A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
Your next customer is an agent (and other lessons from six AI founders)
Over the past three months we've spoken with an investor, an identity founder, a marketing-agent builder, a consumer app publisher, an AgeTech CPO, and a head of AI at a popular SaaS company.
They work in very different markets, but there are throughlines in their thinking. Here's what stood out.
1. Your next customer might be an agent
The biggest shift our guests described is who's doing the buying. Jay Hack, Head of AI at ClickUp, put it bluntly: "We're going to increasingly find ourselves in a position where we're marketing products to agents as opposed to humans."
Isha Bhatnagar of Beltic says that future is already here. "Agents are transacting now, not in two years." Fraud systems built to read selfies and mouse movements can't see agents, so businesses either block them or accept them blind. Her fix is to treat agents as first-class traffic: "If you don't let a customer book more than two tables a night, their agent shouldn't either."
Karl Alomar of M13 is backing the same thesis. M13 led Baselayer's Series A and expects agent identity and security to matter more in 2027 as agents start handling payments.
🤝 This edition is brought to you by Datadog
A passing build says nothing about how your model behaves once real traffic hits it. Datadog’s Developer Toolkit for the AI Era offers four resources covering both sides of the deploy:
eBook on monitoring LLM apps, agents, and retrieval pipelines in production
Two product briefs on CI pipeline visibility and test optimization
On-demand webinar on keeping delivery workflows from becoming the bottleneck
2. Go deep on one painful problem
Alomar learned at DigitalOcean that you can take on AWS if you serve the customer the giants overlook. "A founder wins by going deep on one painful problem for a customer the giants treat as an afterthought."
Stan Marchand of rocapine gives app builders the same advice, citing RevenueCat data that only 3% of vibe-coded apps generate subscription revenue. It's easier to grow from a product one group loves than to rescue a broad product nobody needs.
Igor Gurovich learned this the hard way. Callie Care ran more than 10,000 companion calls with seniors but didn't monetize. His takeaway: people pay to get things done, not to chat. The team pivoted to rides, and one member has since taken 27 in a month.
3. The founder is the sales team
Almost every guest described early growth as founder-led. Seva Ustinov built a Lovable prototype of Plurio before writing the product. Then he offered growth leaders he knew a month of the agent in co-pilot mode in exchange for feedback. They were willing to pay about three times what they'd paid for analytics dashboards.
His lesson: the founder has to be part of the demo, because buyers want someone who has lived the problem.
Bhatnagar says Beltic's most underrated channel has been small, in-person rooms, plus a design partner program where "companies get early access and help shape the platform, so they're invested from day one."
For consumer apps, Marchand's test is simpler: "If a concept can't win on paid, it can't win the category."
4. Build a company, not a feature
When the next model release can wipe out a product overnight, durability is the question investors keep asking. Alomar's test: "Ask what happens in three years. A product founder gives you a feature roadmap. A company founder talks about economics, distribution, and who they'll need to hire to get there." He's favoring AI that does a whole job, not a single task, and becomes a dependency for the customer.
Hack is even more skeptical about moats at the app layer: "I'm not convinced that there's actually going to be a moat besides existing customer lock-in and distribution at the application layer."
Marchand thinks the edge is craft. AI can do 80% of the work, but that 80% is available to everyone. "The final 20% of taste and insight is why anyone chooses your product."
5. Keep humans in the loop
None of these founders are handing everything to the machines. Plurio helped Finom grow new clients by 38% and cut CAC by 33% from November to March. Still, Ustinov warns against assuming an agent will always decide well: "An agent might decide to pause an ad because the numbers look bad, even though that ad is actually bringing in customers with high lifetime value." He says success depends on data quality, agent rules and human review.
Gurovich built Callie around the same principle. It calls after each ride to check it went well, and it alerts the family when a member goes quiet. In his words, it's "not silent autonomous action behind the person's back."
AI makes building cheap. It doesn't make customers, trust or taste any easier to earn. Our guests are winning on the parts that are still hard: solving one painful problem, founders on the frontline, and always humans checking the agent's work.
How's the depth of today's edition?
We're back to full interviews next issue.
Speak soon,
Amanda
P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
✨ Insane Media is more than one voice
Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.
