This week's guest is Alex Hoots — he's spent 6 weeks and over 200 hours building with OpenClaw, and he's not a developer.

It started with a real problem. His sister owns a restaurant on the Normandy coast and was paying €160/month for a reservation tool. Alex built her a replacement in 6 hours using Lovable. It now handles 90% of her reservations for €25/month. Saturday nights fully booked through the tool alone.

Then he went further. His barber Miguel spends half his day managing WhatsApp messages while cutting hair — name, service, date, time, confirmation. Alex built Pepe, an OpenClaw-based agent connected to WhatsApp and Miguel's booking platform. It handles the entire reservation flow autonomously. We demoed it live on the episode. It worked.

But the real conversation is what comes next. Pepe can take a photo of Miguel's weekly inventory, count the items, and update the fulfillment dashboard automatically. The vision: an agent that removes the mental load entirely — handling every repetitive task so the business owner can focus on the work only they can do.

Alex's take on getting started: you need a real use case with a clear outcome. Experimentation without a destination is how you end up with nothing tangible. Start with one problem you actually have. Build the solution. Then expand.

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Agentic Stories is a daily show and guest series covering the AI agent economy — what agents are actually doing in the real world, built by people who aren't waiting for permission.

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