit or Land PR skill and then ship it. And I'm probably shipping at least 10 PRs a day, I would say sometimes a lot more. So that's the primary way that I'm building stuff right now. And in addition, I mean, you don't just build stuff. You have to do marketing and sales. Right. So that's where I'm using OpenClaw to do a lot of the biz dev outreach, land the meetings, and then I take the meetings and then move things forward.
- [32:52]
Peter
So do you like work on multiple features at the same time or kind of like, like maybe two at a time?
- [32:57]
Ryan Carson
It depends. I mean, I, I think it, it's probably one to two at a time. Um, I think we all know it's easy to build features now that the problem is how do you get users, how do you build revenue? And so mostly what I think about is marketing and sales and go to market and and so the big unlock there is that I had Devin build out a skill to use the API for Google Ads. And so it basically built a CLI for itself to use the Google Ads API. And now I'll go in and chat to it every day and say, how is, how's our Google Ads campaign doing? How can we optimize it? And so I don't use the Google Ads UI at all. I just, you know, talk to Devin about it.
- [33:42]
Peter
Yeah, probably not that good, the Google Ads ui.
- [33:44]
Ryan Carson
So I mean it's just very complex. You know, you used to have to hire these agency to do your Google Ads, right? Because it's so freaking complex. And the great thing about using an agent is it can deal with that
- [33:55]
Peter
complexity, use it to set up the ads for you too, or just read the stats, everything.
- [34:01]
Ryan Carson
So it has, it's basically has upsert capabilities so it can insert, update, delete any campaign. And that sounds amazing, but all I did is talk to Devin about it and you know, built the cli, gave it an API key, created an app which you have to do, and then bada Bing.
- [34:20]
Peter
And how about the. I was gonna ask you about the ad creative and also the designs for your product.
- [34:25]
Ryan Carson
Right, okay, so I think we all know this now. Image 2, I think is the formal name of the new OpenAI image model. It's just so good. I mean, it's so, so good. And so I have a workflow where, you know, content creation is obviously part of the key here for driving organic traffic. So what I do is I go out and find an expert to interview. I use descript to do that. And then what I'll do is I'll quickly chop that interview up into 60 second segments. And then the key is I upload those to a Google Drive and they're just MP4s. And then what I did is I set up again a playbook in Devin to say every night, see if there is MP4s in that folder. I want you to make an API call. I use Gemini for this, make a call to Gemini, watch the video and write a description of it. And then I want the new OpenAI model image model to create me a really nice cover image for that video. And so I've got a nice cover image because as you know, that's like the whole key. Then it writes the copy with Gemini and then I publish it all to social using Publer. And Publer is just a, has a good API for publishing a social. So this is the machine, right, like you're trying to Build the machine. Right. And then eventually I'll hire someone to run marketing, but I want to know how to do it and operate the machine myself first and make sure that it works well.
- [35:56]
Peter
And you're able to get the brand consistency from, like, just some prompts.
- [36:00]
Ryan Carson
It's crazy. Yeah. You know, there's a setup cost. Right. So essentially what I've done, and this is similar with cloud design, which we're all playing with right now, the idea is to create a design MD and some reference images. Right. So what I. I've actually paid a designer, his name is Brett from Design Joy. He costs about six grand a month. I had him do all the initial branding work and all of the initial social images. So I have a library of good. Of good image. And now what I do is I use those as reference images with a very good design at md. And then I find that the new image model from OpenAI is completely able to reproduce it.
- [36:41]
Peter
All right. You just save $6,000 a month, I guess, basically.
- [36:46]
Ryan Carson
I mean, you know, I think it's important to pay a designer to do the first cut. Right. We're very much in a world where you need the taste and experience of a very good designer to build out your brand, your layout and some basic social images. But after that, I think. I think honestly, we're in a world now where you can use cloud design plus OpenAI's new image model to get unlimited, you know, perfectly branded imagery. It's wild.
- [37:11]
Peter
Awesome, man. So. So I guess the takeaway from this interview is like, I feel like a lot of the work we do these days is just like setting up the system to do the work. Right. Is that a good takeaway from the
- [37:20]
Ryan Carson
interview or it is take the time to set up the system to do the work because then, number one, you are understanding how the work happens and you're refining it. And then you either bring on more agents to augment that or you bring on a human that's augmented with agents to do that. But it's funny because I think we used to, in startups, we used to say just do the bare minimum to get the MVP out. Like, do not spend time on systems or processes or documentation. But it's literally reversed now. So now as startup founder, you have to spend a lot of time to set up your software development life cycle, your documentation, your reference images. Build all that into a cron job with a skill file, and then you find that, you know, then you suddenly are unlocked and you're doing the work of 10 people. But the Setup is pretty brutal.
- [38:11]
Peter
I feel like, especially for your startup, maybe most of your data is freed up to talk to other humans and like, you know, do the. Do the more human stuff, right?
- [38:19]
Ryan Carson
Yep. Yeah. I mean, you know, I had. It's interesting because I built Untangle before we raised money. You know, I built basically the MVP in my free time and. And so the product was basically built and now it's all about go to market. So I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing, which is fun.
- [38:38]
Peter
I think working companies tend to bifurcate between product people and marketing people, and you gotta do both, man.
- [38:44]
Ryan Carson
You can't just do one of it now. You need to do it all. Like, you need to think about, well, which features will unlock revenue and then how do I. Quickly building them is almost trivial now. And now it's the issue of go to market and adoption and product LED growth. And like, that's the skill is. It's almost everybody as a founder now, even if you're not.
- [39:05]
Peter
Awesome. Ryan, thank you so much for sharing so much information and also like resources for free online. And I guess people can find me on Twitter at. Is it Ryan Carson?
- [39:15]
Ryan Carson
Yep. I am everywhere as Ryan Carson. So just Google Ryan Carson and you will find me.
- [39:20]
Peter
Okay, cool.
- [39:21]
Ryan Carson
All right, man.
- [39:21]
Peter
Well, you're personally an inspiration to me, so thanks so much for chatting again.
- [39:24]
Ryan Carson
Thanks for having me on. Take care.
- [39:26]
Peter
Cool.