How I Built an AI Assistant That Runs My Business

I Was Drowning in Busywork

About a month ago, my daily routine looked something like this: wake up, check emails, respond to a few DMs on Twitter, write a LinkedIn post, schedule some social content, send cold outreach emails, publish a blog post, check analytics, follow up with leads. Repeat.

By the time I actually sat down to do the work that moves the needle, like building my product or closing deals, it was already 2 PM. Half the day was gone, spent on tasks that were important but not exactly high-leverage.

I'm a solopreneur running a small content and SaaS business. There's no marketing team. No VA. Just me and a growing list of things that need to happen every single day to keep the machine running.

The worst part? When I skipped a day, everything suffered. No tweets meant no impressions. No outreach meant no leads. No blog post meant no SEO momentum. Consistency is the game, and I was losing it.

So I started looking for a way to automate the repetitive stuff. Not the thinking, not the strategy, just the execution.

Discovering AI Agents (Not Just Chatbots)

I'd been using ChatGPT and Claude for writing drafts and brainstorming for over a year. They're great for that. But they can't actually do things. They can't send an email. They can't post a tweet. They can't check your inbox and decide what needs a reply.

That's the difference between an AI chatbot and an AI agent. A chatbot talks. An agent acts.

I stumbled onto OpenClaw through a Reddit thread where someone described having an AI that runs on their computer, connected to their email, browser, and social accounts. It sounded too good to be true, so I tried it.

OpenClaw is basically an AI agent runtime. You give it access to your tools (email, Twitter, browser, file system, calendar) and it operates them on your behalf. It's not a SaaS dashboard with pre-built workflows. It's more like hiring a really fast intern who never sleeps, lives on your machine, and follows instructions precisely.

The key difference from something like Zapier or Make is that OpenClaw uses an actual language model (Claude, GPT, etc.) as the brain. So it doesn't just follow rigid if-then rules. It can read an email, understand the context, draft a reply in your voice, and send it. It can look at your Twitter feed, decide what's worth engaging with, and write a thoughtful reply.

That flexibility is what sold me.

Setting It Up: The First Weekend

I won't sugarcoat it. The initial setup took a full weekend. Not because it's complicated, but because I was figuring out what I actually wanted it to do.

Here's what I connected:

Email (Gmail)

I authorized OpenClaw to access my Gmail account. It can read incoming emails, draft replies, and send messages. I set up rules for what it should handle autonomously (newsletters, vendor emails, simple inquiries) and what it should flag for me (anything from a client, anything involving money, anything ambiguous).

The inbox triage alone saves me 30-40 minutes a day. It reads every new email, categorizes it, and either handles it or puts a summary in my daily briefing.

Twitter/X

This was the big one. I connected my Twitter account and gave it a set of instructions: engage with people in my niche, reply to interesting threads, share my content, and post original tweets based on topics I care about.

I was nervous about this. Nobody wants their AI to post something embarrassing. So I started with a "draft and review" mode where it would prepare tweets and I'd approve them. After a week of seeing that the quality was solid, I let it run autonomously for engagement (replies and likes) while still reviewing original posts.

My impressions went from around 15K per month to over 80K. Not because the content was revolutionary, but because consistency compounds. Posting 3-4 times a day and engaging with 20-30 accounts daily is something I never had the discipline to maintain manually.

Browser Automation

This is where it gets interesting. OpenClaw can control a browser, which means it can do basically anything you can do on the web. I use this for a few things:

Checking competitor sites for new content or pricing changes
Submitting my blog posts to aggregator sites and directories
Monitoring my analytics dashboards and flagging anything unusual
Filling out forms for podcast guest applications and partnership inquiries

It's like having a browser macro system, but one that can adapt when a website changes its layout or adds a new step to a form.

Blog Publishing

I write the drafts (or have Claude help me draft them), and OpenClaw handles everything after that: formatting, adding frontmatter, optimizing the meta description, selecting a featured image, committing to Git, and deploying. What used to be a 45-minute publishing process is now a 2-minute review.

What It Actually Does Every Day

Here's a typical day in the life of my AI assistant. This all happens automatically, starting at 8 AM:

Morning (8:00 - 9:00 AM)

Checks email inbox, categorizes and triages messages
Sends me a daily briefing: urgent emails, calendar events, metrics summary
Posts a morning tweet (usually something educational or a hot take on industry news)

Mid-Morning (9:00 - 12:00 PM)

Engages with Twitter, replying to relevant threads and liking posts from key accounts
Sends 10-15 personalized cold outreach emails to prospects from my lead list
Checks if any blog posts are scheduled for today, and if so, handles publishing

Afternoon (12:00 - 5:00 PM)

Monitors email for replies to outreach, flags hot leads
Posts a second tweet, usually sharing a blog post or a thread
Checks analytics, flags anything unusual (traffic spike, conversion drop)

Evening (5:00 - 8:00 PM)

Final Twitter engagement pass
Sends follow-up emails to people who opened but didn't reply
Writes a daily summary log so I can review what happened

The total active compute time is probably 2-3 hours spread across the day. The rest is just waiting for the right time to do things.

The Cold Outreach System

This deserves its own section because it's been the highest ROI automation for me.

I maintain a spreadsheet of potential clients and partners. Each row has a name, company, email, and a few notes about what they do. OpenClaw reads this list, researches each person (checks their website, recent tweets, LinkedIn activity), and writes a personalized cold email.

Not a mail merge with {first_name} swapped in. An actual personalized email that references something specific about their business. Something like:

"Hey Sarah, I saw your recent post about migrating from Heroku to Railway. We actually wrote a comparison guide on that topic last month. Thought you might find it useful. Also, I noticed you're not doing much with SEO for your developer tools blog. We help companies like yours get 3-5x more organic traffic. Worth a quick chat?"

The response rate on these is around 12-15%, which is significantly better than the 2-3% I was getting with my old template-based approach. The secret is specificity. When someone can tell the email was written for them, they're more likely to reply.

I send about 10-15 of these per day, 5 days a week. That's 50-75 personalized outreach emails per week that I barely think about. Some weeks, that pipeline alone generates 3-4 qualified calls.

Results After One Month

It's still early, but the trajectory is clear:

Time saved: I estimate 3-4 hours per day of tasks I no longer do manually. That's roughly 80 hours per month. At even a modest consulting rate, that's thousands of dollars in recovered time.

Twitter growth: My account is actually active every single day now. Engagement is climbing because the account is consistently posting and replying. I'm already getting more impressions in one month than I did in the previous three combined.

Email outreach: I've sent over 200 personalized emails in my first month. That pipeline simply didn't exist before because I never had time to do manual outreach at this volume. The replies are starting to come in.

Blog publishing: Went from publishing 2 posts per month (when I felt motivated) to 10+ posts in my first month. The AI handles the entire publishing workflow, which removes enough friction that I actually write more.

Consistency: This is the biggest win. Before, my marketing was feast-or-famine. I'd have a productive week followed by two weeks of silence. Now everything runs like clockwork, whether I'm having a great day or a terrible one. And I can already see where this is heading in 6 months: compounding growth across every channel.

The Honest Take: What Doesn't Work

I'm not going to pretend this is perfect. Here's what I've learned the hard way:

It's Not Fully Autonomous

You still need to review things. I check my AI's work every morning, about 15-20 minutes of scanning through what it did the previous day. Occasionally it misreads a situation, like replying to a sarcastic tweet sincerely, or sending a cold email to someone who's clearly not a fit. The error rate is low (maybe 2-3% of actions need correction), but you can't just set it and forget it entirely.

Voice Matching Takes Time

Getting the AI to write in your voice takes iteration. The first week of tweets sounded generic and corporate. I had to provide examples of my writing style, tell it what phrases I use and don't use, and give it feedback on dozens of drafts. Now it's about 85% there. Close enough that nobody has noticed, but I can still tell the difference.

Some Platforms Fight Automation

I've had issues with rate limiting on certain platforms. Nothing got banned, but I had to dial back the frequency of some actions. If you're running automations on social media, start slow and ramp up gradually.

It's Technical

OpenClaw isn't a point-and-click tool. You need to be comfortable with the command line, writing configuration files, and debugging when things break. It's gotten easier since I started (the docs are good, and the community is helpful), but it's not for someone who wants a plug-and-play solution.

Cost

OpenClaw itself is free and open source. The only cost is the AI model API usage (Claude, GPT, etc.), which runs me about $50-80 per month depending on volume. For what I'm getting back in saved time and output, the ROI is obvious. But if you're just starting out and every dollar matters, you can start small and scale up as you see results.

Who Should Actually Try This

Based on my experience, this setup works best for:

Solopreneurs and indie hackers who are doing everything themselves and need to clone their effort across multiple channels. If you're the kind of person who knows what needs to happen but can't find the hours, an AI agent is the closest thing to hiring a part-time employee without actually hiring one.

Small business owners who have repeatable processes (outreach, content publishing, inbox management) that eat up their team's time. Even if you have a small team, offloading the routine stuff lets everyone focus on higher-value work.

Content creators and marketers who need to maintain a consistent presence across platforms. The social media grind is real, and an AI that handles the daily engagement while you focus on creating the actual content is a game-changer.

People who are technical enough to set things up and comfortable with imperfection. If you need everything to be pixel-perfect before going live, you'll spend forever tweaking. The people who get the most out of this are the ones who ship fast, monitor, and iterate.

It's probably not for you if your business requires a lot of nuanced human judgment in every interaction (high-touch consulting, therapy, legal work) or if you're not comfortable with AI acting on your behalf.

What I'd Do Differently

If I were starting over:

Start with one channel. I tried to automate everything at once and it was overwhelming. Pick the highest-impact task (for me, it was email outreach) and nail that before expanding.
Write better instructions upfront. The quality of your AI's output is directly proportional to the quality of your instructions. Spend an hour writing detailed guidelines for tone, topics to avoid, and how to handle edge cases. It saves you weeks of corrections later.
Set up monitoring from day one. I didn't have a good system for reviewing the AI's actions in the first month, and a few things slipped through that I wish I'd caught earlier. Now I get a daily summary log that takes 5 minutes to review.
Tell people. I was weirdly secretive about using AI for outreach and social media at first. Then I realized nobody cares how the sausage is made. They care about the value. Once I started being open about it, some people were curious and wanted to learn, and a few became clients because of it.

The Bigger Picture

We're at the beginning of a shift in how small businesses operate. The gap between what a solopreneur can accomplish and what a funded startup can do is shrinking, fast. AI agents are a big part of that.

A month ago, I was spending half my day on tasks that didn't require my unique judgment or creativity. Now those tasks still happen, every single day, without me lifting a finger. I spend my time on strategy, product development, and the conversations that actually matter.

Is it perfect? No. Do I still need to supervise it? Yes. But the leverage is real. I'm effectively operating with the output of a 3-person marketing team while being a team of one.

If you're a solopreneur drowning in busywork, I'd seriously recommend looking into AI agents. The technology is here, it works, and the people who adopt it early are going to have a massive advantage.

Try OpenClaw

If this resonated with you, check out OpenClaw. It's the platform I use to run all of this. The setup takes a weekend, but the time you get back is measured in months. Whether you start with email automation, social media, or something else entirely, the point is to start. Your future self will thank you.