“I would literally just create a VPS server with a Hermes agent on it and send it to my clients. Ideally I just want to sell, and not do any backend. I'd say it's just way better than any other white label company I've tried.”
The problem
ETEC+ sells agents to Australian support, sales and ops teams, in Australian dollars, with someone in the same time zone to call. The agents were good and the clients kept signing. Getting one from a signature to a working agent was the problem.
“I actually manually do it now for 30+ clients on a VPS server. I literally just email clients, setup a Vultr or Hostinger VPS, and setup Hermes agent. That’s my usual workflow.”
Every client was an email, then a box, then an install, then Telegram handed over as the interface, then somebody watching the model bill, then an invoice. None of it was broken. It was just all one person’s afternoon, thirty times over, and again for whoever signed next. ETEC+ is two founders and only one of them writes code.
“We just don’t have time to muck around in the backend.”
What they tried
First a chatbot builder, which was easy to hand a client and could not do the work. In Chris’s words it was “just more of a chatbot with integration”, not as smart as a real agent. So they went back to Hermes, and back to building a server for each client.
A VPS is a fine VPS. That is the whole trouble with it. It hands you a machine, and everything between a machine and a working agent for one named client stays yours: the install, that client’s credentials and nobody else’s, an interface they can actually use, the spend, the teardown when they leave. Thirty clients meant thirty of those, and no product to sell that did not go through Chris first.
What they run now
A client signs up on etecplus.ai, pays ETEC+ on ETEC+’s own Stripe, and gets their own always-on agent with a chat interface waiting for them. One API call per client, made by ETEC+’s own app. Telegram is still there for the clients who preferred it, but nobody has to be set up on it anymore.
The front end is entirely theirs: their brand, their domain, their prices, and an admin panel built so the founder who does not code can set a budget, change a plan or remove an agent without asking anyone. Connectors are wired per client, so the people who actually use the agent never see an API key.
“So they can just use our agent right off the bat without setup.”
The agent itself is now ETEC+’s own container image, built by their developer and published from their own registry. When they want to change what every client’s agent can do, they publish a revision. Nobody logs into anything.
The outcome
- 6 days from starter kit to a branded product: Their own signup, their own paywall and their own admin panel, live on their own domain, with nobody hired to run infrastructure.
- A sales team instead of a build queue: Four salespeople and a full-time developer, and the developer builds features on the product rather than servers underneath it.
- Their own image on every agent: ETEC+ builds and publishes its own container image and ships a new revision when it is ready. Their clients' agents pick it up.
ETEC+ still owns the client, the brand and the price. What is under each agent stopped being something they think about.