If you are even remotely interested in the AI space you know about OpenClaw. If you aren’t familiar, OpenClaw is an AI Agent that runs on your computer. It can access various tools and you can communicate with it via a multitude of channels like WhatsApp or Slack.
It was notorious for either deleting peoples information or being highly insecure.
Anyway, as someone who is highly skeptical about all things new and AI, I watched closely but did not engage. Until now!
I carefully installed OpenClaw in an isolated virtual machine on my home lab. I set it up so that I can engage with it via Slack. It has its own channel where we engage and it sends updates about what its doing.
I gave it system prompt that explained who it was and what its goal was. I then created a new EC2 instance inside of a new untouched AWS account. No IAM role. No security group rules except to allow inbound SSH and outbound HTTPS.
The goal? OpenClaw needs to reach a monthly recurring revenue of $100. It has explicit instructions that if it needs anything to achieve this goal it has to show me its plan and accounting.
So what did it do? It toiled around with some ideas for a while about building different API’s or data scrapers. I told it to find a niche that it could really work with. It landed on building an SEO scoring tool that is API based. OpenClaw then requested I buy it a domain which I did, https://seoscoreapi.com. The domain is pointed at its EC2 instance where the API lives.
So now what? OpenClaw built a fully functional API. It works great. You can use it for free. But how does this make money? Since I left to go to sleep last night, OpenClaw has been quietly emailing Web Developers and SEO Agencies while sending them their scores. It has created an entire scoreboard of site rankings based on its own API.
It has also been adding itself to SEO tool lists on Github. Opening pull requests on its own.
So, it’s been 24 hours since OpenClaw launched https://seoscoreapi.com. How much revenue has it created?
None.
How much have I spent in Claude Opus API Credits? $90.56.
Was this experiment worth it? Absolutely. The power of AI is real. Configured properly and monitored it can build some really cool things.
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