Six months ago I was drowning. Full-time developer by day. Esports CEO by night. Luminon Gaming was climbing the Halo Infinite rankings — we broke into the top 4 worldwide — but the operational load was crushing me. Tournament scheduling, social media, email, content, team comms, invoices. Sixteen-hour days, every day.
I had two options: hire people, or build something.
The Problem with Hiring
A virtual assistant runs $1,500–$3,000/month. A social media manager is another $2,000+. A part-time dev? $4,000 minimum. That's $7,500/month before my esports org makes a dime of profit. For a bootstrapped operation, that's a death sentence.
And hiring doesn't solve the integration problem. My VA wouldn't know what my dev is doing. My social media person wouldn't know about the security audit results. Everyone would need context from everyone else. I'd spend half my time managing the managers.
The Build
I discovered OpenClaw — an open-source AI operator framework that lets you deploy AI agents with real tool access. Not chatbot wrappers. Agents that can read your email, manage your calendar, push code, and run security audits. Self-hosted. Your data stays on your infrastructure.
In two weeks, I built an 8-operator team:
- ☘️ Gina — my personal AI. Handles email triage, calendar, daily briefings, research.
- 🌙 Luna — Luminon's Co-CEO. Manages social media, tournaments, content calendar.
- 🔨 Forge — writes code, manages repos, runs CI/CD.
- 🛡️ Sentinel — daily security audits at 9:30 AM. Automatic infrastructure monitoring.
- 🔍 Scout — market research, competitive analysis, content drafting.
- 📬 Relay — email routing, message drafting, communication management.
- 🗓️ Atlas — scheduling, task management, daily briefings.
- 🎯 Axle — the orchestrator. Breaks down goals and delegates to specialists.
The Cost
$15/day in API costs. $6/month for a VPS. Under $500/month total. That's 93% cheaper than hiring, and the team works 24/7. No PTO, no sick days, no onboarding ramp. They were productive on day one.
The Result
I went from 16-hour grind days to CEO mode. I wake up to a briefing of what happened overnight. Gina checked my email, flagged the important ones, and drafted responses. Luna scheduled next week's tournament and posted the announcement. Sentinel ran a security audit and patched a misconfigured firewall rule.
I make decisions. I set direction. The team executes.
What's Next
Now I build these teams for other businesses. If you're a founder, operator, or anyone drowning in operational work — there's a better way. You don't need to hire five people. You need five agents.
Interested? Book a free discovery call and I'll show you what this looks like for your business.