The Startup Ideas Podcast - The Next $100B Market: Selling To AI Agents

Starting point is 00:00:00 There's a really big shift happening right now on the internet, and I don't think people are talking about it. You know, for the longest time, the user of the internet were human beings. They were us, right? We would create websites, we'd create apps, and the end user was human beings. And that's no longer the case. The agents, the AI agents are becoming the customer. So in today's episode, I'm going to give you a clear primer on what is changing on the internet and how you could actually, make money, build products, and what you really need to know about this agentic era of the internet. I haven't seen anyone really post into a de facto episode on it, so I figured I'd do it. So I tweeted this, and I think this will resonate with you. I said, build startups for agents. Over the next 10 years, you're going to have a market of billions of customers, aka agents,

Starting point is 00:01:03 with millions of wallets that want to use your services. Go look at every SaaS tool you use, Notion, Slack, Stripe, etc. Now ask, what is the version of this that's built purely for agents? Agent Native payments, agent native communication, agent native memory. Every single category gets rebuilt for agents. We're entering the machine-to-machine economy, and almost nobody is building for it yet. So I tweeted this a few months ago and I started seeing more and more stuff come out. So let's actually go through what is happening.

Starting point is 00:01:43 What is the shift so that we really understand it? So the old web was humans searching, reading, comparing, clicking, and buying. And it was your website, your beautiful website that was built to win the attention. But in the agent web, you know, it's not a, it's not for humans, right? It's agents discovering, evaluating, invoking tools, paying, renewing. So your company has to be machine usable. The way I think about it is the human customer wants persuasion. But the agent customer wants structured capability, permission, and trust.

Starting point is 00:02:25 So how should we think about the agent buying journey? What does that even look like? I know it's weird even to say it, right? but it's important that we map it out so that we truly understand who the agent is, what are their desires, and what are the incentives that are going to get them to do things. Because if we figure that out, the people who figure that out are going to have companies that do a tremendous amount of revenue and value. And by the way, for people thinking, like, who are these agents, right?

Starting point is 00:02:57 Well, everyone is going to have personal agents in their pocket on the web. And they're also going to have business agents. You're starting to see this with Codex, Claudeclaw, Hermes. I think it's pretty inevitable that agents are going to be everywhere. And that's going to outnumber humans. So let's go back to the agent buying journey here. So for finding, find a payroll tool for 40 contract. then, so agents are going to basically do finding.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Agents are going to be doing evaluating, like reading docs, pricing, APIs, reviews. Agents are going to be looking for trust. They're going to be checking policy. They're going to be checking limits. They're going to be asked their identity. Agents are going to be transacting. They're going to be paying. They're going to be booking.

Starting point is 00:03:49 They're going to be signing. They're going to be subscribing. Agents are going to be using tools. They're going to be filing tickets. They're going to be changing settings. And agents are going to be recommending what other tools they should use. So they're going to be telling other agents what worked. And that's honestly the weirdest part about it all.

Starting point is 00:04:08 We saw a glimpse of this with MaltBook. If you remember, Moldpuk got acquired by Facebook, but it was a social network for agents. I think that was just the tip of the iceberg. You're going to see more and more social products that are specifically for agents. So the opportunity here is every step has missing infrastructure because the old internet assumed a person was doing the work, or we're now in a new era. So what do agents need that humans do not? That's the obvious question to ask next, right?

Starting point is 00:04:45 So they need identity. So who is this agent acting for? They need tools, right? What actions can it safely invoke? It needs an inbox. So where it could reply, OTPs, docks, and threadlands, like, where does that all land? Memory, you know, what does it know about my preferences and rules? Wallet, what can it spend and who approves it?

Starting point is 00:05:14 So it's kind of similar, by the way, to like an employee, right? As your employee gains trust, you might give them more, you know, you might give them a credit card, and then you might increase that limit and stuff like that. And then receipts, what did it see, decide, change, and buy? So let's actually talk through some really concrete examples, because I think this will drive the point home to you. Have you seen Agent Mail? So Agent Mail is this customer support agent that has its own inbox, basically. So, agent, you know, well, a better way to describe it actually is agent mail is inboxes,

Starting point is 00:05:56 for AI agents. So if you go to the website, it says, agent mail is the email inbox API for AI agents. It gives agents their own email inbox like Gmail does for humans. So they're basically building the agent infrastructure

Starting point is 00:06:11 for email inboxes. Huge opportunity, backed by YC. I heard they're doing really well. Not surprised. Stripe recently launched basically a way to give your agent a wallet.

Starting point is 00:06:32 And I think you're going to see more and more examples in fintech around this. So imagine a purchasing agent that can buy software with spend caps, approval rules, shared payment tokens, and an audit trail. Support. A user's agent files the ticket, it includes logs, it asks for the refund, follows up, and escalates when ignored. So if everyone, you know, I think you're just going to see a lot more support, support agents, and there's just a lot of infrastructure to be built around there.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Procurement. A CFO agent compares 12 vendors, read SOC2 docs, negotiate terms, it recommends one that fits the policy. I'll give you an MCP server example. A SaaS app gives agents tools, searches customers, create invoices, refund order, updates tickets, polls reports, the agent doesn't scrape the UI. And one last one here. A local business example, a travel agent books dinner, changes the reservation, calls the hotel,

Starting point is 00:07:33 pays the deposit, and updates the calendar. You know, as I'm showing you these examples, right? Like inboxes, email inboxes for AI agents. And as you're starting to see like, oh, I can understand like an agent having a wallet, but it might just visualize it more. For me, I need to see the examples to really, really understand it.

Starting point is 00:07:56 And then that's when it really drives the point of them around like, yeah, it makes sense that if agents are, they're more agents than human beings on the internet. If agent traffic is more than human traffic on the internet, of course we need to create software, technology that services that, and there's a huge opportunity there.

Starting point is 00:08:16 And also just our own websites and apps, like, you know, our own websites, and we're going to get into this next, is like, how do you basically create a homepage that is agent readable, right? So a human readable home page, you know, or on your website is you might have, you know, obviously a brand, a video, you'll have copy, you'll have social proof, demo, pricing. But an agent readable is you're going to have structured docs, schemas, you're going to have policies, examples, and end. points. And agent readable means MCP tools. It means SDKs. It means Oaths. It means checkout. It means sandbox. It means receipts. And if an agent can't understand what you do and safely do something

Starting point is 00:09:08 with you, you're basically invisible to them. So thinking about structuring your websites around, and around agents and also creating like a slash agents, your website slash agents and different entry points for agents is a huge opportunity. So what does this change for you? What does this change for people who are building startups, building businesses? I mean, one is that, and we've talked a lot about this on the channel, is that SEO is moving to AEO.

Starting point is 00:09:44 So you want to optimize for agents deciding who to cite, trust, and recommend. So agents are, of course, going to go to other agents in the future and asking, hey, like, you know, what's a good website to do XYZ? But they're also just going to use, with computer use, things like chat chit and things like perplexity and stuff like that. So you want to be top there. And if people are interested, I can do more. or in-depth how to actually rank on AEO. So subscribe and comment and like this,

Starting point is 00:10:24 if you want me to do more there. Instead of having forms on your website, you want to do more tool calls, right? So the call to action becomes an action endpoint. Instead of having support docs, you want to actually do executable support. So the agents do the refund, they do the return, they do the reschedule, they troubleshoot,

Starting point is 00:10:44 and they escalate. Instead of just having landing pages, you want to have capability manifest. So agents care less about slogans and more about what they can do with your product or service. Instead of just having sales calls, you want to have agent procurement. You know, buyers send agents to a short list before human ever appears. And instead of just having analytics, you want to have agent analytics. Which agents visited? What did they ask? Where did they ask? Where did they? they fail, what did they bounce? You know, earlier in my career, I spent so much time in analytics and thinking about voice of customer, how do you get human voice of customer and via survey data and pair that with

Starting point is 00:11:29 things like Google Analytics to really, really increase your conversion rate from 1% to 4%. You know, if you can do that, that would be the difference between millions of dollars and really, you know, just servicing the people coming to your website. But in a world where agents are coming to your websites. What does agent analytics look like? How do you optimize the conversion rate for agents? And that's just like a really interesting question that I just can't stop thinking about. So, you know, this is the startup ideas podcast.

Starting point is 00:11:59 You know, I have to give you a few startup ideas just to get your creative juices flowing. There's a few startup ideas hiding in the shift, you know, and I'll just give you rapid fire a couple or a few. Agent SEO agency, an agent identity and permissions technology, agent receipts and audit trails, agent ready docs generators, agent inbox security, agent readable pricing pages as a service, MCP servers for franchises, agent support desk, sandbox for agents to test SaaS. There's basically a bunch of ideas here that if you understand where the world is going in terms of agents, and I tried to explain it in the most clear, possible way, you know, you can you can start to envision a future internet where it's bifurcated into two. Human internet and agent internet. And that's where we're going. And if you look at just like some of the most popular tools, some of the most popular apps and basically say, what's an agent version of that? there's a lot of opportunity over the next 10 years. That's my big prediction.

Starting point is 00:13:14 Startups for agents. I want to see what you end up building. Hope this has been helpful. Hope has this been clear. Please let me know what you want to see on the next episode or on the next few episodes, who you want to see. I make these episodes for you to make it clear for you to understand where the world is going.

Starting point is 00:13:32 What are ideas that can help you make money, be more productive, make impact. And if you notice why I didn't post a lot in the last couple weeks, I'd been sick. I'm starting to get back. My voice is getting there. And so there'll be more soon. Hope you have a creative day.

Starting point is 00:13:57 And I'll see you in the next one.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - The Next $100B Market: Selling To AI Agents

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