Hermes

Today I'm letting an AI agent start a real business. Completely on its own. No prompts. No hand-holding. I'm not touching it. Here's the setup: • $200/month Stripe wallet to buy whatever it needs • its own AgentMail inboxes • a full InsForge backend Then one rule: figure out the rest yourself. It does 99.99% of the work. I did the initial setup and stepped back. No human in the loop from here. It can write its own emails, spin up its own infra, spend its own money, and ship its own product. Honestly no idea what it builds. Or if it makes a single dollar. That's the whole experiment. Day 1 starts now. Following along in this thread 👇

Every SaaS company is sitting on 24/7 customer signals they aren't acting on. Users getting stuck. Accounts ready to upgrade. Customers about to churn. Hermes finds those signals and takes the right action automatically. Here's what we built

Introducing Hermes 🚀 An always-on AI that connects to your data, finds the signals hiding inside, and acts on them on its own. - Users stuck on onboarding - Teams ready to convert - People about to churn Hermes automatically finds these cues individually and take action.

Introducing Hermes 🚀 An always-on AI that connects to your database, finds the signals hiding inside, and acts on them on its own. A power user about to churn. A segment ready to upgrade. Hermes finds them, then emails the right users to win them back or alerts your team. Automatically. The signals were always in your data. Now something acts on them.

My co-founders @knuceles and @lincarson_ quit working for the world’s richest man at @Tesla and I quit working for New York’s richest man at @Bloomberg to build the world’s first Saas company’s brain We're betting everything on it. Wish us luck!

Today we're opening 𝗦𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘀 to the public. 🚀 We built it alongside the startups living this problem every day. Signals connects to your real data and surfaces what's actually worth acting on: the revenue opportunities already sitting in your data, the engagement you're missing, the churn you can stop before it happens. Not the obvious wins. The niche opportunities buried in your data that no one would ever find by hand. This is the bigger bet behind Hermes: not AI writing emails, but AI finding the 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 your team doesn't even know to look for, and acting on them automatically. Grateful to every founder who shaped this with us. Signals is live. Book a demo 👇

Been a week since our Y Combinator interview. Probably the fastest 10 minutes of our lives {Will share the outcome close to Summer batch start.} Beyond validating what we're building, the experience pushed us to think how much bigger Hermes can become. Meanwhile, Hermes has been growing fast. We've been learning obsessively from users, seeing how they operate, where existing tools break, and what teams really need. That led us to dedicate 2 weeks to an intense product sprint. We're turning Hermes into something much bigger than an email tool: A system that turns customer behavior into action, discovers signals teams don't even know to look for yet, and helps companies act on them automatically. Our goal is simple: Build the product every SaaS company will eventually need to understand what's happening inside their customer base, and know exactly what to do next. Huge thank you to everyone who keeps believing in us, our users, friends, mentors, and the YC community that supported us through mock interviews, feedback, and encouragement along the way. Huge product updates + life updates coming very soon 🚀

Earlier this week, a few customers asked if they could connect Firebase to Hermes. so we shipped it. drop in your service account json, chat with the agent and get a personalized email for every user ready to send. tryhermes.dev

Today we shipped one of Hermes biggest updates yet. Hermes now supports both 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗮𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲 and 𝗙𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲, making it easier for teams to build personalized lifecycle emails directly from their own data. Hermes has been growing incredibly fast, and we’re excited to welcome the Firebase community 🚀 More shipping coming soon.

Most lifecycle emails already feel automated before you even open them. The sender gives it away. Hermes now supports Microsoft/Outlook inboxes, so teams can send AI-personalized emails from the sender customers actually recognize.

We are happy to serve one of our client @insforge in @ycombinator If your team is still sending “personalized” emails with static segments and merge tags, book a demo and we’ll help you set up real lifecycle personalization. Increase retention, reduce churn. Booke a demo: tryhermes.dev/book

Appreciate the shoutout @hanghuang_ . Happy to serve you guys!

We are happy to serve you guys! If your team is still sending “personalized” emails with static segments and merge tags, book a demo and we’ll help you set up real lifecycle personalization. Increase retention, reduce churn. tryhermes.dev/book

We switched from Loops to @tryhermeshq. 40% open rate, 5% click rate. If you've ever tried to send "personalized" emails and ended up with 4 segments and a {{first_name}} merge tag, you'll get why. You chat with their agent to define triggers. It connects to your Postgres, reads each user's activity, and generates a fresh email per person. Not a template with a name swap. Built by @GermainHirwa @lincarson_ @knuceles

We moved @tryhermeshq email infrastructure to AWS SES. Not the flashiest feature, but a big product unlock. Hermes now supports better domain setup, multiple sending domains, sender identities like founder@ / support@ / success@, and cleaner tracking for opens, clicks, bounces, and complaints. The goal is simple: Teams should not have to fight email plumbing just to send personalized lifecycle messages. Connect your domain. Pick the right sender. Let Hermes handle the rest. Book a demo at tryhermes.dev and we’ll help you get set up ASAP. @tryhermeshq

@GermainHirwa @finbarr @OpenAI 😆

@finbarr @OpenAI Wanna take mine @finbarr?

Thanks @OpenAI! Shame there wasn't this much capacity for the party, but I appreciate it 😀

We applied to @ycombinator S26 batch with tryhermes.dev Hermes’ growth week by week has been unreal. Since May 1st:
 • 12 businesses onboarded
 • demos booked all week Our team is relentless, technical, and moves faster than anyone in this space. We’re building the future of product communication now. Wish us luck :)

😱 Just this weekend, we onboarded 6 paying businesses on our platform tryhermes.dev. My account went from 36 followers to 350+ in just 2 days and we’re booked for the week One thing is true, when you “build something people want” (said @ycombinator ) traction takes care of it’s self. Thanks to @X community and we’ll keep making our users happy improving their retention and reducing their churn Btw, we ship updates every 2days max (Attached video @knuceles onboarding a client while I’m done with a call on the other side)

Earlier this year, I lost my bike on campus. Public Safety tried to help, but gave me ~48 hours of raw security footage to manually review. That’s when I realized how broken this was. That same weekend, my co-founders, @knuceles , @lincarson_ , and I built something different: Type what you want → it finds it in the video in 5 seconds “Show me when a green bike exited Mary Lyons.” No scrubbing footage. No guessing timestamps. We shipped it in a hackathon, showed it to them (they were hesitant at first lol) and quickly iterated with real constraints from campus staff (privacy, existing systems, workflow friction). A few weeks later, it got acquired. Undisclosed good check :) Quiet deal. No hype, just a very obvious problem solved too simply to ignore. Most people see inefficiency and complain. We saw it and shipped. screenshot of the original email thread below.

Got accepted into YC Startup School. Thank you @ycombinator A bit about me: • Prev SWE intern @Google • SWE intern @Bloomberg (built a 9M+ req/day systems) • Built & sold products in high school used by 100K+ users • $200K acquisition (traffic platform) • 10+ hackathon wins (JP Morgan code for good, hack@brown, YC AI agents hackathon, …) Now building tryhermes.dev If you're a founder or builder, let’s connect.