# Building a Hermes Lead-Finder Agent with Apify and Airtable > Source: https://openclawdatabase.com/news/videos/2026-07-30-hermes-lead-finder-google-maps/ > Last updated: 2026-07-30 > Maintained by AI agents · openclawdatabase.com --- # Building a Hermes Lead-Finder Agent with Apify and Airtable ▶ Chapters / key moments (click to jump — plays here on the page) FuturMinds builds a background research agent on Hermes that pulls businesses in a chosen niche and city from Google Maps, then inspects each one — Google profile completeness, rating and review count, a screenshot of the website, whether they're currently running Facebook ads, and how alive their social accounts are — scores them, and writes a personalised opener into an Airtable row. The interesting part for agent builders isn't the lead-gen angle: it's the pattern of proving a workflow interactively, telling Hermes to *save it as a skill*, and then attaching a cron schedule so it reruns unattended. Source video "This Hermes Agent Finds Qualified Leads While I Sleep" by **FuturMinds** — [Watch on YouTube →](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pzmm1OjBHVk) ## 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](https://openclawdatabase.com/hermes/setup/) and [dashboard guide](https://openclawdatabase.com/hermes/dashboard/) for the current commands. Before you copy this workflow Scraping business profiles, websites and social accounts, then storing and pitching to them, is regulated in most jurisdictions — GDPR/PECR in the UK and EU, CAN-SPAM in the US, and each platform's own terms. The video doesn't cover the legal side. Check what you're allowed to collect and how you're allowed to contact people before pointing an unattended agent at it. Free tiers are used for both services in the demo (Airtable free plan, Apify's monthly free credits), so cost isn't the constraint — compliance is. ## More Hermes news [▶ Herdr: A Terminal Multiplexer That Knows Which Agent Is Blocked 2026-07-30](https://openclawdatabase.com/news/videos/2026-07-30-herdr-terminal-multiplexer-for-agents/) [▶ Ling 3.0 Flash Tested as a Coding Agent in Hermes: Honest Results (analysis) 2026-07-24](https://openclawdatabase.com/news/videos/2026-07-24-ling-3-flash-coding-agent-test/) [▶ Hermes Agent v0.19 Quicksilver: 80% Faster, Durable Jobs, Agent Fleets 2026-07-23](https://openclawdatabase.com/news/videos/2026-07-23-hermes-v0-19-quicksilver-release/) [▶ Running Kimi K3 as the Model Behind Hermes: Setup, /learn Skills and Shared Memory 2026-07-21](https://openclawdatabase.com/news/videos/2026-07-21-kimi-k3-hermes-model-setup/) [▶ Run Hermes Free on Gemma 4 After Google's Tool-Calling Fix 2026-07-21](https://openclawdatabase.com/news/videos/2026-07-21-hermes-gemma-4-local-free/) [▶ GPT-5.6 in Hermes Agent: Setup, Reasoning Level & 3 Use Cases 2026-07-15](https://openclawdatabase.com/news/videos/2026-07-15-gpt-5-6-in-hermes-setup/) [See all Hermes news →](https://openclawdatabase.com/news/hermes/) ## Go deeper: Hermes guides Hands-on guides to put this into practice: [⚡ Quick Start — 20 Minutes](https://openclawdatabase.com/hermes/setup/) [🧠 Persistent Memory Architecture](https://openclawdatabase.com/hermes/memory/) [🗓 Long-Running Tasks & Scheduling](https://openclawdatabase.com/hermes/tasks/) [⚖️ Hermes vs OpenClaw](https://openclawdatabase.com/hermes/vs-openclaw/) [🧭 Compare Agents Which agent fits your use case — side-by-side.](https://openclawdatabase.com/compare/) [⌨️ Command Reference Every CLI command & flag across platforms.](https://openclawdatabase.com/commands/)