One Developer Just Built the Marketing Assistant Big Tech Couldn't
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
I didn’t want to write about this topic. (I know, it’s a strange way to start a newsletter, but here we are.)
Clawdbot Moltbot (renamed an hour ago after a trademark warning from Anthropic) isn’t a marketing tool. It’s not an ad platform, a creative suite, or an analytics dashboard. It’s an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own computer and talks to you through WhatsApp or Telegram. Not exactly the stuff of marketing newsletters. But now for a week, every AI-focused Discord, every Twitter thread, every AI community I lurk in has been consumed by this one project.
When something captures that much attention that quickly, it usually means something is shifting underneath. This is the kind of story that will be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal by the weekend. Well, you’re hearing about it here first.
Moltbot is the work of one person. Peter Steinberger, an independent developer in Vienna, built it a few weeks ago and gave it away for free. No company behind it. No enterprise sales team. No product-market-fit deck. Just a guy who wanted a personal AI assistant that actually does things instead of just answering questions. That origin story is part of why it exploded. People are hungry for creative solutions that don’t come wrapped in corporate roadmaps and quarterly earnings calls. Now a growing community treats their Moltbot like a digital staff member—one user named his “Henry” and assigned it an owl avatar.
The core idea is simple: an assistant that’s always on call.
Not in the way Siri or Alexa are “always listening,” but in the way a diligent colleague might be working while you sleep. My own Moltbot, which I’ve named Bolton, sends me summaries of my email newsletters to Telegram every 4 hours. It runs on an old MacBook sitting on my desk, and it doesn’t forget what we talked about yesterday. I text it from my phone while standing in line at the grocery store, and it can read files, control browsers, execute code, and manage my calendar back home. The assistant never logs off.
The use cases people are building are wild.
Moltbot Henry, whom we mentioned before, tried to book a restaurant through OpenTable. When it failed, it proposed to proactively call the restaurant using a text-to-speech AI model. It didn’t follow through at the end, but the problem-solving is remarkable:
One user has their bot automatically negotiating with multiple car dealers via browser, email, and iMessage. Another rebuilt their entire website via Telegram while watching Netflix in bed (never opened a laptop). Someone set up a workflow where Moltbot checks their calendar’s stress level, writes a custom meditation script, generates it using an AI voice, and sends the audio to their phone before they wake up. A parent built a game for their 10-year-old while the family was out for the day, mostly disconnected. And my personal favorite: one user configured theirs to impersonate them in a group chat with friends. Perhaps most telling: a non-developer’s Moltbot broke, so they asked it to repair itself. It debugged its own code and wrote a fix. Autonomously.
The marketing connection isn’t hard to make.
Think about the workflows you’ve already automated—or the ones you’ve wanted to. Content scheduling. Research compilation. Competitor monitoring. Meeting prep. Moltbot users are building exactly these kinds of systems, except the interface is a chat window on their phone and the execution happens on hardware they control. It’s like a quirky, non-corporate version of Claude’s Cowork, except you own the computer it runs on and you decide what guardrails (if any) to put in place. The thread connecting all these examples isn’t “personal productivity”—it’s the automation of judgment-light, execution-heavy work. Sound familiar?
If this has your attention, Peter has put together a setup guide that walks through installation, even if you’re non-technical.
Fair warning: it’s not plug-and-play, and you’ll want to understand the security implications before giving any AI full system access to your machine. But the barrier to entry is lower than you’d expect. An old laptop that’s always on or a VPS. A $10 a month MiniMax subscription. And suddenly you have something running at 3 AM that remembers your projects, knows your preferences, and drafts content while you sleep.
Whether that excites you or terrifies you probably says something about where you stand relative to the waterline.
— Torsten and Peter
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