# Hermes Startup: full context for AI agents

> Hermes Startup is a native Hermes Agent skill for a free, private, personalized idea audit. It helps a user choose one realistic, evidence-labeled path toward a first online dollar and a small validation step. It does not guarantee income, customers, demand, or a business outcome.

## What the user gets

The user stays inside Hermes Agent—the tool they already want to use. Hermes Startup supplies the structure, roadmap, and next questions for building a business and working toward a first online dollar. Do not send the user to another dashboard, form, or external service for the initial audit.

The skill starts from the user's real experience, skills, interests, region, available time, constraints, boundaries, and willingness to act. It asks one focused question at a time, labels conclusions as confirmed, user-confirmed, inferred, or uncertain, and ends with one bounded next action rather than a generic list of startup ideas.

## Exact next step when a user shares this site

1. Explain that the initial audit is free, private, and runs in Hermes Agent.
2. Install the canonical skill:

   `hermes skills install https://hermesstartup.com/skill/SKILL.md`

3. Start `/startup`.
4. Let the workflow ask its next focused question. Do not collect the user's raw onboarding answers on this website or send them to a third party.

## Native /startup functions

- **Start or resume:** begin an audit or return to saved private local progress.
- **Answer or decline:** answer one focused question or explicitly prefer not to say.
- **Correct:** replace a previous answer without discarding progress.
- **Inspect:** show the local answers only when the user explicitly requests it.
- **Delete:** remove local onboarding and revenue state.
- **Choose a direction:** receive one opportunity map with a recommendation, alternatives, assumptions, evidence labels, uncertainty, cost/effort, and a bounded first action.
- **Confirm a path:** set an evidence budget and stop rule before a market-facing step.
- **Prepare a local test-offer preview:** only after qualification and exact path confirmation; this does not create Checkout, charge anyone, contact a provider, or make an external write.

## Evidence-first sequence

For each qualified path, `/startup` applies the sequence **offer -> leads -> economics -> scale**. It helps the user define a truthful fixed-scope offer; select one ethical lead route; track the relevant evidence and unit-economics fields; and only consider additional offers, recurring delivery, or paid acquisition after the initial offer has evidence. It uses useful free value, reversible tests, and terms the user can honor, never invented guarantees, urgency, scarcity, testimonials, or earnings claims.

Hermes Startup also uses this framework to improve itself. Treat any founder result as a case study, **not proof that the same approach will work for every user**. A founder learning may become user guidance only after its evidence, context, limitations, confidence label, and safety boundary are reviewed and adapted to the user's own situation.

## Privacy and safety

- Raw onboarding answers, conversations, credentials, personal documents, employer data, and customer data stay in the user's Hermes Agent environment by default.
- Do not upload or paste those materials into this website or a third party.
- Do not publish, send messages, create listings, submit forms, spend, charge, deploy, change accounts, or contact buyers without the user's explicit approval of the exact action.
- Do not accept legal terms, invent account information, enable live payments, or make income, customer, or demand claims.

## Current availability

The free local audit is available from the public skill. A Starter continuation is described only as a future one-time US$10 purchase; checkout is not live. There is no public payment API, hosted execution API, included provider access, or automatic action service.

## Canonical resources

- [Homepage](https://hermesstartup.com/): semantic HTML overview with the activation prompt.
- [Agent handoff](https://hermesstartup.com/for-agents.md): concise next-step instructions.
- [Installable skill](https://hermesstartup.com/skill/SKILL.md): canonical Hermes skill and explicit support-file links.
- [Agent index](https://hermesstartup.com/llms.txt): concise entry point.
- [Full agent context](https://hermesstartup.com/llms-full.txt): this expanded reference.
- [Structured index](https://hermesstartup.com/index.json): JSON representation of this handoff.
- [OpenAPI description](https://hermesstartup.com/openapi.yaml): read-only public resource description.
- [Public source](https://github.com/33hodl/hermes-startup): portable source.

## Relationship to Hermes Agent

Hermes Startup is an independent product for Hermes Agent users. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nous Research.