Without Squirrel Ado

Desk note: the sit-down landed. Two rounds of voice-to-text answers, July 21, 2026, split by question and cleaned for punctuation only. The wording is his. Visit ClearMud →

The story starts in a garage. His father was an engineer, the kind who worked on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks when they were actually floppy. Then he started the family business out of that garage. His son was six years old when he built his first server in it. "Now, I didn't know what I was doing," he says, "but I was introduced to tech at a very, very young age." The same kid was pointing an old camcorder at family snowboarding trips.

Decades in IT followed, then a walk-away: he retired from the industry and chased photography and videography. He reserved the name ClearMud in 2023 from the creative side, not the technical one, and drifted through what he calls the limbo years. Olive harvesting. National parks and car camping. Nights with cousins in Portugal. The ClearMud YouTube channel went up in December 2023 and then sat: the oldest video still public on it, 3 TIPS for Small Businesses using ChatGPT, did not land until May 27, 2025, about 17 months later. The vision existed long before the output did.

Then the unlock. "End of 2024, beginning of 2025. All of the ideas I've ever had, all of the time-constraint or knowledge-constraint things that I wanted to build. I've built mobile apps in the past, but these were all prototypes, they never actually went to production, and then I'd realize, oh, I have to hire a full-stack engineer for this. Beginning of 2025 is where I'm like, wow, I can literally build any idea I have with the help of AI. It was truly just an unlock."

What he built with the unlock was not one product. It was a brand with a bench: educational YouTube on the front, B2B audits and implementation on the revenue side, and an agent system underneath that he estimates at ten primary OpenClaw agents and, counting sub-agents and his personal bot, "just shy of 20 to be safe." This paper's cover line was always the company of one. He corrected the head count.

The tape

Introduce yourself like we just met at a cookout.

Hey, my name is Marcelo. Everyone calls me Malo though. I'm a tech enthusiast. I've been working with computers my whole life. More recently I started a company called ClearMud with a focus around making AI simple and easy to use. I make educational style videos on YouTube. To generate revenue we work strictly in the B2B space, helping companies discover their pain points and defining solutions to alleviate them. Not only do we offer audits and opportunity maps, we also offer implementation. I'm really all about giving away the information but selling the personalization.

What problem kept bothering you enough to build this?

My approach with YouTube is not being like everybody else. I was getting really sick and tired of the fear-mongering, the upselling, the sales funnel, the lead magnet approach of paywalling content. I'm really against paywalling content, especially content that becomes irrelevant after a week or two because the space is moving so quickly.

I'm not just building a project or two projects. I'm not building something up for seed funding. I'm building up a brand that I could then down the road turn into data centers that I then lease out to a lot of the big frontier models. That's longer term. The shorter term is: start from an educational standpoint, get into B2B, which I've already done both, then start selling enterprise-based solutions.

How many projects are you honestly running?

I wouldn't classify it as projects, I'd classify it more as verticals: the ClearMud brand and YouTube, and the B2B side. I'm also running geoextension.com, which I just launched with the intention of letting it grow organically through SEO. And you can classify an OpenClaw system and a Hermes agent system as a project if you think about it. So I'm running those two as well. I'm running a lot more than that.

He pushed back on the question itself, twice, and the pushback is more revealing than the answer: "I feel like these core questions are designed for people who are building products or projects to launch as SaaS offerings. Whereas I'm focused on brand first."

Walk me through the last time you worked on it.

Literally two seconds ago. I'm prepping some video scripts in my custom-built ClearMud OS that was built through my OpenClaw agent team. What's on my screen right now: a YouTube script module showing off an Excalidraw canvas that I'm fine-tuning for the demonstration.

What does AI handle for you, and what can't it handle?

Research, content creation, coding, automation. Tedious tasks that collectively would take at least a couple of hours a week: an agent on a scheduled frequency goes in and updates metadata tags or whatever I define. It's probably saving me anywhere between five to ten hours a week just from those automations alone, and all the squirreling that comes with it.

What it cannot handle well yet is human judgment, and for me that's specifically video editing in DaVinci Resolve. It can make a video, it can edit a video, sure. But is it going to satisfy certain requirements that I have? No. It's not there yet. I think it will get there, but it's just not there yet.

The video

What was the first post that materially changed your growth?

The OpenClaw video, where I showed off my setup of some 30-odd agents slash sub-agents. The amount of leads I got from that was insane. What a lot of people didn't see was the hundreds of hours that went into building my system. The countless sleepless nights, the morning sunrises I would watch from working through the night. This started in December, pretty much 35 to 45 days straight, building this system every day like a full-time job plus that, eight-plus hours a day. People didn't see that. But I think that's why that video did so well: I was just genuinely excited to share something that I built that was truly amazing. And still is. I still use it daily.

Who told you it crossed 100K?

I honestly didn't even keep tabs. A very good friend of mine told me: dude, did you see your video? You're almost at 100K, we need to throw a party. I was like, I'm not even paying attention to that. I paid attention to the first 50,000 views, then I stopped, because I realized focusing on those numbers would get me addicted to making content solely focused on reaching that dopamine. When I made the video, I didn't care about the views.

I'd love to say that every single video excites me, but as of lately with all the things on my plate, I haven't had that feeling as consistently.

What changed in your approach after that?

Honestly, I didn't change my approach at all, and that's probably something that I don't regret. I don't want the success of one video to change my approach. I don't want to be stuck in an endless loop of chasing attention. Listen, it makes other creators more money, they scale faster. But at what cost, when you're posting a video saying this new thing's a game changer when in fact it's not? I don't want to lose credibility. I don't want to cry wolf with every new big thing that comes out.

And I'll be brutally honest with you, man. Lately I haven't always been super enthusiastic and excited to post a video. I'm sometimes posting a video because I promised to post two per week. As I'm sharing these thoughts with you, I'm also thinking: maybe I dial things back, maybe I get back to being enthusiastic and genuinely excited to share a video that I recorded. It's definitely top of mind for me.

How does attention turn into money?

People see what you're building and they want to learn how you built it, or want you to build something like that for them, or like-minded individuals just fall in love with the vibe. The opportunities have been endless. I've been offered money to make a promotional video more than a handful of times at this point, and I haven't taken one. I don't want to blindly promote a tool. I'm very much against taking money for the sake of taking money. I do not want to jeopardize the trust that I'm developing for the sake of a payday. I would rather work my way there in an honest manner. And a transparent manner.

The person

Your dad's garage is where this starts. What does he make of ClearMud?

He knows what ClearMud is. He's retired. While he had a big career in tech, he's also disconnected from it now, more of a handyman these days. He was a hardware guy. What he makes of it: he's just excited to see me doing something. He knows what I'm capable of, he's seen me work. His perception of AI is still what most people's perception of AI is. He just doesn't care. He's at the age where he's just enjoying life.

You retired from IT into photography. Does that eye show up in the videos?

I photographed people, a lot of landscape, a lot of travel. And yeah, it shows up. Depth of field, composition, all the variables that go into positioning a camera. This is why I'm excited to do the editing myself. At some point I may have an AI agent that handles it in my style, but I'm not going to hand it off just for the sake of handing it off. I like the human touch that I bring to my edits.

What would make you walk away from ClearMud? The actual line.

Define walk away. I'm not in this for a quick buck. If I am going to exit, I'm going to exit big. But the actual line? My health. If something happened to me or somebody close in the family, I would be forced to. It's health, but nothing else. I've already worked through a number of burnout phases in my life. I tend not to make the same mistake more than twice. Sometimes it takes me two times, I'll be brutally honest. But three times in a row? That's just not in my DNA.

Describe the desk.

Two monitors, keyboard, mouse, a notepad, this little jar of Thailand menthol inhaler stuff a friend got me. I personally love a clean desk. If things get scattered during a session, I'm okay with that, but when I go to bed, I clean up. It's like a rule I have with the sink: I never leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight. I don't have a dishwasher, I do everything by hand. I like starting the day fresh. Same with making the bed. It's always the first thing I do in the morning, without fail.

Walk me through the morning.

Up between six and seven. I need about 60 minutes minimum to myself. Phone stays on do-not-disturb. Hydrate first thing. Morning stretch, 100 reps of something, usually core. Cold shower. French press, walk to the French door where the sun shines every morning, open it up, grab my journal. I write a few things I'm grateful for, three things I'm going to focus on, things to watch out for, fears and resentments, things I strive for. Then I walk to my computer and the first thing I see is always Opti OS, my personal OpenClaw bot: daily quests, chief aims, a vision board. Only then does the phone come off DND, to make sure there were no emergencies overnight with family. Social media DMs I don't even look at until after lunch.

If it never works, was it still worth doing?

Heck yeah. Heck yeah. I've been enjoying this journey, this process of building this company. I was in limbo for quite a few years there. And what does works mean to me? Am I helping at least one person move forward with an idea? Am I helping at least one person gain the confidence that they need to build the thing that they're thinking about?

Times have changed since the July sit-down. The OpenClaw and Hermes bench is still there. The new videos are Buzz and Grok Bot: how he actually uses them, live, side by side. Claude keeps getting bigger. The agents keep multiplying. The definition did not change. Help one person get the confidence to build. Visit ClearMud →