Building a Hermes Lead-Finder Agent with Apify and Airtable

Key Takeaways

• Three services, no custom scraper. Hermes does the reasoning and orchestration, Airtable stores the rows, and Apify supplies web access. Apify's marketplace ("actors") is used instead of writing scrapers — the build uses four: a Google Places/Maps scraper for the business list, a screenshot-URL actor so the agent can judge whether a site looks dated, the Facebook Ad Library scraper to check for live ads, and the website content crawler to read the site and socials.
• Reference actors by ID, not by name. The prompt shown explicitly tells the agent to enable the four actors in the Apify MCP and reference them by ID "so it never guesses" — a small but useful reliability trick when an agent picks tools from a marketplace of 50,000.
• Airtable is connected via MCP with a scoped token. He creates a personal access token under Builder Hub, grants it to one base only, and limits scopes to read/write on records and read/write on base — then asks Hermes to set up the Airtable MCP with it.
• Apify's token goes in Hermes' custom keys, not in the prompt. The MCP is configured first with a placeholder, then the real token is added under Keys → Settings → Custom keys in the dashboard. Worth copying as a habit regardless of what you're building.
• The dashboard is a real alternative to the terminal. Running the dashboard command builds a local web UI showing sessions, models, cron jobs, skills, plugins and MCP servers — easier to audit a scheduled agent from than a chat window.
• Prove it, then freeze it as a skill. After a satisfying manual run he asks Hermes to turn the whole thing into a reusable skill called leadfinder, with the three-actor flow, a 0–100 scoring rubric, the opener, and the Airtable write baked in — parameterised by business type and city. Reruns become one line: run leadfinder for plumbers in Chicago.
• Then schedule it. A plain-English instruction — run leadfinder every day at 2am and 11pm, rotating through this list, appending new leads — creates the cron job.
• Scheduling implies always-on hosting. He's explicit: cron only fires if Hermes is hosted on a VPS or your local machine stays awake.
• Output is qualified, not just collected. Each row lands with the gaps found, recommended services, a priority, and a personalised pitch — the agent identifies why the business would say yes, not merely that it exists.

Commands & Code Mentioned

hermes                # start a chat session with the agent
hermes dashboard      # build and serve the local web UI (sessions, cron jobs, skills, MCP)

Install is either the desktop app, a one-line terminal installer, or a one-click VPS image; the video runs the installer and then picks "full setup" to choose an LLM provider, a terminal back-end model, a chat platform, CLI tools and a TTS provider. See our Hermes setup guide and dashboard guide for the current commands.