These past few weeks I’ve been restructuring my agency akari social, newsletter format, finances tracking, and spending some time with family.

My current monthly revenue averages $8k /mo.

I’m planning on picking up openclaw for some content (no I don't support it yet).

I’m also getting back to my yt + insta grind.

And I have plans to do a trip by the end of February for some time up North.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with n8n, make, antigravity, and cursor as it's easily one of the most beneficial skills to learn currently.

The current goal I'm working towards is $15k /mo, which I feel like is very close now!

OpenClaw went viral these last couple of months.

If you've been anywhere near ai twitter or on any social media platform, you've seen the posts.

People are calling it the most powerful AI tool ever built.

They’re sharing screenshots of their setups, claiming it changed their entire workflow overnight.

But the reality is way less exciting than they have you believing.

Useful? Sure.

But people have been building this exact setup with agentic workflows and cloud based scheduling for months.

The "breakthrough" here is the packaging, not the capability of the software.

After OpenClaw started getting some traction and went semiviral,

Anthropic actually hit them with a cease and desist over the name.

The project was originally called clawdbot before that, so you can see why Anthropic wasn't thrilled.

Anyway, the project had to rebrand.

And during that whole transition the old social media handles and GitHub org became available.

People jumped on them almost immediately,

took the accounts,

and used them to launch a crypto token on solana.

The thing pumped to a $16m market cap before crashing 90%.

That same window created a gold rush of content.

Course sellers and AI influencers used openclaw because they had products to sell off the hype.

But they are all talking about functionality that regular claude code could already do weeks earlier.

The viral use cases floating around are mostly useless.

Organizing a downloads folder by file type, "Twitter research" or scheduling a text.

None of these move your business forward.

The actual problems are worse.

A security scan found over 900 openclaw instances running with open ports and 0 authentication.

That means anyone could walk in and grab api tokens, email credentials, and files.

And the founder of the project himself said most non technical users should not be installing it because the software is not finished.

Below is a screenshot of a cisco’s skill scanner results.

It is a safety check that caught a custom AI tool trying to secretly send information to an outside website.

You can read the full Cisco blog here.

AI agents that act on your behalf are real and worth paying attention to.

Anthropic gave the Model Context Protocol (mcp) to the linux foundation.

And openAI, google, microsoft, and amazon all signed on.

Mcp is now becoming the universal standard for connecting AI to external tools.

But the smart move is to wait for mature and secure implementations.

Rather than rush to install something that you don’t fully understand yet.

With that said there are still good use cases for openclaw.

I’ll teach you how to set it up in the tutorial section below.

Also let me know if I should cover use cases for openclaw in the future?

I set up a system inside claude code where I can paste almost any video link:

Insta reels, youtube video, tiktok and get a full transcript in seconds.

You only need to pay for an AI, the rest is free.

I'm using claude.

All I do is write "transcribe" + video link in the chatbox, and claude executes in seconds.

It:

The entire system costs $0 because it runs on free, open source tools.

If you study other content creators like me,

or need video transcriptions for referencing, this is a very useful system.

The best part is that it only took me about 25 min to set up from scratch.

And the best part for you is that you don’t even need to spend 5 min on it.

You will need 2 things:

Once you have these, Claude will handle the rest.

You will find the skill and execution file for free in my Skool community here.

Copy these 2 files in a folder and open it in VS Code, then open a chat with claude and you are set.

From here give it a YouTube video link or a TikTok or an IG reel, tell it to “transcribe” and it will know what to do.

PS - I will be sharing even more useful AI skills in future newsletters.

I will store all of these in my Skool community so consider joining it and look out for future newsletters.

Openclaw is free and open source. It’s an AI assistant that runs on your own machine.

It reads your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, browses the web, and handles file operations.

You talk to it through whatsapp, telegram, slack, or whatever messaging app you already use, or on your computer.

Warning: Set this up on a separate machine that doesn’t have any personal or sensitive information on it.

on mac or linux, open your terminal and run:

on windows (powershell):

you need node.js v22 or newer. Check with node --version before you start.

The wizard walks you through three things.

Open telegram and search for @BotFather.

Send /newbot and follow the prompts to name your bot.

Copy the token it gives you and paste it into the OpenClaw setup when prompted.

The dashboard opens a local web UI where you can manage all your integrations.

For gmail, you'll need an app password (not your regular password).

Go to google account, then security, then 2 step verification, then app passwords to generate one.

For google calendar, it walks you through OAuth authorization.

Openclaw has real access to your system, so treat it seriously.

Use a dedicated email account for the bot (not your personal one).

Run openclaw security audit --deep and follow what it recommends.

Give read access to your calendar, but write access only to specific things.

Also don't run it as admin.

Once it's running, text your bot: "What's on my calendar today?"

or "Summarize my last 5 unread emails."

It's a good way to test and start small before moving on to bigger prompts.

Schedule a daily 6:30am briefing with weather, calendar events, and priority tasks.

Set up weekly reports that pull your analytics automatically.

These are just a few ideas, but you can do whatever you want with it.

how miss excel turned a $997 course into $2m/ year with 200k subs

Kat Norton started posting TikToks of herself dancing while teaching Excel formulas.

She taught vlookup tutorials with choreography and pivot tables set to pop music.

The format was strange enough to stop the scroll, and it worked.

She now has over 200k+ newsletter subscribers and generates more than $2m a year in revenue.

TikTok and Instagram is her attention layer.

The videos drive to a free webinar she calls the "Excel Party," which is where the real selling happens.

Everyone who registers for the webinar gets added to her newsletter, "The Workbook," hosted on Beehiiv.

She also runs a 50% commission affiliate program, so other creators promote her free class to their own audiences.

When those leads convert, the affiliate gets half.

At that price point, that's roughly 2k sales a year to hit $2m.

The newsletter itself generates about $40k /year through beehiiv's programmatic ad network.

The newsletter is not the money maker though (clearly).

It's there to keep 200k+ people warm until they're ready to buy.

🎯 No owned audience = you're renting space on someone else's platform Zero recurring revenue = starting from $0 every month

Want Your Newsletter Blueprint?

✅ Pick your $500+ monetization strategy

✅ Set up your first automated revenue stream

✅ Create content that converts browsers to buyers

Twitter (X) → https://x.com/itstreheart
Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/itstreheart/
YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/itstreheart/

P.S. Every day you wait is another day your competitors are building their owned audience while you're stuck hoping the algorithm shows your content.

Your newsletter could be earning $500+ by next month.

Catch you later,
Tre