44:21Greg Isenberg · Interview
Making $$$ with Grok Bot
Billy Howell walks through the AI agent team that runs his local newsletter end to end, and the four-week plan for building the same thing yourself.
August 21stThe argument in one line.
Grok Bot works because every agent gets exactly one job and one thread instead of a do-everything assistant role, and treating it like a focused new hire rather than a personal assistant is what actually turns the automation into revenue.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A solo newsletter, content, or small-business operator who wants AI agents to replace repetitive ops work (research, outbound, social posting) instead of hiring for it.
- Someone who tried Claude, ChatGPT projects, or Codex for hands-off automation and hit a wall because tasks kept blurring together in one thread.
- A creator or consultant thinking about reselling AI-agent-run services, Shopify audits, landing pages, outbound, to other small businesses.
SKIP IF…
- You want a personal-assistant bot for everyday life tasks like organizing email or scheduling; the guest explicitly argues Grok Bot underperforms there.
- You need a step-by-step setup tutorial with exact prompts; this is a highlights reel of results and operating philosophy, not a how-to walkthrough.
The full version, fast.
Billy Howell runs his Arlington Bagel newsletter almost entirely through Grok Bot, xAI's autonomous agent, by giving each agent exactly one job (editorial, research, outbound, Shopify) instead of one general assistant. He replaced an intern he couldn't automate with Codex or Notion in 48 hours, firewalls agent spending with a dedicated email and a $200-limit Mercury card, and keeps outbound work reviewable by chunking it to five prospects a week instead of asking for everything at once. His advice to a beginner: nail your offer and price with the chief-of-staff agent first, then build only the few agents needed to monitor your inbox and website.
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00:00 – 01:03
01 · Cold Open: The Grok Bot Highlight Reel
A teaser montage of quotes pulled from later in the conversation, including the warning that most AI-agent use today is 'advanced forms of procrastination.'
01:03 – 01:53
02 · Meet Billy Howell, the Grok Bot Builder
Chris introduces Grok Bot (xAI's new agent product) and reintroduces returning guest Billy Howell, framing the episode around making real money with it.
01:53 – 04:27
03 · Running a Newsletter on Autopilot
Billy describes running Arlington Bagel (editorial, research, sales, Shopify) through single-task agents, warns that everyday personal-assistant use doesn't unlock the tool, and explains replacing an intern he couldn't automate with Codex or Notion.
04:27 – 07:09
04 · The Focus Principle and the First Live Demo
The intern analogy for single-task focus, then the screen share begins: a chief-of-staff agent reads Billy's Drive and Notion docs and proposes the first three agents (researcher, Beehiiv expert, brand).
07:09 – 09:48
05 · How the Agents Work, Stay Secure, and Get Paid
Agents share one computer, tools, and documents; Billy firewalls spending with a dedicated Gmail and a $200-limit Mercury card; Stripe Link is the officially supported payment plugin; per-task model selection isn't available yet.
09:48 – 12:45
06 · Chunk the Work and the Wins So Far
The 'don't boil the ocean' chunking strategy for Bagel Outbound (five prospects a week), and the biggest win so far: an old missed email that turned into a real sponsorship lead.
12:45 – 15:04
07 · Scaling to Teams and How to Get Started
Ideas for reselling agent-run services (Shopify audits, custom landing pages), Grok Bot's upcoming multi-agent Teams feature for agencies, and the closing advice: nail your offer and price first.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Most people using AI agents today are just automating busywork, reorganizing an inbox for the sixth time, which changes nothing about the business.
- Grok Bot took over a role a human intern held, one that couldn't be automated with Codex or Notion, in about 48 hours.
- Splitting one business into single-task agents, editorial, research, sales, Shopify, beats running everything through one general-purpose bot.
- Treating an agent like a focused new hire, one project at a time, produces more usable output than treating it like an open-ended personal assistant.
- A chat interface styled like iMessage instead of a chatbot changes the mental model from prompting a bot to texting a coworker.
- Agents under one chief-of-staff account share the same saved passwords, tools, and documents, so access control has to happen at the account level, not per agent.
- Firewalling an agent's spending with its own dedicated email and a hard-limit virtual card keeps a $200 mistake from ever becoming a personal-account mistake.
- Officially supported payment plugins integrate more natively and use fewer tokens than manually handing an agent a stored credit card.
- Per-task model selection isn't available in Grok Bot yet; some power users work around it by invoking Claude Code or Codex directly on the agent's own computer.
- Capping an outbound agent to five prospects a week instead of every business in a city keeps the output reviewable and lets it get the task wrong five ways instead of a hundred.
- The most valuable agent win so far was surfacing an old missed email that turned into a real sponsorship conversation, catching what a human had already dropped.
- A repeatable service pattern is pointing one agent at a business function like Shopify order-value analysis, turning the output into a recurring report, then reselling that same agent across clients.
- Nail the offer and price with the agent before building anything else; the automation should monitor a validated offer, not go looking for one.
Give every AI agent one job, not a to-do list.
WHAT TO LEARN
Grok Bot's results here come from single-task agents, firewalled spending, and small reviewable batches, not from a smarter model.
01Cold Open: The Grok Bot Highlight Reel
- Most people using AI agents today are just automating busywork, reorganizing an inbox for the sixth time, which changes nothing about the business.
02Meet Billy Howell, the Grok Bot Builder
- Grok Bot is xAI's autonomous agent product, distinct from just chatting with Grok, built to take real actions rather than only answer prompts.
03Running a Newsletter on Autopilot
- Splitting one business into single-task agents, editorial, research, sales, Shopify, beats running everything through one general-purpose bot.
- A tool that took over a role a human intern held, one that couldn't be automated with Codex or Notion, is a stronger signal of real capability than any demo.
04The Focus Principle and the First Live Demo
- Treat an AI agent like a new hire: give it one focused project instead of an open-ended 'help with whatever' mandate, the same way you'd onboard a human employee.
- Start with a single 'chief of staff' agent that reads your existing docs (Drive, Notion) before building anything, then let it propose the first few agents to build.
- A chat interface that looks like iMessage instead of a chatbot changes how usable an agent feels day to day, because the mental model shifts from prompting a bot to texting a coworker.
05How the Agents Work, Stay Secure, and Get Paid
- Every agent under one chief-of-staff account can share saved passwords, installed tools, and documents, so access control has to happen at the account level, not per agent.
- Firewall an agent's spending with its own dedicated email and a hard-limit virtual card (a $200 Mercury card, here) instead of personal accounts.
- Officially supported payment plugins use fewer tokens and integrate more natively than manually handing an agent a stored credit card.
06Chunk the Work and the Wins So Far
- Cap agent tasks to a small weekly batch, five prospects, not every business in the city, so it can only get the task wrong a handful of ways and the output stays reviewable.
- The most valuable win so far was the agent surfacing an old missed email that turned into a real sponsorship conversation, proof that agents pay off by catching what a human already dropped.
07Scaling to Teams and How to Get Started
- A repeatable service pattern: point one agent at a business function like Shopify order-value analysis, turn the output into a recurring report, then resell that same agent across multiple clients.
- Multi-agent 'teams' (in development) are built for exactly this agency use case, one team of specialized agents reused across different client accounts.
- Nail the offer and price first, ask the agent to help position and price a service, then build the few agents needed to monitor inbox and website, not the other way around.
Terms worth knowing.
- Grok Bot
- xAI's autonomous AI agent product, controlled through a chat-style interface, that can browse, use tools, and keep working in the background after the user closes their laptop, distinct from just asking Grok a question.
- Chief of staff agent
- The top-level Grok Bot agent Billy set up first, which reads his existing documents and proposes and coordinates the single-task agents underneath it.
- Stripe Link
- A payment connector plugin inside Grok Bot's marketplace that lets an agent spend from a linked balance like a debit card, integrating more natively and using fewer tokens than a manually entered credit card.
- Mercury
- A business banking platform that issues virtual cards with per-card spending limits, used here to cap what any one AI agent can charge.
- Beehiiv
- A newsletter publishing platform; Billy's 'Beehiiv expert' agent manages the Arlington Bagel newsletter on it.
Things they pointed at.
04:09toolCodex
04:09toolNotion
06:12toolBeehiiv
08:07toolMercury
08:36toolStripe Link
12:42toolShopify
12:01toolGitHub
12:01toolCloudflare
01:53productArlington Bagel newsletter
Lines you could clip.
00:26
“It's just advanced forms of procrastination.”
03:31
“It's built for builders, not to be like a personal assistant.”
04:09
“I couldn't automate it with Codex. Couldn't automate it with Notion. Grokbot took over almost immediately, like in 48 hours.”
09:58
“Instead of boiling the ocean and telling Bagel Outbound, make me a list of every business in Arlington... let's focus on five.”
14:50
“You need a Google sheet and Gmail to sell anything, right?”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
This is an amazing opportunity. This is a new product. It works great.
You're getting probably $10 ,000 worth of tokens for your subscription. Use it to make money. Stop organizing your Gmail for the sixth time.
That's not going to change your life. Anything you see on Twitter that people are getting wrong about Grogbot? Yeah, everything.
Let's hear it. Everything that I see on Twitter is like, whoa, I just had Grogbot make this knowledge graph and it called my dad. and this and that.
It's just advanced forms of procrastination. Yeah. It's got a bias for action.
It just does stuff. I couldn't automate it with Codex. Couldn't automate it with Notion.
Rockbot took over immediately. It was doing stuff that I couldn't set up. I don't think you need a lot.
I don't think you need to customize. I don't think you need to make 80 different agents. They're just good to go.
They know what to do. And they can work on it even when your laptop's closed. If someone is brand new to Rockbot and they want to use it to build something, like you're saying, what's like a good first step or an agent that can get someone to revenue?
This is a pro tip.
I can't go three feet nowadays without hearing about Grokbot. What is Grokbot? Well, we all know we have ChadGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, which is owned by Elon X, Twitter, whatever.
That's Grok. Grok just came out with Grokbot, which is an agent. It's an AI agent that's groundbreaking.
It's amazing. It does stuff for you. We've talked about agents before, but this seems to be the best one so far.
So last year, I had a friend named Billy Howell on the pod. You guys loved him. He was one of my best episodes of last year.
We'll link it in the show notes. He's on the cutting edge of these agents. So I had him on to teach us and tell us what is Grokbot?
How can we use it? How can we prompt it? Most importantly, how can we make money with it?
If you've ever wanted an AI agent to run a business for you, start a business for you and make money for you today, you're going to hear it from a guy who's actually doing that today. So why don't we just start broadly and tell me how you're using Grokbot today. Okay, so I'm using it to run Arlington Bagel, which is my local events and restaurant news newsletter.
It runs editorial, it runs research, and it runs the sales team as well as the Shopify for the lovely hats. But what I like about it is I can only give each of those agents one thing to do at a time. I've noticed, I don't know, Chris, do you use GawkBot at all?
I never have, but I want to. Whoa, okay. Yeah.
Okay, so yesterday I set up a second GrokBot account. It's cheaper now. And I was like, I just want to try this.
It's been doing some great stuff. I've got 20 bots and everything I think that I can do, I can do with GrokBot. And so that's the problem.
I sit texting GrokBot all day and that happens even worse, I think, to people and tools like ChatGPT or Claude because of how projects are set up and how threads are set up. And so... All that is to say, Rockbot makes you very mission focused.
But if you're using it for everyday life stuff, I don't think you're going to get like the max potential. I don't think it's going to click for you. Does that make sense?
Yeah. But like, for instance, right now I need to rent like a pump. to get the water out of my pond.
And I'm, I need to browse Facebook marketplace for skid steers. Like there's so many things on my to -do list right now. You don't think it would be good for that or like good.
It's not like using its full potential for stuff like that. No, it is. I mean, it is good for that.
I guess I just think if you're going to be using something that's so like it's mission focused, it wants to, it wants to ship. It wants to build stuff. Like, I think that's what you should be using it for.
Yeah, it's built for builders, not to be like a personal assistant. Yeah, yeah. You're saying.
The reason why I like it is it just really clicked because A, it's a mission oriented, it's built for builders. And B, because I told myself, hey, you're going to use this just for the newsletter and to grow the revenue of the newsletter. You're not going to add a bunch of agents to do your taxes and take your dog for a walk and stuff.
And that's just, I've made more progress on this newsletter in the last two weeks than I did in. In three months, I said this the other day, my intern left because he got a different job and I replaced the intern, which is something I couldn't do for two months. I couldn't automate it with Codex, couldn't automate it with Notion.
Grokbot took over almost immediately, like in 48 hours. It was doing stuff that I couldn't set up. I just want to take two things you just spoke about and kind of put them together.
So you talked about your intern left, so you replaced it with Grokbot. Is it safe to say like... Instead of saying, you know, it's best to use Grokbot as X, Y, or Z.
It's best for builders. Replace Grokbot with the word intern. Like let's say whoever's listening to this has never had an intern or a personal assistant or whatever in their life.
What you're saying is that amazing PhD level helper, it's best to point them at one thing because you don't want to get a new employee and say, try this. Can you do this? Can you go get my coffee?
They're like, whoa, coffee. I thought we're doing Facebook ads, right? It's like the same principle as hiring a human.
Focus them. Have them doing one thing or working on one project at least. Is that accurate?
I think that's exactly it. Yeah. Okay.
Can you share your screen and show kind of what tasks it's doing to grow your newsletter? Sure. So we could see like how it works, how you talk to it.
Sure. Okay. So if you've never seen Rockbot before, this is one of the things that makes it great because it doesn't look like chat GPT.
It looks like Apple iMessage. Yeah. Or Telegram or Discord, whatever.
Yeah. And so you have each of your agents here and I've got a chief of staff one. That's the one I started with.
And basically I connected him to my Google Drive and my Notion where I already had a bunch of documentation and plans and work documents for this newsletter. And I said, go through and read and reread everything and then tell me where the first three agents you would build. to get the ball rolling, replacing this intern.
So you're saying like, hey, give me ideas on how I can use you. Correct. Yeah.
But within reason, right? You see how I'm like, let's start with three agents. And so the first three that it built, you might be wondering, it was the researcher, the beehive expert, the bagel brand, because we also were kind of doing a rebrand.
And if you don't understand, it's okay. It's confusing. This is a newsletter about local events and food.
I called it the Arlington Bagel because it was breakfast time that we were sending it out. And I thought it would be funny just to associate it with breakfast. In Arlington, Virginia.
And so it is the top line chief of staff. That's like the bot that runs all the other bots. And then everything below it are agents that are running concurrently or could be running concurrently that Grokbot is creating to do all these tasks.
Is that right? Yeah, correct. So you have to ask it and it won't create one of these without you telling it to.
To my knowledge, it hasn't done that. So they have their own computer. But the cool thing is that all the agents share it.
So if you've saved passwords in there or installed something in the terminal, they can all use that tool. If you've got documents, right? So instead of them all having to go into a Notion or Google Drive every time, they can just store stuff on their own computer and folders.
They can also access your computer too. So how I like to think it, if all this is sounding crazy, it's like . I think let them do what they naturally do and work on work product on their computer.
And then when it's done, when it's done, they put that deliverable either in your chat or in Google Drive and send you a link. That way it's not like, all right, work on my computer a little bit, then go take this and work on yours. And if you have them work in the cloud, if you have them do tasks on their computer, which they will do by default.
then they can work on it even when your laptop's closed, which is a cool thing. Do you worry about security at all for this? Do you have your credit card uploaded?
I do, but that's one of the other great things about the way I set this up. They can only mess up my Arlington Bagels specific Gmail and the credit card with a $200 limit that I set up for them. They don't have my personal card.
They don't have my Gmail with pictures of my ID in it because I specifically firewalled it. Gotcha. Are you using Mercury?
I am. Okay. So with Mercury, it's like you create a digital card, daily spending limit, total spending limit, give the card to it, and it will make decisions using that.
Yeah. And they get a little weird about you. They don't like when you put in information like that.
I think what I'll do is the officially supported plugin, this is a pro tip, is Stripe Link, which I think requires a Stripe account. And you can just put money in and it's like a debit card, but it'll use less tokens. The agents will like it because it's like a native connector.
There's a big marketplace here of plugins. And the other thing, it's just a little thing that makes me really happy is you can go click add on all of them and then you don't have to go to authentication. The first time the bot has to use it, then you can do the authentication or put the API key in.
So you can get everything set up without getting slowed down. Like the first time when you're getting everything ready. Okay.
Can you tell it what models to use for certain tasks? No, that's something that people I think are asking about and that they might add in at some point. I know a lot of people are, another thing they're doing is logging into clog code or codex on the Grokbot's computer and being like, okay, use clog code to build this for me or to do these tasks.
And I don't know that. I really don't know that anyone watching this needs that. I think those are for like the hardcore.
I'm building 20 different apps and I'm maintaining an enterprise level software. So you could do that. So give me some examples.
So what does Bagel Outbound do? Yeah, so Outbound right now, I think I have to click in. I've never talked to Outbound directly.
Let's actually see. Oh, every week the chief of staff works with the Bagel Outbound and... Instead of, this is another way about thinking about AI that I think will help people not burn out, not be like, this is impossible.
And it's chunking work like this. So instead of and telling Bagel Outbound, make me a list of every business in Arlington and give me their phone number and their email. Instead, I'm just like, every week, let's focus on five.
Maybe it's five that we've mentioned or five that follow us on Instagram. And let's get their information. And let's prep a custom package with what an ad would look like and send it to them.
So just kind of chunking that work. And it also, I think, feeds the agent better context and helps it iterate better because instead of it doing something wrong a hundred ways, it's only going to do something wrong five ways and then I can correct it. I can't review a hundred different ad packages.
So that's kind of how I thought about setting up this outbound. Has Grokbot found... new subscribers for you yet or any sponsors for you.
What have been the most impressive things that it's done for your newsletter? The most impressive was it found an old email in my Gmail that I had missed from like a month and a half ago that led to us going into this guy's business and meeting him. And now we're putting together.
an ad package for him and figuring out the sponsorship. It's handling all the emails with readers and current and previous sponsors. And it's done a great job.
What businesses or ideas do you have that are tempting you with Grokba right now that you haven't chased yet? What I would do was I wouldn't sell a bunch of junk websites. I think I would want to help someone customize landing pages for their leads.
So people who are in sales, like, well, I, for example, I was talking, I was buying season ticket package for the wizards the other day, the wizards, the way they were showing like the packages and where the seats were was kind of archaic, but they had all the information. And I was like, man, like, I think you could sell so many more of these.
If you just made a like Billy, like here's the seats you could have. And here's why we picked them because Chris, like you and I, we know we can make anything exist with code. But most people out there don't.
And I think with Grokbot, you could teach people to do that in a way that makes sense to them, just like using iMessage. So teach them how to set up so that they can go into Grokbot and be like, OK, I got this guy, Billy. He wants to buy tickets.
You've got a list. You've got a spreadsheet. You've got pictures.
Make him a quick site. Use my GitHub and Cloudflare. And I can show it to him during our sales call.
And that's I mean, that's applicable to anyone that does sales. And I think you could do that with anything. you know you could do you could do the same thing with helping people manage shopify's you could say okay and you could do it for them right so you could start with your agents do like a done for you and so i've got my bagel shop bot and i could be like okay bagel shop bots locked jacked into your shopify it's going to find you know your average it's going to analyze your average card value like your chargebacks all this stuff that you didn't know and then make a report and then we'll get you set up so that you can just have this run on a routine with your own shop bot every week but you could just do it as a service too you can you can do sections so you can segment out like by client And I think they're adding in a Teams thing.
I haven't been able to figure out how to do it, but I read something from someone at SpaceX. So it could be like, it's exactly for this agency use case. So say you have a team of five and they're all cracked at optimizing Shopify.
Well, you could use that team on Chris's croissants, right? Client. And then you could have that same team on a different project.
So I think they're kind of going where I'm thinking on this, which is setting up Grokbot agent teams and then using them on different small businesses. Okay. If someone is brand new to Grokbot and they want to use it to build something, like you're saying, what's like a good first step or an agent that can get someone to revenue?
Well, I mean, this is probably second nature for a lot of people listening, but you just have to nail what your value prop is and what your offer is. And Grokbot's really good at that. Do what I said, like with those products and be like, what do you think we can get the cost to on this?
What do you think the price point is? What's our hero product? So even if you're selling consulting or services.
have grokbot do chief of staff and say i want to sell gutter cleaning okay what's my hero product oh it's a it's a summer end of summer gutter clean or spring refresh or whatever i think grokbot says i think you could price it this price point this price point at this price point i think you could hire someone based on where you live this is the going rates uh here's what i think you would would spend on a website.
Then build the website based on that offer, right? So I think nail the offer first with Grokbot and then build three agents that monitor like your inbox and your website. And that's all you need, right?
You need a Google sheet and Gmail to sell anything, right? So you can teach Grokbot to sell with just Gmail and a Google sheet. Just get that offer nailed down.
So you might not know this, but this isn't my real channel. My full channel is linked below or right here. Go check that out for full episodes.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Chris Koerner opens with a warning before the pitch: most people using AI agents right now are just automating procrastination. Then his guest Billy Howell, who's actually running a newsletter business through a fleet of single-task Grok Bot agents, shares his screen and shows exactly where the pitch turns into a real paycheck.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:53concept
One Agent, One Job
Every Grok Bot agent Billy runs gets exactly one job and one thread instead of a general assistant role, which he says is the difference between an agent that ships and one that becomes 'advanced procrastination.'
Steal forAny Claude, ChatGPT, or agent project setup: scope each agent or project to a single job instead of one catch-all assistant thread.
09:49concept
Chunk the Work, Not the Ocean
Instead of asking an agent to find every business in a city, Billy limits Bagel Outbound to five prospects a week so it can only get the task wrong five ways instead of a hundred, and he can actually review the output.
Steal forAny outbound, content, or research agent: cap the weekly batch size so review stays possible and errors don't compound.
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
14:34next-video
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