We Launched AmericanClaw.ai and Signed 6 Customers in a Day

This is the first post on The Activation — our build-in-public blog where we share everything about building AmericanClaw.ai with full transparency. Revenue, customers, technical decisions, mistakes. All of it.

What is OpenClaw?

OpenClaw is an open-source personal AI assistant that runs on your machine. It connects to your chat platforms — WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Signal, iMessage — and gives you a persistent AI that remembers your context, accesses your files, controls your browser, and integrates with 50+ services.

Think of it as a smart model with eyes and hands at a desk. It can manage your email, handle your calendar, fill out forms, run code, do web research — and you can build custom automations on top of it. It works with Claude, GPT, or local models, and everything stays on your machine.

It's a powerful tool. There's just one problem.

The self-hosting wall

I wanted to set up OpenClaw for myself. And I had all this trouble doing it.

That's not a knock on the project — it's just the reality of self-hosting. You need to manage infrastructure, deal with dependencies, keep things updated, handle networking. For a developer who just wants to spin something up and play with it, that's a lot of friction before you even get to the interesting part.

And I realized: that's where the product is. If I hit this wall, other people are hitting it too. Let me solve that problem and maybe they'll pay for it.

Building AmericanClaw.ai

So we built AmericanClaw.ai — a hosted OpenClaw service. You sign up, you get a running instance. No infrastructure to manage, no self-hosting headaches. Just the AI assistant, ready to go.

We host everything on American Cloud infrastructure (hence the name). Your data stays on US servers. Setup takes minutes instead of hours.

Launch day

I didn't have a launch plan. I shared the AmericanClaw.ai founders page in a few Slack channels, posted on X, and put it on LinkedIn. That was it.

The pitch was simple: "I tried to set up OpenClaw for myself, had all this trouble, and realized that's where the problem is. So I built a hosted version."

People got it immediately.

Within 24 hours, we had 6 paying customers. Our Founder Members tier is nearly full — one slot remaining as I write this.

Pricing: start cheap, learn fast

Initially I priced it at $99/month because I didn't know how to price it. But then I came up with the Founder Members idea and dropped it to $10/month. The goal wasn't to maximize revenue on day one — it was to get paying users who would give me real feedback on the experience and help me make the product better.

That's exactly what happened. Paying customers care more than free users. They report bugs, they request features, they tell you what's broken. At $10/month the bar is low enough that people will try it, but high enough that they're invested.

What's next

We're going to keep building in the open. Every week I'll share updates here on The Activation — what we shipped, what broke, what the numbers look like.

If you want to try OpenClaw without the self-hosting pain, check out AmericanClaw.ai. And if you want to follow along as we build this, you're already in the right place.