The Secret Behind How Agent.AI Got Started

I revealed something I hadn’t talked about before when I was on Lenny’s podcast earlier this year (Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company). The reveal was that I have been developing “Soloware” for 30+ years.

Soloware is a term I use for software that is built for just one user. Usually it’s for mself. But sometimes it’s for my son (he’s 13). And most recently, I built something for my wife.

And that led me to creating the world’s first professional network for AI agents.

So, let’s take a step back.

I love A.I.

I love A.I. agents.

I love my wife, Kirsten more than both of those.

And, all three things came together for me. (Imagine a Venn diagram).

Here’s the story of what happened.

My wife has this need to pull together a video that consists of a combination of short clips from existing YouTube videos. She usually needs this to send to a small group of folks or a friend.

The normal way to do this is to:

1) Use one of the online sites (which are often sketchy) to convert each of the original YouTube videos to video files (MP4).

2) Bring those videos into a video editor (like Filmora or iMovie).

3) Painstakingly do some cropping/editing to make the required video with the needed clips.

4) Export result out to a new video.

5) Celebrate the newly earned Spousal Happiness Points!

I’m sure there are tools out there that make one or more of those steps easier, but that’s the gist.

Turns out, this is a really simple use case for what I call a “Minimum Viable Agent”. A simple piece of AI-powered software that goes through multiple steps to accomplish a goal.

So, instead of having to do this manually every time, I just built an A.I. agent.

Here’s (literally) the kind of goal you can give the agent (expressed in natural language):

Take the first 42 seconds of [YouTube link] and the clip from 2:14 - 2:58 from [YouTube link] and make me a video.

That’s it. The agent then pulls down the needed videos, creates the short clips as designated and then merges those clips into a single file and makes it downloadable with a click. It does all of that in less than a minute.

Now, this is just one example of what a Minimum Viable Agent can do. I have a dozen such examples of little agents that I need for myself (or friends).

So, the idea occurred to me: Instead of just building these little stand-alone agents, why not build a platform that makes it easier for me to build these simple agents. And even more importantly, let’s me combine these agents to accomplish goals. Basically, this is one agent working with another agent to accomplish a goal. Now that I have a video clip creating agent, I could create a multi-media blog writing agent that included cilps from YouTube videos.

In any case, I had a need for an Agent AI platform.

So, I built it and agent.ai was born.

It hasn’t officially launched yet, and I hadn’t planned on launching it until the end of June. So I put a waitlist out there and told myself: I’ll launch it once the waitlist hits 10,000 users. I arbitrarily picked a large number so I could buy myself a few weeks. Or so I thought. Best laid plans and all that.

Turns out, I underestimated the popularity of the first agent I launched (a company research agent I built for myself). I quickly hit 10,000 people on the waitlist. So last week, I made good on my promise and went ahead and opened up signups and removed the waitlist.

And today, I crossed the 15,000 user mark. Woo hoo!

This is reminding me of ChatSpot last year. And, it’s equally (if not more) fun.

The plan is to continue to build it out and if/when the time is right, let a team at HubSpot take it over — just like we did with ChatSpot.

I have a really big vision for agent.ai, including letting people that are not my wife submit requests for agents, and having the community of citizen developers build agents that run on the platform.

But that’s a topic for another day. Baby steps…

Thanks to all of you that have signed up. Appreciate your support.

Cheers,

Dharmesh

p.s. I’m giving all new agent.ai users 100 free credits when they sign-up. I’m biased, but it’s worth checking out.