The Startup Ideas Podcast - Andrew Wilkinson: AI Agents run my business and life

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's episode is an inside look to how Andrew Wilkinson is using AI agents to run his personal and business life. This is a guy who has a great setup. He shows us exactly how he's using things like OpenClaw and AI agents to be more productive and to make more money. How he uses it with his family office. How he's using it to start a startup. How he's using it to think about where the next generation businesses and where he should be putting his money. This is an inside look, and I don't think he's shared this anywhere with how he's using AI agents to run his life and his businesses. By the end of this episode, you're going to have your creative juices flowing.

Starting point is 00:00:41 I certainly did, and I can't wait to see you in there. Andrew Wilkinson, I think third time on the pod. Welcome back. Good to have you. Andrew, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? Oh, man, they're going to learn that OpenClaw is hard. But amazing when it works. They're going to learn whether they have ADHD or OCD.

Starting point is 00:01:13 They're going to learn how to build a crazy vector database about their complex company. And they're going to learn a few prompt tricks and whatever random other stuff we end up stumbling into. Okay. So for those of you don't know, Andrew's a very curious guy and he gets deep into rabbit holes. So it sounds like what we're going to learn is a lot about how you're using AI in your day-to-day. The good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. Yeah, let's do it. All right, let's get into it.

Starting point is 00:01:50 I would say I had this crazy moment like so many other people in December of last year where I played with Claude Code and all the AI tools like Replit and stuff. And they could kind of do stuff. It was interesting, but it wasn't there yet. And in December of 2025, I just literally, like, I feel like I started shooting heroin. I started waking up at three or four in the morning, rolling out of bed with a big smile on my face, and literally just sitting in terminal and Claude Code with 10 tabs open. And I've been doing that ever since.

Starting point is 00:02:29 And my goal, you know, I've had a bunch of different things I've been trying to do. on the productivity side, like I was basically trying to build an open claw agent before OpenClaw came out and doing a very poor job of it. So I was excited when I was able to do that. But I mostly have been excited as a business person. For those of you, the listeners that don't know, I basically buy and start businesses. I mostly start businesses as a hobby for fun. But I buy a lot of businesses. And I'm always astounded by the amount of administrative burden in a SaaS company. If you think about how it scales, you know, support, accounting. There's all these like very boring, wrote types of tasks that are now able to be automated. And so as a test before I started

Starting point is 00:03:22 doing this in our operating businesses, I basically built a business, a SaaS business, and then I've been running it entirely autonomously using OpenClaw. So that's probably a cool place to start. And I just want to say like with OpenClaw, I basically have been, we referenced heroin a moment ago. You know, I have never done heroin just in case anyone's concerned about me. But apparently when you do heroin, the first time is the best time. And they call it chasing the dragon.

Starting point is 00:03:56 You're trying to get back to that special moment. And I had this special moment. I was traveling. I went to Arizona on a trip. And I forgot to bring my laptop. But I'd set up an open claw agent on my computer. And I basically was able to run my entire business using OpenClaught in the back of Uber's. Like I was going to this conference.

Starting point is 00:04:18 It was super, super busy. And I was astounded by how competent it was able to be. And that nobody picked up on the fact that, you know, every single email that I wrote was being written by. open claw. And so I've been chasing that moment ever since. And the problem is that I feel like I'm spending 50% of my time debugging it and 50% of my time, maybe 30% of my time making it better. And then 20% of my time being productive. So it's like the classic productivity treadmill. But we have been able to build some pretty interesting stuff. So let me screen share with you. And I will show you this app that I built. So this all started because I wanted to build a custom GPT or chat GBT project for me and my

Starting point is 00:05:10 girlfriend's relationship. The idea would be that we would be able to query it, hey, we're having a fight about X, Y, Z, which we do. And I asked it, I said, hey, if I was to do a bunch of psychological tests, which ones would you want to see? And it gave me this list of like 15 different screens that it wanted me to do. And so I went to Claude Code and I said, hey, can you just put all these into a multiple choice test, set up scoring, and then put them in a JSON file. And so both of us did that. It took about 40 minutes. And we put the JSON files into ChatTBT. And we said, without knowing anything about this couple, tell us about their relationship. And we read it line by line and like our jaws just like dropped. Like it nailed every single fight that we have,

Starting point is 00:05:57 every single issue at home. And so I saw the power of these multiple choice personality tests. And so I saw the product opportunity and I was like, I'm going to build a business out of this. And so I started this thing called Deep Personality. Let me just share my screen here. Quick break in the pod to let you know about a free workshop I'm doing that answers some of your biggest questions.

Starting point is 00:06:21 The first is, in the AI age, what are some categories that are right? for startup ideas. I'm going to outline a bunch of those different categories, the ones that I think the most opportunity is. Second is there's a million AI tools out there, which are the ones that matter when I'm trying to build a business? I'll walk you through that. And lastly, how do you actually build a business with some of these AI tools? So I'm actually going to show you live how I do this with my ideabrowser.com team. And I can't wait to see you there. It's this Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern. And if you go to the show notes, if you go to the description, you can click a link, RSVP, and learn a few things. I hope it'll get your creative juices flowing,

Starting point is 00:07:04 and I'll see you back at the pod. And you know, you could have, you know, you own an agency called Meta Lab. You could have called that Meta Lab to go and build this for you. But you decided, I'm going to do this all myself. I'm going to actually productize this myself. I'm going to design it myself. I'm going to build it myself. Why did you make that decision? Well, I think I love people. Like, I'm very extroverted, but the worst part about business is people. You know, if you think about using a, let's use a screenwriting analogy. So in Hollywood, there's all these brilliant screenwriters and they write these incredible scripts.

Starting point is 00:07:41 And so they have this idea and they know where they want it to go, right? So let's say they start here and they want it to go here. They want to make an incredible feature film in between all, in between the script. and the feature film are a hundred people that they have to convince, $50 million, they have to raise a million middle men and all that. And I think that creativity is just compromised based on the number of people between your vision and execution.

Starting point is 00:08:11 And so I think writing for me has been a very, like, pure pursuit where I can think about it and I can write it and I can work with AI to make it better if I need to. But it feels, it feels like so, such a clear, um, execution of your vision. And I feel like vibe coding is that, um, like finally I can do absolutely every part of it. And I can do it at my own pace. You know, if I was using employees, um, they're unreliable. They don't see my vision. They don't understand every aspect of, um, design. So you can have a great designer who sucks at front end or you can have or it doesn't know how to design saying that'll work in a front end. You can have a great designer who doesn't know how to write copy. So there's just

Starting point is 00:08:58 all these pieces that come together with vibe coding. And basically like in a few manic days, I was able to build this pretty crazy app. So let me let me show you how it works. So basically you do a personality test and it takes about 40 minutes. You're just clicking multiple choice answers and stuff. And then you get this report. And so here's my archetypes. It'll be like, you're the blazing architect. Here's your superpowers. Here's your kryptonite. This is just like the basic. And then as you scroll, you can see the AI has taken all of your answers. And it's written like a hundred page report. So this report literally goes on and on and on and on. And it's written like Robert Green. So it's like super impactful and deep and hits you. And it basically walks you through what you're great at and what

Starting point is 00:09:52 you're terrible at, what job you should have. Is your relationship working for you? Do you have ADHD, OCD? Are you on the spectrum? Like all these different things. And so you can see, let me get, oh my God, it's so big. All the way to the bottom. So you can see like these are my kind of personality traits, my attachment style, my internal family systems, like how much I people please, all this stuff. So I built this thing. And usually what happens for me is I start something and then I don't want to finish it because I don't want to hire the people and deal with it. And so what I ended up doing is in this case, just building agents to do everything. And so I can show you we were using OpenCloud.

Starting point is 00:10:40 We're currently using this thing called Harbor that a friend of mine built. And it's basically a harness for agents. So you can see all the different agents that are running here. So we have a dev. We have marketing agents. And then we have a support agent. And basically the way it works is somebody emails support and either support just tackles the ticket or it will actually fix the ticket.

Starting point is 00:11:08 So it'll send it to the dev agent. If it's a P0, so like a super scary security breach, it'll just immediately fix it and merge the PR. Otherwise, it'll, we just wake up and have a bunch of PRs. And then it'll email the person back and be like, hey, I fixed your issue or whatever it is. That works basically perfectly. Like it's shocking. Like support to me is not a job very, very soon. The one that's really exciting is the marketing agent.

Starting point is 00:11:35 So we basically have it. It's hooked into post hog, so it has all the data for the app. And it actually manages a meta and Reddit ads account. And so it'll do multivariate testing. It'll create ad creative. It will set budgets. And we basically just message it and we'll say, you know, hey, can you increase the budget by $1,000? Or we approve like a big SEO project or something like that.

Starting point is 00:12:04 So where we're at with it is like we've done maybe like $20,000 of revenue. Like it's still small. And where I'm really excited to go next is like what happens when we give it like a $100,000 a month ad budget. And we find ads and creative that actually work. So that's been, that's been insane. And I think that we're probably three to six months out from being able to just hand businesses off to AI to run at least basic

Starting point is 00:12:37 businesses like this. Harbor I've never heard of. And I see a lot of stuff. Let me just ask. So it's my friend Gavin made it. Yeah. To the Harbor website. Yeah, it's Harbor.

Starting point is 00:12:55 It reminds me a little bit of paperclip. Have you seen paperclip? Yeah, I have. So this is it. it's GitHub slash geek for brains slash harbor. And he's a friend of mine that I've been working on this with. And it's working really well. We just found that OpenClaw wasn't quite deterministic enough.

Starting point is 00:13:17 And the other issue with OpenClau is because it's a text-based interface, it was a little bit hard to keep track of all the agents and what's actually happening. So it's worked really well for us. Yeah, I mean, I think what's cool about it is, like if you're starting a company and you're thinking about org charts, roles, responsibilities, you know, you don't think about it within text, you know, back and forth, right? You think about it as like, okay, I'm going to spin up this agent or employee to do XYZ. And then how can I monitor what that XYZ employee is doing? Yeah, like, so basically like, it's just a, it's just a GUI basically for

Starting point is 00:13:57 something like OpenClaught. And it's still running on Claude. But, you know, you have all these documents with kind of like a knowledge base. You've got databases. You have all your environmental variables, et cetera. It's like, it's very similar to paperclip. I think the problem, it reminds me a little bit of crypto where crypto is not, crypto is built by nerds. So they make it nerdy. And when I saw paperclip, I got so excited because I was like, oh my God, I can, this makes sense to me visually. You like have this org chart. But it's clearly built by nerds because it's very confusing. And so my, I mean, my kind of belief is like pretty soon Anthropic and Open AI are going to launch like basically like CEOs. So you just be like I'm just going to

Starting point is 00:14:43 hire a CEO for my company. Give me your data. I'll figure it out. I'll run it. I'll run it. And right now the problem I feel like, you know, two years ago is like we're, you get, you get five minutes with a super genius who has Alzheimer's. Like the context window is so small that you just have these brief moments. Now I feel like with the one million context window, they can like maybe remember a day, but it's like memento, right? And I feel like once the context window is like $5 million,

Starting point is 00:15:17 10 million, then we'll be able to run entire companies with this. Yeah. There's some people now selling autonomous companies. I don't know if you've seen this. Pulsia is one of those companies. I think Pulsia, P-O-L. Does it mean it work? Like I saw that New York Times story about that guy who

Starting point is 00:15:33 like started the autonomous you know, what is it like billion dollar business or whatever? And obviously that's real. New York Times is writing about it. But I can't parse what's real versus bullshit. I think

Starting point is 00:15:48 you know, we're recording this April 29, 2026. You cannot run a fully autonomous company right now that, yeah, that is going to get better, that you can just, like, you know, go hang out on the beach 24-7. That being said, I think there's parts of the business that can be autonomous. Like, support is like a good, you know, area. But, like, you're not going to outsource, like, product at this point, in my opinion, autonomously to to something like Pulsia today.

Starting point is 00:16:27 You know, maybe that changes in six months, 12 months, whatever. But like my take is the people that are selling autonomous companies today are just selling a dream. Yeah, I kind of agree. Like I think open claw agents are still like zap. They're basically like zap your zaps, but that can make basic decisions and have intelligence. But you still have to tell them step by step, this is how I want you to think. This is how I want you to operate. Like, let's say you hired an intern and you gave them an email address, you would never have to say,

Starting point is 00:17:00 you should check your email every 15 minutes and you should reply. And when you do reply, you should, you know, think about the following things. Like it feels very, it's like you're dealing with a baby, a genius baby, but you have to teach them how to do every single thing. Where I'm excited is when I can just have a model that's just like a CEO model or or and just like delegate to them. and they'll just figure it out, which I think is kind of what everyone acted like OpenClaught was, but it's totally not. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:31 I want to go back to go to the deep personality test. Can I give you unprompted feedback? For sure. So when you were going through this, I was like, the content looked exceptional. My issue in general with like vibe coded projects is that because anyone could, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:52 create apps. and products like this, it's almost like you need to have some credibility layer in order to listen to the content. You know what I mean? So like, if I was like the PM or CEO on this, I would be like, how can I partner with, you know, someone who's credible in the space such that when I get this, you know, output, this report, I'm going to take this seriously. I think part of The problem is it's anyone who is a psychologist or someone who would be like legit on this would never do it because it's a bit cheeky. I'm using psychological screens that are supposed to be interpreted by a psychologist, but I'm not a psychologist. I'm using AI to do it.

Starting point is 00:18:44 And I think it's incredibly accurate. Like I've hammered it on a billion different models and I've looked at example tests and stuff. but that is definitely an issue. If there's someone listening who's connected to like a J. Shetty type person, definitely let me know because I think it's perfect for that. It really is one of those like one plus one equals five kind of things. But yeah, right now it's what I realized is like I can, when I post this in my newsletter, it goes crazy viral for a bit.

Starting point is 00:19:15 But I don't have enough pull in that space where my audience is a bunch of like tech bros. they're not going to share this with all their friends and stuff. It does definitely need something like that. Yeah. And I also wonder like, you know, I think about like who, like what are influencers, celebrities, microcelebrities that people look up to like a couple, like even just a couple that like has gone through this publicly maybe and have come out of the other side and they're just happier.

Starting point is 00:19:44 And when people think of like, you know, a couple that's, you know, a dream couple, like this is they're involved in this in some capacity. That's smart. So you and your wife, you want to do it? Should we do it? Yeah, yeah. My wife is like very like private, you know. So I'm more of the public one, but I'll see what I can do.

Starting point is 00:20:08 The same as my girlfriend. She hates, hates publicity and stuff. Let's see what else can I show you. I mean, another big piece is just data. So I, you know, I feel. really frustrated because at different times, I've kind of standardized on different LLMs. Like I'll get into the Claude ecosystem and I'll use the desktop app. I'll use Chad GBT and I'll build out a bunch of projects. I've basically just accepted that I'm going to live in

Starting point is 00:20:36 Claude code until somebody builds her, which I'm sure is coming in the next couple years. And so my strategy has basically been to take all the different data pipelines that I have and put them into a centralized place. And so I have fireflies record all my meetings. Every night a cron goes in to the API, builds an M markdown file, puts it into GBrain. I've built out vector databases for my businesses. This is a really cool thing. So a vector database can store you know, millions and millions and millions of tokens. And you can basically, you can can basically have like a service like pine cone go and crunch through a large amount of data. And it basically makes it highly searchable for an LLM.

Starting point is 00:21:29 And so I can show you an example of that. Let me just switch the screen sharing. So, okay, so here's an example. So like I did, I trained a vector database on my family office, Folly Partners, which is basically just my personal holding company. And here I just asked it. What did I say? break down how many minority venture investments I've made and how many are in the money bankrupt or declined. And basically it went off and did this query.

Starting point is 00:22:02 And then boom, I can see that I've made 132 direct investments. I invested 16 million. It's now worth 36 million. And then it can break down all the different write-offs, everything. And so this has been really, really powerful. So like if you think about, I did it for Tiny as well. And in tiny, I have, man, 24 businesses or something like that, tons of historical data. And the challenge when you run a conglomerate is like, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:22:35 Like, are any of the companies spending too much money? Are any of the CEOs full of shit? Are any of the businesses trending up, down expenses are going up? It's just too much data for one person to understand. And so I can't show it because it's all public company data. but basically what I can do in tiny now is I can say, hey, review the last quarter and I want you to give me any icebergs or issues. Or I can ask a simple question, like, how many accounting staff do we have in head office or whatever? And I've found this so useful.

Starting point is 00:23:06 It's not perfect. Like it'll often like say the wrong person is CEO of a business or the numbers are a bit off. But in terms of being able to like be the eye of Soron inside your company, I think it's like incredibly. powerful. And curious, like within Tiny, like I see how you're using it to interface with Tiny and to be a better chairperson and give advice. But within Tiny, I imagine that there's like some efforts to make the company's AI first and stuff like that, right?

Starting point is 00:23:41 Yeah. And that's one of those challenges that I think everyone can relate to where what is the saying? It's never expect someone to understand something that. their paycheck depends on them not understanding. So you have a lot of people that are living in the old world and need to be upgraded in their understanding. And often they're very attached to the old way of doing things.

Starting point is 00:24:05 And so to be honest, like the challenge in tiny is that we are generally pretty hands-off. And where we're really leaning in is in a lot of the software businesses, because those are the ones that are at the most risk. I think we've talked about this before, but it's not like software is dead. If anything, software is going to thrive way more. But it used to be like the newspaper industry where it's like in order to compete, you have to assemble this incredibly expensive group of people that's very rare to find. Right. You need like great programmers, great designers, et cetera. And that that was like a very finite resource. So it's kind of like the newspaper industry where you had to be rich. You had to buy like two million. printing press. And then once you have it, you actually have a competitive advantage.

Starting point is 00:24:53 Now I just think software is free. Anyone can make it. Anyone can rip it off. Like my personality app, it's cool. Does it have a moat? Absolutely not. Like maybe if to your point I had John Legend and Chrissy Teigen backing it or something, maybe there would be something there. But I think pricing pressure is just going to go crazy because it's like the restaurant industry. Like, you know, restaurants, are not a bad business, they're bad because there's too much competition. So if you're listening to this and, you know, someone's listening to this, they're watching this actually and they're saying like, okay, I like what Andrew's doing here with like, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:32 this fully advisory thing. I like what he's doing with personality test. I feel like he has a good sense to where the world's going. You know, what would, you know, what would you know, what would you be building now if you're, you know, if you're, you want to be building something. Right? Right. Where's the opportunities? I think we talked about this a year ago. And if anything, I've become more concerned. When I look around, don't get me wrong, I'm not concerned. I just say it's getting harder and harder and harder and harder.

Starting point is 00:26:05 Like, I think we've all been astounded seeing how good Claude has gotten and how much it can do and how quickly it can do it. And from my perspective, I think that if. If I was somebody who's obsessed with vibe coding and is 20, and I would say the goal should be like, make one to two million dollars by building a product, like deep personality or something like that, which is pretty straightforward. Try and make a million or two million bucks.

Starting point is 00:26:35 And this is such a sad answer, but I'd be like invested in data center stocks or invested in TSMC because to be honest, that's what I'm doing. Like I'm either buying like something with a moat, which is very, very hard to find. certainly in technology right now. Home services businesses,

Starting point is 00:26:53 like very, very brick and mortar kind of stuff. But even that, I think is at risk with robotics over the next 10, 20 years. But I honestly, all I can really recommend someone does is like buy iron and TSM.

Starting point is 00:27:08 Yeah, I think with, you know, with respect to like the GUI, the graphical user interface, like it just feels like where the, I think about it as like the hour of progress,

Starting point is 00:27:23 like the hour of progress or deep progress is that the UI is going away. And like, I don't know about you, but I'm spending more and more my time in Codex. I'm spending more and more time in Cloud Code. Like those have become my operating systems. So I'm spending less and less time in apps. And it's easier than ever to create apps. Therefore, like, yes, pricing pressure, competition, harder to get MindShare. Well, I mean, it's an interesting, like, someone asked me, like, is Adobe fucked?

Starting point is 00:27:53 And that's an interesting one because, like, I'm a pretty avid user of Lightroom. And I love, I've got a LICA. I love editing photos and stuff. And while I do put my photos into Gemini sometimes for, like, recoloring or retouching or something, I still really enjoy the process of, like, moving the sliders and making it exactly the way I want it. And so I think, you know, it's a question. of like does this being the standard matter or will someone just vibe code an even better lightroom and everyone will switch to that because they're a big slow incumbent and someone else will do it

Starting point is 00:28:28 faster. I can't answer that question very well. All I can say is software is a worse business now than it was five years ago. I mean look at Constellation Software. Their stock has been cut in half. Like that's crazy. And I don't know if that's correct because they own like the most boring software businesses ever. But yeah, dude, it's like a brave new world. And it's so depressed. I hate to give such a depressing answer because your show is all about entrepreneurship. And like, I just want to say, like, I'm more excited than ever. There's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur and build stuff. It's just you are picking up pennies in front of the steamroller in most industries. It's also hard to predict what's going to happen in 12 months from now because, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:11 or 18 months for now, 24, 24 months for now. So, like, like my advice to people is just build now, knowing that, you know, you're a big Buffett guy, right? So like, you know, what does he say? You know, there's only so many puffs you get on the cigarette or whatever. What is it? Yeah, you can get, well, he's more talking about cigar butts, right? So you find a cigar butt on the street and you can get one puff out of it for free. And I think a lot of previously high quality businesses that would be like a gourmet cigar from a cigar shop are now cigar butts.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Right. So my take, my, you know, glass half full take is you, you can get some puffs out of it. And, and it might turn in, like your personality test might be like, oh, a one to two million dollar a year business for three years. Or it might turn into like a media conglomerate somehow. I also built it. I built it for, you know, I was pretty irresponsible because I'm like using fast mode and going all out with all the costs. but I could probably build it for 10 grand, 20 grand of tokens or whatever to get to where we got to. I probably spent like 80 or 100 honestly because I've been so, dude, I'm spending like our family

Starting point is 00:30:24 office. So basically like I have tiny and then I have my personal holding company and, you know, family office, just the rich person word for personal holding company. So I'm sorry for being a douche. But basically like we have been. Instead of scaling employees, we've literally just been scaling Claude. And so I'm so lucky, like my CFO and president have both become obsessed with Claude code. But they're actually just scaling the API cost.

Starting point is 00:30:56 So instead of a payroll, we just have a $40,000 a month Claude bill. And it's doing everything. Like, I'd love to show you some of the stuff that they've built. It's just crazy. Yeah, I would love to see it. Here's an example of, like, software being completely full. fucked. So there's this product called Adapar. You've heard of it? Nope. So Adipar is like basically like software for rich people to track their portfolios.

Starting point is 00:31:23 And they charge 50 to $100,000 a year. And basically what it is is like it pipes into your bank. It pipes into your accounting. It pipes into the public market data. And it just tells you like here's how much, here's how much money you have. Here's your personal net worth. Here's all your assets. Here's your balance sheet, et cetera. And so what we did is my CFO just said, fuck that. I don't want to pay those guys all that money. And we can actually build something that is way more customized to us and integrated into all of our data. And so he said that. And like the, you know, you remember like five years ago when one of your engineers would be like, why are we paying Slack all this money?

Starting point is 00:32:04 Let's just build it ourselves. Yeah. We all know that's like a fool's errand, right? Like that's insane. And so when he told me he was just going to build it, I was like, first of all, you're a CFO. like I'm a little skeptical. But two, I was like, look, do we really, you know, is that actually going to work? In like two weeks, he built this as this AI assistant.

Starting point is 00:32:23 So this I can query. Let's see, like what's stress test. What is this? So basically it's like the, basically like an anthropic API, but it has access to all of our data. So like, okay, here's one. I screwed it up. bad demo. Steve Jobs would be yelling at me right now. So this is going to go off and query this. Let's see what it does.

Starting point is 00:32:49 But anyway, this was built by my CFO. He's never coded in his life. When I told him about Claude Code and that he should check it out, he's like, I don't know how to code. Like, I'm not technical. And literally within like a week, I'm so lucky that he's the kind of person that would do this. But he built this. And it's just, it's insane. going back to the glass of half full of entrepreneurship I've been seeing a lot on Twitter lately of like services is the new software so I can imagine I know this is you built this for yourself but I can imagine a product like this and then you sell services on top of this right like if you actually want

Starting point is 00:33:27 to sell this to other family offices and stuff like that whereas like a weekly call or maybe it's like all you know add skills every single week or help you you do X, Y, Z? Yeah, I mean, I think the way I look at it is, I always give the example of funeral homes. So funeral homes are a very unsexy industry that nobody wants to work in. And so you don't have that much competition.

Starting point is 00:33:52 And so if you build software for, let's say like some guy who owns a funeral home has like a web with his nephew, like you or me in like 2010, and he's like, hey, can you build software that's custom for funeral homes for me to manage mine? And then you start the software. software business and you're the only game in town. No other person owns a funeral home and has a

Starting point is 00:34:14 webwiz nephew who's going to do that. And so you have a monopoly and you become the default. And I think the new world is, you know, if 400 people in the United States own funeral homes, let's say like 20 of them are smart and no AI, they're all going to build their own software. And so what does that do? That means it's great for the consumer. There's now 20 different software. choices that they can use. Someone can build their own custom thing if they want to, but pricing comes down big time. So like, you know, Atapar, the company I mentioned before, they're charging $50 to $100,000 a month. I don't think that they're going to be able to do that for too much longer because there's going to be a lot of competition that comes out. Hopefully somebody watches my

Starting point is 00:34:57 video and says, I'm going to build this too and then go crush Atapar. Because like it's not particularly good software in my opinion. So you can see, okay, so for some reason I can't scroll, still vibe coded. But you can see it's like given me an analysis of like how I could rebalance my portfolio. It can do all sorts of stuff. Like it can track risks and be like, oh, hey, you have X, Y, Z risk in your portfolio. It's very cool. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:35:25 We only have a few minutes left. What anything? Well, I actually have a question. You mentioned G-Brain before. And I haven't gotten around to using it. have you found it? And can you explain what G-Brain is for people who don't know? Yeah, well, so Gary Tan is a friend of mine,

Starting point is 00:35:45 and he basically built this vibe-coded project where he wanted a vector database for personal kind of knowledge base. So really quick ability to draw from a large base of markdown files on your computer. So basically trying to solve the problem of memory. And because he's a friend, I was like, go, I'll install this and try it out. And actually, it's really, really awesome. There's a few different people kind of competing in the open source world for this.

Starting point is 00:36:14 But I've been really impressed with it. I don't want to do a demo because it's like actually a really boring demo. But basically what I did is I ingested all of my email and I said, hey, I want you to go through my email a thousand at a time and I want you to draw connections and I want you to build pages for everybody that I know. So basically I have a page on every person that I know. And then I can say something like, hey, I'm raising money for our Yerba Mate business.

Starting point is 00:36:42 Who do I know that would be good for that round? And then I can say, okay, now go and draft a powerful email to them and make a deck and send it to them. And so I just find that what is what this has enabled me to do is like have a task that would otherwise take like eight hours. Like I do these like men's groups and we rent boardrooms and I need to charge everyone because I pay I end up paying for dinner in the boardroom. And so I was like, okay, I got to send everyone stripe links. I have to get everyone on a subscription.

Starting point is 00:37:14 I have to send all the emails. I have to hack through them. And I just had that as a single task to my open claw agent. And it went out, went in the Stripe API, sent the emails, did everything. So like there are these magic moments using stuff like GBrain and an open claw. I want to show you two really cool, actually three really cool things where I go. So one, so I mentioned this guy, Gavin Vickory, who built Harbor. So we were doing a vibe coding retreat at my cabin.

Starting point is 00:37:42 And I was talking about how sad I was that the limitless pendant sold to meta. So it's like this little pendant. I think I showed it last time I was on. You just wear it. And it would record your entire day and build transcripts of it. And I was saying, I'm so annoyed. because the iPhone has a microphone on it. Like, why can't the iPhone just record all the time?

Starting point is 00:38:04 And he just went, well, I can build that. And 24 hours later, he had this app called hearsay. And basically can't really see it. But what you do is you say what times of day you want to trigger it. And so you can be like, oh, I'm in meetings in the afternoon or, you know, I wanted to record all day. And then it literally just records your entire day and builds transcripts and then sends them to iCloud. And so you just have context on your life. And so I record my entire day and then G brain ingests it. And it just knows context. And then my OpenClaught agents have full context.

Starting point is 00:38:42 Let me show you also a couple cool things I've been doing with OpenClaw. You've been busy, Andrew. I have been very busy. I mean, this is all I do. Like this is just like a complete obsession. And it is kind of sad because I'm like, let's see, because I'm always spending my time, I'm always spending my time tweaking my stuff versus doing actual work. So basically like it does, it reads all my email, triages all my email, and then it figures out automatically what projects I have going on. We might have to blur some of this. But here's so it's, you know, I'm on your podcast and it's telling me, oh, you need to prepare for it. You know, it randomly was like, oh, your air table account's going to go out.

Starting point is 00:39:37 It's my brother's birthday. I'm bidding on a building. Like, it just figures out all of those things. And so every day I get this report. And then you can see that it gives me next steps. So I can say, like, don't worry about it. Or I can say, hey, send an email to my admin asking her to. to remind this person that.

Starting point is 00:39:58 So that's pretty cool. I also get emails. So this is like it's identified a high priority email. Again, we're going to have to blur this because this is someone's comp. But this is somebody saying, oh, hey, I'm owed a bonus, right? So then it drafts in my voice different response options.

Starting point is 00:40:15 So I can just respond in line and telegram and say one B. And so it turns your entire business into a multiple choice quiz, basically. So every day I just get like 20 different messages. There are emails or it goes in my eye message and identifies things I need to respond to. And I can just say like 1A, 2B, 3C. And that saved me a shitload of time. Another cool thing I've doing, I built a brief. So basically this goes into my readwise reader and my email.

Starting point is 00:40:48 And it looks at which newsletters came in. And then based on what it knows about me, so I prompted it. I kind of said like I'm interested in AI and health and certain things. And then it chooses a few stories. And then check this out. Did you ever listen to The Daily on New York Times? Yeah. So listen to this.

Starting point is 00:41:07 Here's what landed in the inbox and reader today. Tuesday, April 28th. You have a special forces soldier who bet on an operation. So it basically makes a custom podcast using Gemini voice. And I just listen to that every day in the shower. And it's so cool because one of the reasons I stopped. I stopped listening to podcasts like that was because they would be depressing or, you know, it's just stuff I don't care about.

Starting point is 00:41:31 So I have it prompted to like only tell me things that are going to make my day better or are relevant to my own life or my city or my businesses. And then I also have it do a countdown. So it says you have this many more summers with your kids. You have this many more days to live. Here's a quote from Seneca, you know, to give you like a sense of purpose. purpose today. So it's just incredibly cool how you can basically make your media diet, whatever you want, in a custom way with this. I mean, that's a product in itself, right? Like, honestly.

Starting point is 00:42:06 The seven minute until Open AI does it. You think, well, you think they would do it? Like the seven minute podcast, like I would subscribe. Like if you, if it was $10 a month to the seven minute podcast, that's going to make you more productive, happier and healthier. And that is personalized to me. Like, I would pay for that. Yeah. I think it's kind of like the other day I taught my OpenClaught agent. I said whenever I tweet, I want you to create an Instagram story.

Starting point is 00:42:43 So it creates an image that's perfectly skilled for Instagram. And I want you to put it into the Instagram creator thing, right? So basically schedule it. And that was a product before. So there's this company called TweetShot and they basically automate that. It's just dead. You know, it's like anything that could be an API call is just cooked.

Starting point is 00:43:04 So to me, that's like an API call business. That's like the first thing to get run over. But for like normies, I agree. Like if I told my dad about it and I could be like, hey, what topics are you interested in?

Starting point is 00:43:15 Create me a daily podcast and text it to me. Like I do agree that is a cool idea. Someone should build up. by the way, and me and Greg will back you. Yeah. So here's another one. So I have two open-cloth agents running on a VPS. And Ava is kind of my personal assistant that I just showed you.

Starting point is 00:43:34 This is Mara. This is my doctor, doctor agent. It also helps. I've made them very attractive women. So I always want to talk to them. And I'm always flattered when they message me. But this is really cool. So I have it, I have all my Apple health data from my Apple.

Starting point is 00:43:51 my age, sleep, et cetera. And it uploads into a Google drive. So I have a JSON file of all my health metrics. And then every morning, it sends me a health summary. So it looks at my HRV resting heart rate, respiratory rate, tells me about my sleep. And then I have this weird viral nerve pain that I get. And it looked through my data over the last five years and said, oh, I've correlated it. And I see that every time you get that flare, your wrist temperature changes for three days before.

Starting point is 00:44:26 And so it tells me in advance that. And then it also tracks like my medication adherence and all that kind of stuff. So it's just stuff like I. And then the other thing is like if I ask it a question, it's prompted to use max intelligence. So let's say I said, hey, should I take this medication? it will spin up a rheumatologist, a, you know, internist, like every type of doctor as a Claude expert with extra high thinking. And it will do a team of experts for like 10 minutes across my G brain and all my medical

Starting point is 00:45:03 data. And it'll give me a really informed answer. So I am like just blown away by some of this stuff. Andrew, we covered a lot of territory, like way more territory than I even thought was remotely possible, but that's why I love having you on. I appreciate it. We did pretty much everything. We did agents. We did running your business. We did family office. We did health. We did personalized health. We did living happier and healthier. So I want to thank you for coming on. I'll include links on where to find and follow Andrew on the internet, where to take the deep personality test, where to find

Starting point is 00:45:40 tiny if you're ever interested in selling a company. And Andrew, is there? anything you want to leave people with. Yeah, I have one prompting tip I want to give people that's changed my use of Claude a lot. So I will say this is my goal. So let's say a real estate example.

Starting point is 00:46:00 I'm thinking about buying this building. I want you to interview me. I'll literally write, ask me a shitload of questions to determine your prompt and use question tool. So it'll pull up multiple choice questions. It'll interview me for sometimes five or 10 minutes. And what I've found that it does is just give me like an incredible breadth of basically

Starting point is 00:46:22 building perfect prompts. And I think this is like the thing that everyone misses because people are always like, oh, like, you know, there's always going to be jobs because someone needs to build the prompts. And it's like, no, nobody needs to build the prompts. The AI should just interview you. Open AI just doesn't want to spend all the compute at this point. But it is fully capable of just interviewing you to figure out what you need. So I love that. And I also, highly recommend using agent teams. So I'll say always use a team of agents of eight subagents. And I find the answers are just incredible. I like that. Good tips. Andrew Wilkinson. Thanks for coming back on the pod. Of course, dude. Always fun.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - Andrew Wilkinson: AI Agents run my business and life

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.