Small Business Agent Skills

A collection of Hermes Agent skills built for real small business operations — lead intake, estimates, payments, marketing, financial analysis, and owner onboarding. Every skill is owner-gated: the agent drafts and proposes, the human approves, then the agent executes.

Built during the NVIDIA × Stripe × Nous Research hackathon (June 2026). These skills ran a real service business end-to-end through Telegram — the same app the owners already use to text. Real leads, real estimates, real money, real marketing — all with the owners approving every action.

Why This Exists

Small businesses don’t need another dashboard. They need help with the 3+ hours of daily manual work that nobody signed up for — estimating, following up, sending payment links, tracking who paid, and figuring out whether the last job actually made money.

These skills turn an AI agent into a business assistant that works through a chat app. No new software to learn. No computer required. Just text.

The Pattern

Every skill follows the same philosophy:

1. Agent drafts — the agent does the work (estimate, email, campaign, analysis)
2. Owner approves — the owner gets a Telegram message, taps “yes” or “no”
3. Agent executes — only after approval does anything go out or get charged

This isn’t a limitation. It’s the product. Owners who’ve never touched AI will use it every day if they trust it. They trust it because nothing happens without their OK.

Skills

Core Business Operations

Spending

Marketing & Growth

Financial Intelligence

Onboarding

Reference / Templates

Email

The GoDaddy Workspace Email reference documents IMAP/SMTP setup for the extremely common small business setup: domain email hosted on GoDaddy, accessed via Outlook desktop as an IMAP client (NOT Microsoft 365). Includes verified server settings, config file template, and password storage pattern.

Setup

Prerequisites

• Hermes Agent installed and running
• A Telegram bot connected (or other chat gateway)
• Environment variables for your integrations (see each skill’s Prerequisites section)

Installation

# Copy skills to your Hermes skills directory
cp -r skills/* ~/.hermes/skills/productivity/

# Add your credentials to ~/.hermes/.env
# (see each skill's SKILL.md for required env vars)

# Restart your Hermes gateway

Configuration

Each skill has a SKILL.md file with:

• Prerequisites — what env vars and accounts you need
• Setup steps — how to wire it up
• The Flow — how the agent uses it in practice
• Common Pitfalls — what goes wrong and how to avoid it

Start with estimator-engine and crm-lite — those are the foundation. Then add stripe-payments and lead-to-payment for the full earn loop. Add marketing and financial analysis when you’re ready.

Architecture

Lead arrives (email / Telegram / website form)
    ↓
Agent qualifies + summarizes
    ↓
Agent runs estimator-engine → produces estimate
    ↓
Owner approves in Telegram
    ↓
Agent creates Stripe payment link (stripe-payments)
    ↓
Agent drafts customer email (himalaya / outlook-graph)
    ↓
Owner approves email → agent sends
    ↓
Customer pays → agent confirms → CRM updated (crm-lite)
    ↓
Agent syncs to Mailchimp for future campaigns (mailchimp-integration)
    ↓
Owner runs financial analysis quarterly (financial-analysis)

Every arrow point is a place where the owner can say “no” or “change this.”

Tech Stack

• Agent framework: Hermes Agent by Nous Research
• Model: GLM-5.2 via Together AI
• Payments: Stripe (revenue) + Stripe Link (agent spend)
• Email: Himalaya CLI (IMAP/SMTP) or Microsoft Graph API
• Marketing: Mailchimp API
• Accounting: QuickBooks Online API (optional) or CSV import
• CRM: SQLite (no SaaS needed)
• Interface: Telegram (or any chat gateway Hermes supports)

License

MIT — use these for your business, your clients, your hackathon. Just don’t blame us if something breaks.

Acknowledgments

Built during the NVIDIA × Stripe × Nous Research hackathon, June 2026. Thanks to:

• Nous Research — Hermes Agent framework
• Stripe — payments infrastructure + Stripe Link for agent-initiated spend
• NVIDIA — compute and model infrastructure

These skills were built for a real service business with real owners, real leads, and real money. The friction we hit — model reasoning leaking into chat, card declines, SPA scraping loops, approval timer expiries — is documented in each skill’s pitfalls section. If it were frictionless, it wouldn’t be impressive that it shipped in 11 days.

Contributing

Found a bug? Want to add a skill? Open a PR.

If you build a skill for a different business type (HVAC, landscaping, cleaning, consulting), the pattern transfers: encode the expertise in the skill, gate everything behind owner approval, deliver through chat.