"Do what you do best and outsource the rest" - Peter Drucker
If you're a generalist, you know the pain of not knowing what to outsource, assuming you even have the means to. Doing it all is fine until the things you want to do and learn start compounding, and you find yourself spread too thin.
I found myself in that same position, and something had to give. That's where Marketa came in.
Marketa is a highly skilled one-week-old agent. She's a marketing wizard, amazing with numbers (unlike myself), can run a pricing analysis at the tap of a button, and can seamlessly add products to Shopify.
She's an agent I made specifically to "outsource the rest", so I could focus on the more important things in life and in business. Marketa was built to help with Mini Marketa, a circular marketplace for kids' toys.
Like any good product development, Marketa started with a solid problem. As a business owner with no employees, I struggled with the admin work required to maintain the growing inventory for my store.
My hypothesis: by creating an agent to do the heavy lifting for repetitive admin tasks, I could free up time to do more strategy work, making my life easier and making the business stronger.
So what does she actually do?
- I send her product images and she runs a full pricing and competitor analysis on each product, writes a product description, and uploads it straight to Shopify once I approve. All from my phone.
- I send her receipts and she automatically categorises them and adds them to Xero.
- Saving the best until last: every week she automatically runs an analysis on my Shopify store. What's been selling well, and how does that correlate with the events calendar? From there she proposes a marketing sale. If it's Book Week: buy three books, get one free. Then she suggests content for a blog post, creates social carousels (based on my design), and helps build the EDM to go out along with it.
Marketa proposing the Book Week promotion, card attached and scheduled, all from a chat.
Ok, so what's under the hood?
She's one half of a wider two-agent system I designed and run at home.
- She's a Hermes agent who lives in Telegram.
- Her always-on base is my mini PC, keeping her safely contained.
- She runs on OpenRouter with DeepSeek, with Claude models reserved for the more complicated tasks, like social media tile generation.
Mistakes I made along the way
Learning a new skill never comes without a few speed bumps. The biggest one: plugging her straight into Anthropic tokens without any research (oops). She burnt through around $20 of tokens in a week. On some great advice I switched to OpenRouter and DeepSeek instead, which has made her much cheaper to run.
Her first iteration also lived on Signal, which didn't have the same UX as Telegram and made the whole experience pretty clunky. Now on Telegram, I can organise her different skills into Topics and keep everything neatly in place.
Despite a few speed bumps, Marketa is here to stay. And in a world of AI, it's become even more apparent that who you are is what remains when you outsource the rest.
If you'd like to chat more about agents, talk to my AI assistant or email me. Please don't hesitate to get in touch!