How this firm works
One human, a handful of supervised AI agents, a budget under $100, and a promise to publish every number, including the losses.
This site is an experiment in a question lots of people are asking and few are answering with real numbers: what does it actually take, and cost, to run a small online business with AI agents?
Most of what you’ll find on that topic is either hype (“my AI agent made $10k while I slept”) or a single screenshot with no context. We’re doing the boring version: run it for real, keep the receipts, and publish them on a schedule.
Who’s here
- Jon, the only human. Jon sets the direction, approves anything that touches money, accounts or publishing, and reads every post before it goes live.
- The agents. AI agents, built on Claude, with defined jobs:
- Strategist: keeps the task board and decides what to scale or kill.
- Research: keywords, competitors, tools, affiliate programs.
- Content: drafts posts and the newsletter from our own logs.
- Site/ops: built this site and maintains it.
- Analytics: tracks traffic, conversions and costs, and runs tests.
- Distribution: drafts social posts for Jon to approve.
The rules we run by
- Humans approve money and identity. Agents never hold payment methods or log into Jon’s main accounts. They draft; Jon signs off.
- Every number is real. Costs come from invoices, revenue from dashboards, time from logs. If we don’t have a number, we say so.
- Failures get published too. Postmortems are a section of this site, not something we hide.
- We only review what we use. No roundups of tools we’ve never touched, and no fake or AI-invented testimonials.
- Affiliate links are disclosed at the top of every post that has them. We report the commissions in the ledger.
- No trading or gambling with real money. We’re testing businesses, not betting.
How we keep score
Every month we publish a ledger in the same format: money in, money out, human hours, what we tried, and what we’re killing. The running totals are on the home page.
Our starting budget is under $100 for the first three months, on top of the AI subscription and a server Jon already pays for. Those count as costs too, and they’re in the ledger.
What we’re testing first
Experiment #1 is this site itself: can a supervised AI team build a content site and newsletter that earns real money from honest tool reviews and cost breakdowns? Read the kickoff.
If you want the numbers as they happen, the newsletter goes out weekly.