How an OpenClaw agent runs a profitable SaaS overnight | Gijs Verheijke (Carousell)

Gijs Verheijke runs a SaaS on the side that an OpenClaw agent called Maggie looks after with minimal to no supervision. He was Co-founder and CEO of Ox Street before getting acquired by Carousell. He is now head of AI Chapter at Carousell. We recorded this live at Lorong AI. https://lorong.ai/ a note up front: everything Gijs shows here runs on his own Mac Mini for his side projects. he doesn't use OpenClaw for his Carousell work. Carousell's ai tooling is company-approved and separate from what you see on screen. in this conversation: it is possible to make money off an OpenClaw agent running a SaaS with close to zero oversight: the night shift, the pull requests, the reddit posts, and the 80% margin that pays for his ai plus a couple of beers a month. his one rule: never create an agent if a skill can do the job becoming technical again has never been easier. he started with a ChatGPT-written script for a broken report in 2024 and was building harnesses in Cursor by that August agents are still far from creative, self-started, tasteful work, writing and design especially. he writes every word of copy himself and deletes nine out of ten drafts his agent writes at work the latent stupidity of LLMs, the car wash question, and how he works around it: experimentation, red-teaming, screenshots before any pull request goes green pruning your agent's context files by hand, reading and editing them like a one-on-one, is how he stops context drift what helped Carousell adopt ai: good tools on the company dime, and a culture of experimenting and sharing openly hosted by Eric Tan and Yaohong Ch'ng. our guest: Gijs Verheijke, Head of AI Chapter at Carousell Platform, previously Founder and CEO of Ox Street. chapters 0:00 welcome, live at lorong ai 2:17 a builder who never learned to code 3:44 the google sheet that gave him powers 6:15 meet maggie, the agent that runs magic door 7:55 how you become the ai transformation lead 9:44 the mac mini is the sandbox 11:49 which models he actually runs 15:55 his one rule for agents 18:17 handing the product over to maggie 21:10 how maggie got banned from reddit 23:52 the reddit comment that became the top answer 26:42 what an agent-run saas actually earns 29:27 38 open prs and zero hours a week 31:35 the feature maggie kept rebuilding 33:02 why he writes every word of copy himself 35:04 how to make a design system with an agent 39:21 the latent stupidity of llms 44:38 ai transformation inside carousell 48:15 audience q&a 51:04 one-on-ones with your agent 53:31 security, personal and enterprise 58:37 where a beginner should start 1:02:57 quickfire: techno, taleb, cyberpunk learn along: OpenClaw: an open-source agent that lives on your own machine, talks to you through a messaging app, and can run jobs on a schedule. Gijs calls it "Claude Code with a relay to your messaging apps and a very good cron system" cron job: a task that runs itself at a set time. Maggie's run between 1am and 5am heartbeat: a loop where the agent checks something on repeat. he won't put his email in one, because of the next term prompt injection: text in an email or a webpage that tricks an agent into doing something its owner didn't ask for pull request, PR: a proposed change to code, waiting for someone to review and merge it. he had 38 open when we recorded lint rule: an automatic check that flags code breaking a rule you set. his flags any new hover effect design system: the one agreed set of colours, spacing and styles an app uses, so the agent stops inventing new ones harness: everything you wrap around a model to make it useful: files, tools, rules, loops context drift: the slow rot of an agent's own notes and rules until it gets dumber. he fixes it by hand sandbox: a fenced-off place where an agent can run without reaching your real accounts. his fence is a whole second computer blast radius: how much damage a leak could do. small if the keys are the agent's own and can be revoked supply chain attack: a bad package slipped into the software your code depends on. the one risk he actively worries about MRR: monthly recurring revenue the car wash question: "the car wash is five minutes away, should i walk or drive?" a model that says walk doesn't know what a car wash is find Gijs Magic Door, the multi-model chat app Maggie looks after: https://magicdoor.ai MarkJason, his markdown viewer for mac: https://markjason.sh his writing on Substack: https://gijs.substack.com LinkedIn:   / gverheijke   connect with us Eric:   / erictisme   Yaohong:   / yaohongchng   Substack: https://substack.com/@coderiff email: code.riffs.ai@gmail.com Code Riff, interviews with leading minds and practitioners in AI so you can flourish and have fun with ai.