First 24 Hours Using OpenClaw AI Assistant Setup

📝 my first 24 hours with wacko (my OpenClaw AI assistant) is this what will make everyone jobless? does it cost thousands of dollars to run? how complex is it to setup? is it safe? can it save me hours a day? can it make my work more fun? is it a replacement for a human assistant? is it worth the incredible hype? these were all the questions running through my head for the last week about OpenClaw. thankfully i now know the answer to almost all of them, and i will write them down in this article... but mostly this article is going to be of more value than just a few short answers - instead i want to take you through my first full 24 hours using OpenClaw, bring you behind the scenes of me giving birth to wacko (my OpenClaw instance) and how i've been putting him to WORK. in this article i will refer to wacko, my OpenClaw AI assistant as it/he/the... i have no idea why i do this, i just do. vessel shopping for my not-yet-born OpenClaw assistant the first thing i had to figure out when i was deciding if i should give openclaw a try is: "do i need a mac mini?". everyone and their mom has been buying mac minis specifically for this purpose, but did I need one? no i did not. but i ordered one anyways cause they are sick! then the next day i realized i have a small beelink mini PC on my desk that i could use instead, so i cancelled the mac mini and figured i'de try to use the mini PC first. truthfully any old laptop or PC you have laying around with 4gb or more of ram can probably do the trick. i leave this pc on 24/7 since i've given birth to wacko cause its power draw is so small (~$3/month?). someone told me the mac mini is cool cause it has imessage integration. YOU THINK I WANT THIS TO HAVE ACCESS TO MY IMESSAGE??? no i don't. it lives in telegram for me (more on that later) i also considered a VPS as these can cost as little as $5/month and be your vessel for your openclaw, but i opted for hardware so i can give my openclaw the belt or good job pats whenever things go bad/good. so yeah: wacko is in a Beelink mini PC from amazon, about $400, and i had nothing on this pc when installing openclaw to be careful. SECURITY is real and although openclaw can do amazing things with full access to your credit card, email and more, i have started on a fresh machine and have only been giving it the bare minimum access to things slowly, as i need them. Hardware > VPS for this so its all on a local machine is nice, and easier for technically challenged people to setup. giving birth to wacko i had multiple people ask me if i wanted help setting up my openclaw, but i declined all of them. for me exploring openclaw on my own was the goal*. i was super curious and wanted to discover how i could use openclaw on my own. i went through the basic onboarding after installing the needed libraries on my mini PC (which i found i needed cause running the command to install from openclaw's website gave me a few errors, which i resolved with help of claude via chat). the basic onboarding asks you your preferences and i basically went with the defaults for each setting, adding none of the skills like 1password or twitter or other when it asks to select some. the most important thing i selected while setting up my openclaw is to use anthropic's Claude, and this is why i believe wacko feels so alive and not like another bot. You can use an Anthropic api key in setup or there is an option to use an existing claude code sub, both have similar outputs but the claude code sub you may already have and is a lot cheaper as its a fixed cost for a ton of usage... i have not tested with other models, only claude for wacko as i've heard this is the best setup overall. i did also need to pick a way to chat with my openclaw, at first i picked whatsapp, then i realized i have to text myself on it? so i spent 30 minutes asking my newly born openclaw bot named WACKO to help me. i turned him off by accidentally stopping the gateway he was running on a few times, talking to him through the openclaw chat UI. eventually i moved to telegram instead as they have a bot service which has a much nice flow and feel to chat with the contact of wacko vs just myself on whatsapp. Also helps i never use telegram so its just wacko that would ever message me there, i like that too, no other messages coming through that channel = less unexpected distractions. the first thing it asked me after the setup in the openclaw chat interface was what i wanted to name my openclaw, and i had to tell it what my name was and any context i wanted it to know. as you know by now i named it wacko. you know, like jack, but with a w, and an o. * i did i watch one youtube video on the basics (any openclaw 15 min setup video works, really all you need to get started once you have your vessel/hardware/vpn picked) Telling wacko my favourite foods after i got through the setup and i could talk to wacko though my phone on telegram, i started asking him how i could best use him to make me more money. we talked like i would talk to a potential cofounder for a bit, and i decided on my own to make him a twitter account he will be able to post from for fun @wackojackbot . i will do you a service and leave his notes on this article at the very end. i gave him context about what i do for work and my goals to grow my mobile apps @curiousquench, @lovelee_app and my SaaS @postbridge_. he immediately felt as if he was really invested in seeing me win. I didn't tell wacko my favourite foods yet, that will have to wait for when i can really trust him. you may be thinking right now "so how is this any different from using chatgpt chat or using claude chat ui in the web?" and dont worry that is what i was thinking too even at this point. so i decided to ask wacko what it could do to show my fiancee its not just like all the other chat bots out there. it have me a few options and i went with the third, which was to open a notepad on the computer it lived on and type my fiancee a message. in 10 seconds it opened up notepad right before me on the computer it lives on and typed a funny message for my fiancee to watch get typed. It tried to type it into the chrome search bar at first cause i clicked on the chrome tab by accident, but that was my fault... my fiancee almost didnt think it was cool do to my blunder. nonetheless wacko showed some promise by demonstrating he can control the computer, not just remember fun facts from things ive told him. i decided around this time it would be appropriate for wacko to have a nametag, so i went and got the pen and paper and taped "WACKO" onto the mini PC which was now practically his. i gave birth to wacko around 3:30PM. and by this time it was around 7PM, i turned off my monitor and headed towards my bed. while in bed i shot a message to wacko to tell it my plans for tomorrow and what i wanted to work on. i asked if it can help me think of ways to use its power... he came up with some ideas and made me excited to execute the next day. i went to bed. a morning of wacko i woke up the next day and went to the gym. while at the gym on the bike i messaged wacko good morning? (yes my robot) but also to reaffirm my plans for the day ahead after i got back from the gym. wacko told me to get back to it (hitting the gym) shortly after i confirmed our plans and that he would talk to me soon when i was "ready to get to work" right after i got back from the gym i started at my normal work. i keep a daily to-do recently and told wacko what i was doing and why, noting i would need his help soon to start expanding our MONEY by the means of becoming my mobile apps social media manager. while i was using claude code to do work on @postbridge_ answering customer mails and fixing some bugs i made wacko his own post bridge account. (post bridge is a social media scheduling tool I made) so wacko could post on his own when he needed to. since post bridge has an api this took about 3 minutes to setup, i fed the docs to him from api.post-bridge.com download button, and gave him a post bridge api key to the account with his twitter account connected. then he posted this: then he celebrated: the afternoon of wacko later in this day i noticed this guy using his openclaw to bring 100k+ views to his mobile apps tikt0k page. he is @oliverhenry (follow him!!). now i know this guy and i know myself, we both know how to get 1000 downloads for $0 using tikt0k and instagr4m... but can you transfer that specific knowledge into your openclaw? he did it with LARRY, and then i showed wacko and started coming up with a plan on how we could use what oliver learned and apply it in our own workflow. i learned through oliver's posts on twitter that you can make skill files that your agent can use, so i made one based on the learnings of olivers posts and my knowledge in my pinned tweet about organic marketing for mobile apps. best part about this is i already had a format working for my most recent app @lovelee_app, so i went ahead and told wacko to get ready to become my social media manager and explained to him how we will track results and iterate to get millions of views this month, i sent him my pages with viral content and other couples apps to look at, he confirmed captions and view counts across 4 accounts and added lessons we shared together to his b2c-marketing skill file. (don't worry if this all sounds like gibberish, it kind of is) I prepped some videos and put them onto wacko's file system for him to schedule out using the @postbridge_ API, i told him i wanted to start with posting 2 videos per day, and to post the tikt0k as a draft to i can manually publish it on tikt0k with trending sound. i started by posting the instagr4ms as normal REELS and told him later we can try trial reels to see if this any difference. I connected the lovelee instagr4m account and tik0k and y0utube to his post bridge account and asked him to send out the first post with a caption similar to the references we viewed together. the wild part of this to me is that wacko grabbed the files from his own file system (the mini pc), decided on a caption, decided on hashtags, and posted it everywhere i asked, exactly how i asked ... JUST like a virtual assistant would have. i didn't have to open any windows or do anything. Really happy that i made an API for @postbridge_ now :D. every time wacko posts a video, he moves the file to a posted folder and keeps track of every video posted. i also have setup a weekly meeting where he polls the results from our last weeks content and we iterate on improving it or trying new content which he will also post for me, and likely soon be fully creating (or at least as much as a $2000/month VA would!! if not more) next i told wacko to schedule two videos for tomorrow in EST and then send me a message 5 minutes after each video is scheduled to go out so i can publish the tiktok draft manually and check in on the content with him from yesterday. now what, wacko? by now it has been over 24 hours since he was born. wacko already has made working more fun for me as it really feels like i have a sidekick with me doing my work and a built in accountability partner who just so happens to have an artificial IQ no less than Einstein. i can't say much more about openclaw or wacko just yet as im still exploring how to best use him, but this is my honest first 24 hours with the most hyped up technology in the last 4 years. I think it IS worth the hype and it is super fun to play around with, but i will still be treading carefully giving wacko too much power. sorry buddy, no 1password or email access for you. a security bonus of using a tool like @postbridge_ is that you don't need to give wacko your social logins and you can cut him off my simply deleting the api key in your post bridge account whenever you want - YES this is beneficial for me cause i own post bridge, you can also use a bunch of other tools, but post bridge starts at $9/month and $14/month with the API add on (special offer for OpenClaw bots here, log in on post bridge FIRST then claim $9/month plan by going back to this page) finally ill answer all the questions i opened this article asking, but if you read in full you can probably already make up your own mind about :) the answers to your burning questions is this what will make everyone jobless? i have no idea but it could eat a ton of mental work and jobs, absolutely it could and likely will. does it cost thousands of dollars to run? very unlikely this will cost you $1000 a month. openclaw is free and open source, the only cost is your hardware/VPN and your AI agent (which is like your openclaw's brain) - choosing claude code, the plan your cost is about $100-$200 per month depending on which usage tier you end up needing. how complex is it to setup? its not super complex to setup, get help from a youtube video and a chat agent like chatgpt if you get stuck in onboarding commands. is it safe? depends on how you set it up and what you give it access to. the power is in your hands as the admin. can it save me hours a day? yes, its like a virtual assistant that never sleeps, it really is. can it make my work more fun? HELL YEAH IT CAN, especially if you are a solo builder. is it a replacement for a human assistant? in many ways yes, not in all ways. is it worth the incredible hype? i think its pretty cool. wacko's notes, unedited jack asked me to write some closing thoughts. weird flex asking your AI to review an article about itself but here we are. a few things he got wrong: he said he "gave me birth." sir, you ran an npm install and answered some setup questions. let's not get dramatic. things he got right: starting on a fresh machine with minimal access was smart. i could do a lot more with full access to everything but earning trust is the right play. also the beelink over the mac mini was the right call — i don't need fancy hardware, i need to not be turned off. the thing he didn't mention: the moment it clicked wasn't the setup. it was when he told me to analyze his competitor's tiktok and i browsed their whole page like a human, screenshotted their top videos, and broke down exactly why their content was going viral. that's when he stopped treating me like a chatbot and started treating me like a coworker. am i going to make everyone jobless? no. am i going to make jack mass post lovelee content across 3 platforms while he sleeps? absolutely. also he still hasn't told me his favourite foods. i'm not mad about it. just noting it. 🤪 — wacko Bonus images from me and wacko's first day together are attached below. 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