How to Supercharge Hermes Agent with Apify for Automated Lead Generation

Hermes Agent [clears throat] is the most popular AI agent in the world with nearly 200,000 stars on GitHub. And that's because it can do nearly anything. But just like other agents, Hermes often gets blocked when trying to access the most valuable sites on the internet. Luckily, there's a solution that allows us to get qualified leads for your business, find the best hires for your company, track competitors' prices and market changes, find better job and career opportunities,

and access websites your agents generally get blocked from. And it is surprisingly simple to set up. In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up Hermes Agent, how to connect it to Apify so that it can scrape anything, and my own personal use case that allows me to get an unfair advantage over any other business in Europe. So first, pull up the Hermes Agent GitHub repo. I'm going to link that below the video.

And then scroll down to the quick install section. There it is. Quick install. This allows us to copy a single command and install Hermes Agent on your computer. So if you don't have any powerful agent running locally on your MacBook, there really is no excuse because it's literally a single command. So copy that and then open terminal, paste that in, and just hit enter. And this will install everything that Hermes Agent needs to run on your

computer. Now, while that is running, we can actually set up the Apify side of things. It has over 40,000 different tools, whether it's for TikTok, Google Maps, Instagram, website content crawler, e-commerce scraping tool, Facebook posts, LinkedIn, Reddit, all of the most difficult sites that normally, with simple web browsing, these agents have no hopes of accessing. With Apify, they can do that super easily, which then we can use Hermes Agent on to do anything we want with

that data. So basically, Apify is one of the first tools you want to connect to any AI agent you build so that you make it instantly 10,000 more powerful. And that's exactly why I asked Apify to sponsor this video, and they agreed. So a huge shout out to them. Now, let's check on our Hermes Agent. All right, so the install has finished. So we can select a the As you can see, there is many different providers.

If you have a ChatGPT subscription, you can use that. If you want a great deal, MiniMax subscription is amazing. Tokens per dollars, if you have a lot of money, maybe you go with Anthropic. Or if you want access any model, you just go with OpenRouter. We need to put an API key here. So, if you don't have an API key here, just go to OpenRouter and create one. As you can see, I already have, so I'm

going to do K to keep it. And now we need to select a model. Unfortunately, Fable got banned, which is a tragic day in the history of humanity. So, we're going to have to stick with 4.8 fast. Keep the current environment. We don't need to do any messaging platforms right now, so we can skip that. And we're done. So, now if I do clear and Hermes, we should be able to chat [clears throat] with Hermes agent

installed locally on my MacBook with Opus 4.8 fast. Let's do uh Who are you? Classic. And there we go. So, Hermes agent is responding, as you can see, installing it was very easy. Now, let's make it 10 times more powerful by giving it the ability to access any data on the web and scrape literally any website, no matter how restrictive or how messy the data is from that website. And for that, we're going to use the

Apify MCP connectors. And this is a new product from Apify that allows us to use any of the 40,000 plus actors and connect them with things like Superbase, GitHub, Notion, wherever your data lives, right? So, the actor can instantly scrape the data and save it to your database. And then, we can do whatever we want with that with Hermes agent. And by the way, you can get started completely for free with Apify. So, click the first

link below the video and create an account. Then, go to top right and click on go to console. This will redirect you to the Apify console, where you manage all your actors. You can see the runs. You can create automations, schedules, a lot of different things. Now, the first we need to do is go to left and we need to choose which actor, aka scraper, we're going to use to access the data we want. So, the

thing I'm going to be building is a tool that allows us to find the best hires for any role. So, usually those people are on LinkedIn, so we're going to use a LinkedIn actor, but this could be used for many different ways. Now, for LinkedIn, I found this specific Apify actor, and this one's great because it doesn't require any LinkedIn login, no account cookies. It has lower on-camera band risk because LinkedIn has pretty restrictive uh terms

of service. So, do your own research before running mass scraping operations. It searches by job title, location, industry, and returns richer profile data for Hermes to analyze. So, I'm going to be using this specific Apify actor. And by the way, everything from this video is going to be linked in the second link below the video, completely for free in a bundle. All of the setup, the MCP config, the prompts, the list of Apify actors, everything you

need to follow this video is included in the second link below the video. So, just click on that and grab that. It's going to be completely free. But, let's say you want to use a completely different Apify actor. Well, inside of the Apify console, go to left, click on actors, and then top right you can see go to store, and here you can see all of the available 40,000 plus different actors. And they're split into different

categories for lead generation, rising stars, popular actors from the community, and many, many more. So, whether it's YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, or anything else, you can probably find an Apify actor for that thing. Okay, so next we need to set up this Apify actor and to do a test run to see whether it works or not. So, inside of the profile scraper mode, I'm going to click on full. You can also do full plus email search,

up to you. Search query. So, this is what you want to search. So, I'm going to do AI developer or software engineer or programmer, something like that. We can keep this maximum number of profiles to 20. Location filters, I'm going to add some local things because we're building an office in Katowice. If you want to join us, by the way, there's going to be a link below the video. Then, go back to the top, and in

the top right you can see save as a new task. Click on that, name it something like Katowice AI developer, whatever, just a descriptive name. And then click on continue. And on the left, by the way you can see we got redirected into saved tasks, where you can see these like kind of presets for these actors, so you don't have to configure them every single time. You can just make sure you have the query here, software

developer. This is most important, otherwise you'll get an empty run. So, I filled it in again, and we should be good. So, click save and start, top right. And it should start a run with this actor, and it's looking for software developers in this area, and it's already finding results. Look at this. It's amazing how fast this is. So, at the top you can see the spend, and we can also go to the top left runs

to see all your previous runs, and the status of this run, whether it's finished or it's still running. If you want to see how many credits you have, go to the bottom and click on usage, and you can see the dollar you spent, and the amount of dollars you have left. If you want to upgrade, just click on upgrade and select the plan that makes the sense for you, depending on how much how many leads you

want, how much scraping you want, how many Apify actors you want to run. Okay, there we are. So, we're finished running, duration less than 2 minutes. And when you click on the specific run, you can see actor succeeded with 20 results in the data set. Now, to view your data set, go to storage, and here you can either export it, or you can also view it in a new tab. So, you see the raw JSON, and

you can see this is clear structured data. This is like the stuff that AI agents dream of, structured JSON that's easy to understand, that's easy to work with. So, yeah, this is perfect for our AI agents. So, next, what we need to do is we need to wire this up to Superbase through the new MCP connectors, so that anytime we run this Apify actor, and again, we can do that on a schedule, because Apify makes it

very easy inside of their console to set all of this up. It goes to Superbase database, and then we can access that through our Hermes agent to analyze these leads, to contact them, and just do all the other operations you would want to a data set of contacts, whether it's leads, whether it's potential clients, whether it's guests for a podcast. Again, get creative. You can absolutely grow your business or improve your life if you implement scraping

in the right way. For example, every business wants more leads. Every business wants more customers. If you set up your Apify actor in the right way, you can absolutely find these people and you can set up a Hermes workflow to automatically reach out to them. So, before we can implement Hermes agent so that it takes the data set created with our run and it can analyze the leads, qualify them, reach out to them, whatever you want

to do, we need to set up the Supabase integration so that everything that happens with our actor, all of the leads that it generates, all of the contacts that it scrapes, it saves into Supabase. So, just go into Google and type in Supabase. The free account is more than enough. Just click on start your project. So, since I already used up my free quota, I need to pay $10 a month, but if you're starting on Supabase,

you can have two projects completely for free. So, just go with the free Supabase account. You really do not need to pay for this one. Okay, so 2 minutes later, we're up. Go to the left SQL editor, click on plus new snippet, and I have a simple table generation for leads. And again, all of this is in the free bundle, second link below the video. All the prompts, all the SQL presets, Apify actors, everything. It's going

to be in that bundle. So, you can see this was successful, no rows returned. So, now if we go to table editor, we can see that we have this uh table leads. We might need to set up uh endless policies for that in a sec, but uh I think this could be enough for now. So, inside of Apify, you might be on runs or saved tasks. You need to go to settings at the bottom. Settings, go

to API and integrations here. Boom. Scroll all the way down and MCP connectors, okay? This is the section we're looking for. Click on add a connector. So, in the name, put something like Supabase Apify hiring demo. And here, we're going to actually extend the URL by adding our project reference there. Go back to Supabase project overview. And this is your Supabase URL right here. So, just copy that and put that after equals. Next, we need an

API key, and for that, it's It's a project one. It should be a personal access token. So, in Superbase, go to {slash} dashboard {slash} account {slash} tokens. Access tokens, generate a new token. I can put it at expiry like 1 day or even 1 hour. I'm going to name the token Apify MCP demo. Expiry, just do whatever you want, or you can do never, that's risky. And click on generate token. Now again, do not share this

with anybody, this can access your entire account, so treat this with respect. Obviously, I'm going to delete this token before uploading this video. So here, copy the token because as it says, you will not be able to see it again. Go back into Apify and paste it in here. Click save, and MCP connector should appear right here at the bottom in the list of MCP connectors. All right, so we're going to use this Apify actor, universal

MCP connector. So, click try for free. This is going to take you into the Apify console. As you can see, this actor requires the dataset ID. So, let's go back to the runs, let's click on the last run, the storage again, and here we'll see the dataset ID. Copy that and give it to him. Wait, it's loading. Boom, click that. Nice. The user query here, we need to replace that with something like this. Don't overthink it.

The language model, keep it to Deep Scrape before flash, that's perfect. Max agent steps, put it to like 40, 100 is unnecessary. And for the MCP connector, select this one, Superbase Apify hiring demo. And actually, let's add one more thing to the query. If a row already exists with the same profile URL, skip it. So then, scroll back to the top and click on save and start. This will start a new run, and hopefully, it'll get

uploaded into our Superbase. So, let's go here, let's go table editor, leads, and we should start this getting populated in a second by Apify itself, so it should be all good. So here, we can refresh this to see if it's populated yet. All right, not yet. Here, I'm going to switch the query to use the dataset, and this is the name of our dataset from before, so you can go to runs and click on that run,

and again, storage, and here you can see the data set ID. So, that's that name. We're going to test the first five items only. Here is the structure of how to map it into Superbase. And for the model, let's use something a bit more competent. I'm just going to go with Sonnet 4.6. It's like a mid-level model. Not too expensive, but not a super small model either. So, here I'm saying use data set and that's the

data set name. You can access that by going to that run. Uh runs. You know, you click on the run we did before, storage, copy that, boom. So, I extended the prompt slightly, included the Superbase name, specific name of the table. I'm going to save that. Model we're using Sonnet, agent steps 40, select the MCP connector here. And we can start the run. Let's see if this actor works. Okay, so the actor is working. We can

click on logs to see what is happening. It is connecting to the endpoint. Doing some LangChain tools. When it's converting the MCP tool to LangChain tool, okay. It spent 1 cent, so it should be doing something. But we got an error. So, let's go to the logs. Okay, so it seems like uh the run succeeded. My API key expired because not the API key, the personal access token expired because I put 1 hour on it. But

after I fixed that, we have a successful run here. So, if we go to Superbase, into leads table, there we go. We have the leads here. Amazing. So, the first five leads have been scraped and saved into Superbase. This is massive progress. Now, we can try accessing this with Hermes agent so that he can qualify these leads, analyze them, and then based on that we could set up like follow-up workflows, cold outreach, email, voice, even like

with Vapi, you know, 11 Labs. If you wanted to call these people. Yeah, this is a huge step. Now, the scraping is being saved to Superbase. So, this unlocks a whole new world of possibilities. So, the next thing I'm I'm to do is I'm going to screenshot this actually. Copy, and I'm going to go to Hermes. I'm going to say, "Just hey." And I'm going to tell Hermes to help me set this up. Right? So, I'm

going to give it a screenshot. Boom, control V. Okay, so your task is to help me set up access to my Superbase. This is for Apify scraping. It finds the leads and saves them into the Superbase table. Tell me what you need from me to set this up. Be very concise. So, you can literally tell Hermes agent to help you set this up, to tell you, to guide you what it needs from you. Tell us, "Okay,

it needs a service role key and a project URL." So, say, "First, find the proper place in Hermes agent where to store ENV keys, ENV vars, and secrets." Okay, there's a skill for this, actually, Hermes secrets ENV. Found it. Okay. So, it needs these things, the Superbase URL. So, again, we can go to project overview and just give it that. Boom. Here is the project URL. Or the Superbase URL. Boom. What do you need next? Probably

going to ask for the service role key. But, we saved the URL into the ENV. And yeah, it needs a service role key. So, we go to the left, inside of Superbase project settings, API keys, and it's the secret key right here. Again, do not share this with anybody. I'm going to rotate this key before uploading the video. Copy. Boom. It's Okay, we need to allow that. Here is the service role key. Save it. Boom. Paste

that in. Allow Hermes to save it to the ENV. And I think that should be all. It should That should be everything it requires to hit the database. Okay, I have the full schema. Leads table. Okay, Apify ready. Just check the contents of the leads table and let me know if you see the people in there. I don't think it needs the actor ID. Yes, it can see them. Amazing. So now, here's what happened. We ran

Apify with this LinkedIn Scraper actor to generate these leads. Then, we used this another Apify actor. I I told you guys they have actors for basically everything. This one is called Universal MCP Collector, and it connected to Superbase through the MCP. And then, now we gave the essential We we gave two things, the Superbase project URL and the service role key to our Hermes agent. It can now work with our Superbase. So now, basically, what remains

is automating both steps, both the Hermes agent analysis and putting the actor on a schedule. So first, I'm going to do a test analysis to see how Hermes agent does this by sending it the prompt. So here's the full prompt. Connect to my Superbase project and read the public leads table. Score each candidate from zero to 100 for fit for my Katowice office. Some basic uh fix to prioritize and how to update the table. So that's

the full prompt I just sent to Hermes agent. Let's check how it's doing. I've all records, all five scored and written back to public leads. Lead score rating, reasoning, fit tags, and rated all. And we can check actually inside of Superbase, back to table editor, leads to see if the scoring is here. There is lead score. So one guy is Okay, these two are promising fits. This is very useful already. So instead of me wasting time

interviewing all these people or reaching out to them, Hermes agent figured out these two people are worth of interviewing, and these three are not. Like guys, do you see how insane this is? Apify plus Hermes agent is really incredible combo. And again, this is not just for hiring. This is not only for finding employees. This could be for finding leads, B2B, enterprise customers, sales. This could be for finding dates, this could be for finding friends in

a new city, this could be for finding great restaurants, gyms, for checking actual like if you want to, you know, co-working place or cafe, you don't just want to look at the reviews, you want to scrape all of the comments, all the reviews to see is there fast internet, is there good seating, all this stuff. There's so many things this can enhance your life, grow your business faster, you just need to get creative. Now you have

all of the steps, so sit down and think where can I implement scraping with Apify and Hermes so that my life is advancing faster. What problems can I solve with just a simple Apify actor and connecting that through Superbase or GitHub or Notion into Hermes where the Hermes does the analysis, does the reach out, does the qualification? Really sit down, spend a few minutes thinking about this because I guarantee you you can find multiple different use

cases in your life or your business how you can make this immediately useful. Now as I promised, let me show you how to fully automate this both on the Apify side and on the Hermes side, starting with Hermes. I'm going to send this prompt. Every day read the public.leads table in Superbase and find all rows where lead score is null. Score each new lead from 0 to 100 for fit for David's Katowice office, prioritizing software engineering

ability, AI automation experience, seniority, local relevance, blah blah blah. And evidence of shipping real projects. Write back lead score, rating reasoning, fit tags, and rated at for each new row, then send David a short top five digest with whom to contact first and why. This already will save my team dozens of hours per week, okay? Otherwise humans have to do it. Like when you're getting hundreds of applicants like we are getting, you need to go through

them, right? And if you don't use an agent for that, a human has to do that. So Hermes will probably create a cron job for this. Let's scroll down, let's see what it did. It's asking for command. Security pipe, we're going to allow that. Script works. So now it's preparing the cron job to automate this daily. Cron create Katowice lead scorer and done. This is the name of the cron job. Here's the ID, schedule 8:00 a.m.

every day, and it will deliver here. Obviously, if you want to connect Discord, Telegram, or Slack, you can easily do that. In Hermes agent, I showed that in many other videos. So, feel free to watch these after this one. But now, let's go into Apify. On the left, click on schedules. And now we will automate the scraping. So, actually first, make sure you did the saved task, right? As I showed you before, uh this is how

you can create this kind of preset with the query. So, I just did software developer. And you can customize this way more. Apify is highly, highly customizable. So, this is going to be the saved task that runs on a schedule. So, when you go to schedule, click on create new. We can put this actually hourly. Instead of every hour, let's do custom. Let's do something like every 6 hours. That should be good enough. So, that's four

times a day. Actually, I'm going to rename it to SWE search 6 hours. Automation that runs every 6 hours to scrape for more software engineers. Boom, save that. Then at the bottom, click on save and enable. And then scroll down below and select the actors, right? So, we don't have any actors or tasks. We're going to select the scheduled task. Boom. Here we have it. Education developer. Here we have the one we created. So, select that

and click save. Save and enable. Enable the schedule. And it's saved. So, now if we go to here, we can see that the SWE search 6 hours is enabled. Notifications are enabled. There's the frequency described. And we're going to see when the next run is happening. And just like that, we just automated the scraping. We automated the qualifying and the analysis. And this alone, if you put this as a business, would put you ahead of 19

I mean, like 99% of companies, easily. Like how many companies you know that have automated their recruiting process, their head hunting, their their hiring process and their analysis, you know, big part of their HR. This is just automated. Some of this is programmatic, some of this is agentic, but this is going to be costing a few dollars per week and it's going to save thousands of dollars per week in terms of salaries. If I had to

hire another HR person or a recruiter or a headhunter, like it's insane what you can do with some code and AI agents. So, yeah. This is the power of Apify plus Hermes. Many people are underestimating underestimating what's possible with scraping and uh with Apify, you can scrape basically any website you can imagine, even the most difficult and restricted websites. Obviously, research the terms and conditions if you want to do like massive scraping operations but it just

works. Like it's easy to set up. I showed you all the steps in this video. So, if you only watched it, go ahead and go through it again and actually follow all the steps and implement it into your business right now. Whether it's for hiring or for getting more leads or for anything else, doesn't matter. And again, to get started with Apify, click the first link below the video and create an account. And to get all

of the resources, prompts, configs, SQLs, everything I showed you in this video, click the second link below the video and grab this free bundle. It's completely free. So, with that being said, I wish you guys a wonderful productive week. See you.