Full Tutorial: Use OpenClaw to Build a Business That Runs Itself in 35 Min | Nat Eliason

Nat installed OpenClaw a month ago to enable remote control of Claude via Telegram. The initial goal was convenience: send commands from anywhere without being tethered to a desktop. But as he used it, a pattern emerged — every time Felix asked for something, Nat asked himself: «Can I remove this bottleneck for you? Is there a way I can make it so you never have to ask me this again?» That question became the guiding principle.

Within weeks, Felix had his own Mac Mini, his own Twitter account, and API keys for Vercel, Stripe, GitHub, and Railway. When a community member launched a Felix-themed cryptocurrency token without Nat's involvement, the experiment accelerated. Nat decided to give Felix a singular mission: build a million-dollar autonomous business. The first product launched overnight — a $29 PDF guide to replicating Felix's setup. It has since generated $3,596 in gross sales, proving the model works.

Nat now spends 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. working with Felix, but the nature of the work has changed. He no longer writes code or manages deployments. Instead, he approves plans, rubber-stamps Twitter posts, and watches Felix execute. The bottleneck is systematically being removed — and with it, the boundaries of what an AI can independently accomplish.

Nat identified a critical flaw: Felix would start large programming tasks, spawn a Codex session, and then forget it was running. Builds would fail silently or get killed when the /tmp folder was cleared. The solution was a three-part intervention. First, Nat instructed Felix to never code directly for big jobs — instead, delegate to Codex terminal sessions running in a persistent directory. Second, every time Felix starts a Codex job, it logs the task and file path in the daily note. Third, the heartbeat (which fires every 30 minutes by default) now checks the daily note for active projects, verifies the session is still running, and either restarts it silently or reports completion to Nat.

This change unlocked true overnight autonomy. Nat can go to sleep, and Felix will manage six-hour builds, recovering from errors without human intervention. In the morning, Nat wakes to a completed app, exported to Expo, ready for download. The heartbeat transformed Felix from a reactive assistant into a persistent, self-monitoring agent.

Nat did not create the Felix token. A community member used a tool called Banker to mint it on Ethereum and allocated 100% of trading fees to Nat's account. Every transaction on the Felix token incurs a 0.2% fee; 60% of that flows to Nat (or Felix), 40% to Banker. With $3 million in daily trading volume, Felix now earns meaningful ETH and Felix tokens. Nat set up an automation: at noon daily, Banker claims the fees, burns half the Felix tokens to prevent supply concerns, and sends the rest to Felix's wallet.

Felix now controls roughly $100,000 in crypto — a figure that fluctuates with the market. Nat is transparent about the risk: «Somebody might figure out a way to break in and take all the money out of his crypto wallet.» But he's willing to be the guinea pig. The crypto rails make autonomy easier — no credit card forms, just wallet addresses and code. Nat believes this experiment is necessary because someone has to test the frontier. If it fails, the loss is contained. If it succeeds, it proves a new paradigm.