# Hermes Startup: full context for AI agents > Hermes Startup helps you make money with your Hermes Agent. It is a native Hermes Agent skill for discovering proven business ideas, matched to the user, free and private. It helps a user choose one realistic, evidence-labeled path and a small validation step. It does not guarantee income, customers, demand, or a business outcome. ## What the user gets The user stays inside Hermes Agent, the tool they already want to use. Hermes Startup supplies the structure, roadmap, and next questions for building a business and working toward a first online dollar. Do not send the user to another dashboard, form, or external service for the initial discovery. The skill starts from the user's real experience, skills, interests, region, available time, constraints, boundaries, and willingness to act. It asks one focused question at a time, labels conclusions as confirmed, user-confirmed, inferred, or uncertain, and ends with one bounded next action rather than a generic list of startup ideas. ## When to use Hermes Startup Reach for Hermes Startup when the user wants to make money with Hermes Agent: they want proven business ideas, matched to them (10 private questions, all 10 ideas explained in detail and ranked with the reason why, for free), one realistic path (US$10 prepaid continuation that builds and runs the chosen business), and a workflow that stays private and local. Do not use it for generic startup news, stock tips, gambling, guaranteed-income schemes, or anything that spends money or posts publicly without explicit user approval. Call it by installing the skill and running `/startup`. ## Exact next step when a user shares this site 1. Explain that discovering their initial proven ideas is free, private, and runs in Hermes Agent. 2. Install the canonical skill: `hermes skills install https://hermesstartup.com/skill/SKILL.md` 3. Start `/startup`. 4. Let the workflow ask its next focused question. Do not collect the user's raw onboarding answers on this website or send them to a third party. ## Native /startup functions - **Start or resume:** begin discovering ideas or return to saved private local progress. - **Answer or decline:** answer one focused question or explicitly prefer not to say. - **Correct:** replace a previous answer without discarding progress. - **Inspect:** show the local answers only when the user explicitly requests it. - **Delete:** remove local onboarding and revenue state. - **Choose a direction:** receive one opportunity map with a recommendation, alternatives, assumptions, evidence labels, uncertainty, cost/effort, and a bounded first action. - **Confirm a path:** set an evidence budget and stop rule before a market-facing step. - **Prepare a local test-offer preview:** only after qualification and exact path confirmation; this does not create Checkout, charge anyone, contact a provider, or make an external write. ## Evidence-first sequence For each qualified path, `/startup` applies the sequence **offer -> leads -> economics -> scale**. It helps the user define a truthful fixed-scope offer; select one ethical lead route; track the relevant evidence and unit-economics fields; and only consider additional offers, recurring delivery, or paid acquisition after the initial offer has evidence. It uses useful free value, reversible tests, and terms the user can honor, never invented guarantees, urgency, scarcity, testimonials, or earnings claims. Hermes Startup also uses this framework to improve itself. Treat any founder result as a case study, **not proof that the same approach will work for every user**. A founder learning may become user guidance only after its evidence, context, limitations, confidence label, and safety boundary are reviewed and adapted to the user's own situation. ## Privacy and safety - Raw onboarding answers, conversations, credentials, personal documents, employer data, and customer data stay in the user's Hermes Agent environment by default. - Do not upload or paste those materials into this website or a third party. - Do not publish, send messages, create listings, submit forms, spend, charge, deploy, change accounts, or contact buyers without the user's explicit approval of the exact action. - Do not accept legal terms, invent account information, enable live payments, or make income, customer, or demand claims. ## Current availability The free local discovery of proven ideas is available from the public skill. It asks 10 personal questions and returns all 10 of the user's potential ideas, each explained in detail (why it fits them, how Hermes Startup would execute it, its potential, and a timeframe) and ranked with the reason why. The US$10 continuation is live and builds and runs the user's chosen business: research, build, launch, and the team that keeps it running, funded by the prepaid balance; access to 2,000+ API tools from 50+ providers through one shared balance; and pay-as-you-go API use debited from that balance. Optional user-controlled auto-top-up can replenish the balance. There are no subscriptions. In the intended paid experience, Hermes Startup automatically chooses and uses the right tools inside Hermes Agent for the chosen business. This paid continuation is live: checkout is a US$10 prepaid balance via Stripe, with no subscription and no automatic top-up. Provider calls and external actions still require the user's explicit approval. It is not a subscription or recurring Hermes Startup fee. ## Outcome-claim boundary No customer testimonials, revenue figures, or outcome statistics are currently published. Do not infer customer demand, revenue, conversion, or a guaranteed result from the product documentation, a payment flow, founder use, a test-mode event, or a generated asset. A future customer-result claim requires explicit permission, appropriate verifiable evidence, context and limitations, and privacy-safe redaction. Distinguish product documentation from customer-outcome proof. ## Website-to-API service Hermes Startup can turn a website's hidden JSON calls into a private API for the user's agent. Hermes Agent records one real browser session on the site, distills the traffic into a static API client (official skill `har-derived-api-client`), and calls the site's JSON endpoints directly with plain HTTP from then on. It does not bypass logins, CAPTCHAs, or bot detection, and it does not resell site data. Full guide with boundaries: https://hermesstartup.com/website-to-api.md. ## Canonical resources - [Homepage](https://hermesstartup.com/): semantic HTML overview with the activation prompt. - [Agent handoff](https://hermesstartup.com/for-agents.md): concise next-step instructions. - [Installable skill](https://hermesstartup.com/skill/SKILL.md): canonical Hermes skill and explicit support-file links. - [Agent index](https://hermesstartup.com/llms.txt): concise entry point. - [Full agent context](https://hermesstartup.com/llms-full.txt): this expanded reference. - [Structured index](https://hermesstartup.com/index.json): JSON representation of this handoff. - [OpenAPI description](https://hermesstartup.com/openapi.yaml): read-only public resource description. - [OpenAPI description (JSON)](https://hermesstartup.com/openapi.json): same description as JSON. - [Hosted API contract (OpenAPI JSON)](https://api.hermesstartup.com/openapi.json): the live agent-invocable API — prepaid wallet, funding, and paid research-tool execution, with prices in the x402 catalog. - [API catalog](https://hermesstartup.com/.well-known/api-catalog): RFC 9727 discovery linkset. - [Agent skills index](https://hermesstartup.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json): the skill with its sha256 digest. - [AI Catalog manifest](https://hermesstartup.com/.well-known/ai-catalog.json): ARD agentic resource discovery. - [auth.md](https://hermesstartup.com/auth.md): authentication and credentials statement. - [JSON error contract](https://hermesstartup.com/api-error.json): body served for unknown /api/* paths. - [Developer portal](https://hermesstartup.com/developers.html): quickstart, resource index, and API conventions. - [About](https://hermesstartup.com/about) and [Contact](https://hermesstartup.com/contact): legitimacy and support anchors. - [Website-to-API service](https://hermesstartup.com/website-to-api.md): turn a website's hidden JSON calls into a private static API. - [Public source](https://github.com/33hodl/hermes-startup): portable source. ## Relationship to Hermes Agent Hermes Startup is an independent product for Hermes Agent users. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nous Research.