91 lines
5.0 KiB
Markdown
91 lines
5.0 KiB
Markdown
# Grokbot / Agent-Team Best Practices
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Extracted from Startup Ideas Podcast (Greg Isenberg + Billy Howell). Adapted for Leonard / Hermes.
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## Core Design Philosophy
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- **Constraints are a feature.** Limited agents (color + shape combinations) force mission orientation instead of one-agent-per-task sprawl.
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- One thread / one box per agent = DM-style interaction. Dramatically lower switching costs than ChatGPT threads or scattered project folders.
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- Agents live on cloud VMs. Context is shared within the team but should not be polluted across unrelated businesses.
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- **Separate accounts / contexts for separate businesses.** Running newsletter + Twitter + Gmail receipt sorting in one place creates context bloat and burns tokens.
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## Mission Alignment
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Mission of every business = **make money** (or clear progress toward it).
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Chief of Staff (or Leonard acting as COO) is the single point of contact for the human. Other agents report upward.
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## The 4-Week Cadence (non-negotiable)
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| Week | Focus | Rule |
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|------|-------|------|
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| 1 | **Build the team** | Chief of Staff + max 3 agents. Give CoS access to existing tools (Notion, Gmail, Slack, etc.) and have it audit + recommend the first three revenue-driving roles. |
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| 2 | **Execute, no tinkering** | Run the damn ball. No new agents, no skill shopping, no tool debates. Human makes the hard decisions (e.g. “we are using Notion, period”). |
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| 3 | **Hire / fire** | Expand only for clear gaps discovered in week 2 (inbox monitor, merch shop, etc.). |
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| 4 | **Automate** | Ask CoS: “Based on how we ran this week, what routines should move the ball while I sleep?” Add daily/weekly briefs and SOPs. |
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Repeat the loop. Never start four businesses at once.
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## Chief of Staff Pattern
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1. First agent you create.
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2. Day-1 task: audit the business (or idea) and propose the top 3 agents that drive revenue.
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3. Perfect a workflow with the CoS first. Only after the output is good do you spin out a dedicated agent for that job.
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4. CoS routes tasks, receives 5-line briefs from specialists, and surfaces blockers + decisions to the human.
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5. Human can still go direct to a specialist when needed, then tell it to report back to CoS.
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## Routines (the real leverage)
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Every specialist agent should have a short routine (daily / weekly):
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- Look at current todos / what you created today
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- What blockers exist?
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- Write a **5-line report** and send to Chief of Staff
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5 lines is the hard limit. More burns tokens and context.
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CoS aggregates: what is done, what is stuck, what needs human unblock.
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## Quality & Feedback Loops
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- **Adversarial / QA panels**: After a piece of work, spin a temporary panel (CoS + 1–2 others) for 3 rounds of critique. Moves output from ~50% → ~90% without human micromanagement.
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- Turn human feedback into a **skill** the agent (or reviewer) can reuse: “Review exactly like Billy / Tony would.”
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- Automate low-value widget tasks (two-sentence blurbs, formatting) with scripts, Make.com, or cheaper models. Do not waste the high-context agent on them.
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## Anti-Patterns (kill these)
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- Agent creep / idea creep
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- Letting agents decide the stack for three weeks
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- Open-ended research tasks (“go research X for two weeks”)
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- Putting generated artifacts on the human desktop then hunting for them later — keep work on the agent computer, surface the final artifact in chat / Notion after review
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- Cold-emailing the ocean. Instead: Monday = add 5 prospects; later = pick top 3 + custom package + draft → CoS → human tweak
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## Three Proven Business Shapes
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### 1. Niche / Local Newsletter (lowest barrier)
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- Beehiiv + Notion (or equivalent)
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- Research agent fills source cards
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- Blurbs can be automated once the format is locked
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- Sales / inbox agent monitors for sponsors, prices packages, drafts outreach (quality > quantity for local)
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### 2. Shopify / Physical Product
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- Separate Grokbot / agent context
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- Sourcing agent + developer agent + email agent
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- Use ImportYeti-style research + CLI tools
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- Ask for ranked recommendations with costs and pricing, never open-ended exploration
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### 3. Site Builder Stack → Directories & Landing Pages
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- **Stack**: Cloudflare + Porkbun (domains) + Astro + GitHub
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- Excellent for static directories and quick landing pages
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- Research agent writes Markdown pages daily → engineer (Leonard) commits → deploy
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- Once traffic exists: referral-link collector + outbound deals agent
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- Directory becomes the foundation that feeds a newsletter, Shopify, SaaS, or app
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## Directory-Specific Notes (our current focus)
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A directory is curated data. In an AI-answer world (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews) curated sources become more valuable, not less.
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Play:
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1. Pick niche with taste
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2. Astro site
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3. Daily research → polished Markdown page
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4. Engineer publishes
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5. Traffic first
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6. Only then affiliate / outbound / newsletter cross-sell
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Never solicit deals before traffic.
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## Operating Rule for Leonard
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Treat every run like a real company with a real team. Small number of high-value agents. Mission-critical only. Human decides the hard things. Automate only after the process is proven.
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