A three-person software house uses Hermes skills to fill its sales and marketing gaps

Who built it

Marcin Golonka of Halfbit Studio, a three-person software house in Ostrów Wielkopolski, Poland, writing on the company blog in June 2026. The team has no dedicated sales or marketing people, and the author describes sales as a weak spot.

How it works

The team began by giving Hermes the company's background: its history, problems, weaknesses and goals. That way, conversations start from shared context instead of a blank prompt, and the author credits much of the usefulness to this step.

For competitor analysis, the agent pulled financial data from Poland's KRS company register, looked at competitors' strategies and compared them with Halfbit. The author reports a report of about 45 pages with profiles of five companies, comparison matrices and recommendations over four time horizons, produced in hours rather than the week it would have taken by hand.

For lead research, the agent looked into 24 potential clients and opened a YouTrack ticket for each one. Each ticket holds a company profile, a specific problem the agent found, a suggested first-contact approach and a hot, warm or cold rating. The agent doesn't send any email; client contact stays with people. It also reviews the founder's outreach drafts, for example flagging one as too generic and suggesting specific edits. The author frames this as coaching the team to write better rather than writing for them.

Each of these workflows is saved as a named Hermes skill: competitor analysis, lead research briefs, first-contact coaching, event research, and diagnostics for enterprise consulting. A company-advisor skill lets a new team member load the firm's strategy. The author sees skills as institutional memory, so an analysis can be run again later without rebuilding the context.

Recurring work is meant to run as scheduled jobs: event monitoring every two weeks, competitor review monthly and pipeline analysis quarterly. The author says most of this already works and some is still planned. Event research checks more than a dozen calendars and filters events by budget, location and fit.

Lessons you can use

• Give the agent a written picture of your business (goals, weaknesses, constraints) before asking for strategy work; generic prompts give generic results.
• Once a research task works, save it as a skill so the next run follows the same steps and anyone on the team can use it.
• Send research output into the tool your team already works in (here, YouTrack tickets) so it turns into tracked work.
• Keep people in charge of client contact and decisions; let the agent research, draft and critique.
• Treat the agent's research as possibly incomplete and check key facts before acting on them.
• Schedule research at the pace it actually changes (every two weeks, monthly, quarterly) rather than daily.

Try a smaller version

1. 1

   Write a short company context file covering who you are, what you sell, your goals and your weak spots, and keep it where Hermes loads it (for example an AGENTS.md in the working directory). See the Context files docs.

2. 2

   Run one competitor or lead-research task by hand with web search, then ask Hermes to save the steps as a skill. See the Skills docs and Web search docs.

3. 3

   Require a fixed output shape in the skill (profile, problem found, suggested approach, rating) and ask for source links for every claim so you can check them.

4. 4

   Once the skill gives reliable results, schedule it with cron, for example event research every two weeks, delivered to a chat you read. See the Cron docs.

5. 5

   If you want tickets created automatically, connect your tracker through MCP and keep the agent's permissions limited to creating tickets, not sending messages. See the Mcp docs.

Caveats

• The report size, lead counts and time savings are the author's own figures and were not verified; the article even gives two different times (a few hours, and two hours) for the competitor report.
• The article doesn't say where Hermes runs, which models it uses, which chat interface the team uses or how YouTrack is connected.
• The author notes that the agent's research can be incomplete and its advice too generic, and some of the scheduled jobs are described as plans rather than finished.

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