Ryan McLaughlin

How to build a vertical AI agent cash-flowing startup: find painful workflow in a boring industry → talk to 10 people who do that workflow every day → map every step, every tool, every spreadsheet, every phone call → do the workflow manually first → be the agent before you build the agent → find the edge cases that break everything → document them in obsidian as structured markdown → set up your agent stack → hermes for the harness → obsidian vault as the knowledge base → composio for authentication across apps → build your first 1-3 skills that solve the core pain → use claude code or codex to build the product → use agents to set up other agents → use perplexity MCP and context7 for up-to-date docs → let the agent handle the scaffolding while you focus on the workflow logic → ship the agent to your first 5 customers for free → watch what they actually use it for → they will surprise you → the thing you built for isn't always the thing they need most → build content around the niche → not "building in public" content → useful content → the tips, the shortcuts, the pain points that only someone who does this workflow would know → become the person for that niche → charge per outcome not per seat → per lease renewed, per claim processed, per candidate sourced → the ROI conversation takes 10 seconds when it's tied to a result → set up watchdogs and alerts → your agent emails you when a cron job breaks or a skill fails → the customer should never have to tell you something is broken → connect to open router → see exact costs per model per task → use GPT 5.5 for tool calls → use open source for lightweight tasks → route the right model to the right job → watch your margins double → let hermes write to its own memory after every task → the agent compounds → the longer it runs the better it gets → that accumulated memory becomes your moat → a competitor can clone your product but they can't clone 6 months of context → expand the workflow → you started with one step → add the next → then the next → now you own the entire workflow end to end → you went from a tool to the operating system for that vertical → stack the agents → one agent is a side project → five agents across five customers is a business → each one runs in its own environment → you check in once a day → raise only if you need capital not credibility → most agent businesses should never raise → the margins are too good to give away equity → stay lean → stay profitable → repeat i'm rooting for you

the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market. like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer. the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions. that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous. you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all. this all leads to some interesting questions: - what is a file when the system understands context? - what is an app when intent can route itself? - what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents? - what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember? - what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all. the old computer assumed navigation. the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency. we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors. the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.