This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge: Build With Hermes Agent
What I Built
I'm a 17-year-old first-year Computer Science student, and I built StartupForge solo for this hackathon — my first real agentic AI project.
StartupForge is an AI launch-kit autopilot. You describe your product idea in one sentence, and a Hermes Agent runs a four-step launch pipeline, streaming every line live so you review and approve each step before the next one starts:
- Competitor Research — live web search: real competitors, pricing, weaknesses, and the gap your product fills.
- Landing Page — a complete, responsive HTML page with a working waitlist form, live device preview, and ZIP download.
- Launch Posts — an X/Twitter thread, a "Show HN" post, and a Reddit post, each tuned to that platform's culture.
- AI Agent Prompts — a build plan plus copy-paste-ready prompts for coding, design, and marketing agents.
The problem: going from "I have an idea" to "I have something to launch" normally takes days of scattered research, copywriting, and planning. StartupForge compresses that into one guided run — with a human-in-the-loop approval gate so you stay in control instead of getting a black-box dump.
My friend 0xwagmi helped me with the CSS and the landing page when I was running low on time — shoutout to him for jumping in.
Demo : https://hermeschallenge.vercel.app/
Code
StartupForge
Describe your idea. The agent does the rest.
Hermes-powered launch kit: describe a product idea in plain text, and the agent autonomously researches competitors, writes a landing page, drafts launch posts, and generates AI agent prompts.
Stack
- Next.js 14 (App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind)
- Clerk — authentication and per-user run history
-
Hermes Agent — OpenAI-compatible API at
/v1/chat/completions(port 8642) - Supabase — run storage + waitlist
- Coolify — reverse proxy on DigitalOcean VPS
Quick start (local)
- Copy env file:
cp .env.example .env
- Run Supabase schema in your project SQL editor:
# See supabase/schema.sql
- Install and run:
npm install npm run dev
Open http://localhost:3000.
Environment variables
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY |
Clerk publishable key |
CLERK_SECRET_KEY |
Clerk secret key |
HERMES_URL |
Hermes gateway URL (e.g. http://hermes-agent:8642) |
HERMES_API_KEY |
API_SERVER_KEY from Hermes |
NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_URL |
Public app URL for landing page form POSTs |
SUPABASE_URL |
Supabase project URL |
SUPABASE_SERVICE_KEY |
Supabase service role key |
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN |
Optional fallback Telegram bot |
My Tech Stack
Next.js 14 + TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion, Clerk (auth), Supabase (Postgres), SSE streaming, Telegram Bot API, deployed via Docker + Coolify on DigitalOcean. AI: Hermes Agent, powered by MiniMax (I got their Pro plan free through a hackathon, which made running the agent possible).
How I Used Hermes Agent
Hermes is the engine behind every output. I leaned on its agentic capabilities:
- Live web search for real competitor data — not hallucinated.
- Streaming with live progress so you watch the agent think instead of a spinner.
- Multi-step pipeline where the research is fed forward as context into the next three tasks for consistent positioning.
- Structured output via a sentinel protocol, parsed into saved, typed results.
- Human-in-the-loop approval between every step.
This was an agent problem, not a completion problem — it had to research the real world, produce several different artifacts, carry context between them, and report progress — all of which Hermes handles natively.
Future Improvements
- Automated image generation — auto-generate logos, OG images, and landing-page visuals per run.
- Dedicated backend — move the in-process job queue to a shared store (Redis/Supabase) for horizontal scaling.
I haven't built these yet simply because I don't have the capital for the extra infrastructure and image APIs right now. As a student (broken guy lmao) , I focused on shipping a solid core experience first.