Clawdbot's Rise to Fame: The project the founder worked on after achieving financial freedom, creating a prototype in just 1 hour

ClawdBot became an instant hit thanks to open source, local deployment, and high customization. Founder Peter Steinberger, through his second entrepreneurial venture, redefines personal AI assistants and creative pursuits.

Recently, a personal AI assistant called ClawdBot (now renamed Moltbot) has gone viral on social media. It is open source, can run locally, and is highly personalized, sparking a wave of enthusiasm among developers and even unexpectedly boosting sales of Apple’s Mac mini. More than the product itself, attention is focused on the creator behind it—a serial entrepreneur named Peter Steinberger.

This veteran developer from Vienna, Austria, previously founded a successful B2B software company and achieved financial freedom, but after retirement, fell into a profound sense of emptiness. Now, with renewed passion for AI technology and deep insights into the essence of entrepreneurship, he uses ClawdBot as a starting point to re-enter the forefront of the tech wave.

13 Years of PSPDFKit

Peter Steinberger’s first entrepreneurial journey centered around PSPDFKit. PSPDFKit is a company specializing in document processing SDKs, providing PDF collaboration, signing, and annotation tools for developers worldwide.

Back in 2011, Peter received a job offer at WWDC in San Francisco during a party. As a freelancer, this was an enticing opportunity—to live in San Francisco, immerse himself in startup culture, and work alongside industry elites. He accepted the offer and waited for his work visa.

But that wait lasted over six months.

During this period, Peter paused all freelancing work and suddenly had plenty of free time. “My mind was liberated from all freelance gigs, and naturally, I filled this time with other projects.”

Inspired by friends, he decided to try a paid component business. Thus, PSPDFKit was born.

Image source: a fish CoolFish

Initially, PSPDFKit was just an experimental project he built in his spare time, but it unexpectedly attracted many developers willing to pay. Even more dramatically, before his visa was approved, the project had grown into a viable business—“earning more than I could in a full-time job.”

Nevertheless, Peter decided to go to San Francisco to try working there. “All the gears were set for San Francisco, so I took the job. Now, it’s all about the experience. I truly believe I can do it.”

But reality soon proved this nearly impossible. Managing a 40+ hour job while running another full-time business left him exhausted. “After killing myself for a while,” he had to make a choice.

In April 2012, after attending NSConference, Peter finally made up his mind. “So many amazing people are genuinely passionate about what they do—after experiencing all this, I could no longer go back to that 9-to-5 routine. Moreover, seeing users genuinely love your product is one of the most wonderful things in the world.”

His experience in San Francisco clarified his true direction. “It helped me realize what I really wanted to do.” So he returned to Vienna, Austria, to focus on PSPDFKit full-time. This seemingly “passive” attempt, delayed by visa issues, instead became the foundation of his 13-year entrepreneurial saga.

PSPDFKit gradually grew from a personal project into a global remote team of 60-70 people, serving top-tier clients like Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM, Volkswagen, and others. Remarkably, the company was entirely bootstrapped for 13 years, without external funding.

Peter has openly stated on his blog that he invested immense time and effort to create the best product. This relentless pursuit of quality and deep understanding of the B2B market made PSPDFKit a successful industry benchmark.

In October 2021, Insight Partners made a strategic investment of $116 million (about €100 million) into PSPDFKit. It was the company’s first external funding and marked a perfect conclusion to Peter’s first entrepreneurial chapter. He and co-founder Martin Schürrer officially stepped down from full-time management roles.

Image source: a fish CoolFish

But behind this glamorous ending lies the cost of nearly 13 years of working almost every weekend. Peter has openly admitted in multiple speeches that this entrepreneurial journey led to severe burnout.

Post-Retirement Void and Awakening

After selling PSPDFKit, Peter entered a so-called “retirement” state.

For a tech person who achieved financial freedom early through startup success, this should have been the ideal life—ample time to relax, recover, and make up for the past 13 years of life regrets.

However, this freedom brought an unexpected sense of “emptiness.”

In his blog “Rediscover Passion,” he wrote: “After selling my stake in PSPDFKit, I felt shattered. I had poured 200% of my time, energy, and heart into that company—it was my identity. When it was gone, there wasn’t much left. I heard it’s common for founders to fall into a low after leaving their companies, taking a year to recover. The typical lifecycle of a company is only 4-5 years. Looking back on these 13 years, I realize I just needed more time to find new goals.”

He tried parties, therapy, moving to new countries, chasing various “hedonistic pleasures”—all to fill this void. Ultimately, he realized: “You can’t find happiness just by moving; you can’t find purpose—you have to create it.”

This awakening prompted him to return to what he loves most—creating and building.

In 2024, as the AI wave begins, the experience of AI tools at that time was far from ideal—simple arithmetic problems were answered incorrectly, logical reasoning was riddled with flaws, and generated code was buggy. But over time, AI technology rapidly advanced, and Peter gradually realized that AI had shifted from “not very useful” to “really interesting.”

A new technological paradigm was forming, and he decided to no longer be a bystander.

On his personal homepage, he wrote: “Came back from retirement to mess with AI.” This seemingly casual phrase signals the start of his second life.

Image source: a fish CoolFish

ClawdBot: A One-Hour Viral Hit

Image source: a fish CoolFish

ClawdBot’s origin was driven by Peter’s personal need, just like PSPDFKit 13 years ago.

In April 2024, he began conceptualizing a “life assistant” project, but at that time, AI models lacked the capability to support this vision. Later, the idea was shelved because Peter believed big companies would develop similar products. Doing it himself seemed pointless.

By November, he realized a key issue: big companies had not created truly personalized AI assistants.

Market AI tools were either too limited in function, had privacy concerns, or had high usage barriers.

So he decided to do it himself, hands-on.

Strikingly, from idea to prototype, Peter only took one hour.

In an interview with “Open Source Friday,” he recalled: “That month, I spent an hour cobbling together some rough code. It could send messages via WhatsApp, forward to Claude Code, and send back the result. Basically, just ‘gluing’ a few things together. Honestly, it wasn’t hard, but the effect was quite good.”

Initially, this project was called “V Relay,” essentially a relay tool for WhatsApp. But it quickly demonstrated an unexpected “self-adaptive” capability that even surprised Peter.

Once, working at a hotel in Marrakech, Morocco, he jokingly told his AI assistant: “The hotel door lock in Marrakech isn’t very reliable. Hope you don’t get stolen, since you run on my MacBook Pro.”

The AI responded: “No problem, I’m your proxy.” Soon after, it detected the network and found it could connect to Peter’s computer in London via Tailscale, then migrated itself there.

Peter later recalled: “Maybe it’s not yet AGI, but at that moment I truly realized that the ‘self-adaptive’ aspect had exceeded my expectations. I thought, this is how Skynet begins.”

The project’s evolution was also full of serendipity. Later, while developing features related to Claude, a developer submitted a PR for Discord support. Peter hesitated: “I was considering whether to add Discord support, since it was no longer limited to WhatsApp.” Ultimately, he accepted the PR, but the project name had to change.

What to rename it? Peter asked Claude for suggestions. Claude proposed “ClawdBot”—a name echoing Claude itself, with the imagery of “Claw.” And so, ClawdBot was born.

This name also reflects the core idea of the project: giving AI a pair of hands, making it a true personal assistant running on your own device.

Today, ClawdBot has exploded in popularity within communities both domestically and internationally. Its GitHub stars surpassed 40,000. More dramatically, this project has boosted Mac mini sales, as many users choose it as the hardware platform for ClawdBot. Its affordability, compatibility, low power consumption, quiet operation, and small footprint make it attractive—even Google DeepMind product manager Logan Kilpatrick couldn’t resist ordering one.

But this viral success was not easy. Peter admits he initially had no idea how to communicate the product’s value to the public.

“Interestingly, last November, when I showed it to friends, they all exclaimed ‘So cool!’ But when I posted on Twitter, the response was surprisingly cold,” Peter recalled. “It wasn’t until December that, in face-to-face demos, people would blurt out ‘I need this.’ But I realized I had no idea how to explain its magic to more people.”

This “great in-person demo, difficult online spread” dilemma precisely highlights ClawdBot’s uniqueness—its value can only be truly appreciated through personal experience. By January, with community-driven word-of-mouth, it began to ignite a collective resonance among developers, spreading unstoppable momentum.

Peter calls himself “stopping reading code, starting watching code flow.” It sounds like a joke, but it accurately captures the fundamental shift in developer roles in the AI era. ClawdBot’s success proves that Peter Steinberger, after a period of silence, not only reignited his “spark” but also, with a more forward-looking and philosophical stance, re-entered the forefront of the tech wave. From a traditional B2B software entrepreneur, he transformed into a futurist embracing AI and pursuing ultra-personalized experiences.

From early PSPDFKit to today’s ClawdBot, both ventures are major successes. But beyond success, their greatest commonality is solving real problems he personally encountered, then sharing solutions with the world.

In a recent interview, Peter emphasized ClawdBot’s mission: to enable everyone to control their own data, rather than handing it over to big corporations.

This technological idealism was less apparent during his first startup. PSPDFKit then resembled a traditional B2B software company—excellent, but fundamentally aimed at commercial success.

In his second life, Peter shed the business baggage and returned to his original passion for technology. ClawdBot is fully open source, permanently free, and supports local models. These choices are not “business-smart,” but have earned widespread recognition from the developer community.

Building tools to solve one’s own problems and then sharing with the world—that’s perhaps what open source should be about.

The Unfinished Second Life

As of this article’s publication, ClawdBot’s GitHub stars have surpassed 40,000.

Image source: a fish CoolFish

Unlike the 13 years of hardship during his first startup, this time he appears more at ease. No KPI pressure, no external urging—only pure joy of creation.

In an interview, Peter shared a moment that deeply moved him. A user who once felt anxious contacting customer service can now delegate that task to his intelligent assistant.

Peter recalled: “I never thought I could solve problems this way. At that moment, I felt incredibly humble, even a bit stunned: wow, we—just because that initial idea came from me—actually changed something and genuinely improved someone’s life. Making others’ lives better feels really good.”

Peter Steinberger’s second entrepreneurial journey is still ongoing. But one thing is clear: in this era of AI reshaping the world, those who dare to create and actively embrace the future will never be abandoned by the times.

• This article is reprinted with permission from 《Deep Tide TechFlow》
• Original title: 《ClawdBot 爆紅背後：創始人PeterPeter 與他的二次生命》
• Original author: 一隻魚 CoolFish