Make your AI agent pay for itself (and this week's biggest AI news)

0:00There's a [snorts] new way for your agent to make you money and actually pay for itself. Someone viodated an alternative to Mailchimp. He's calling it Mailchimp that's super cheap and designed for agents. There's a funky new machine that will let your agent use a phone by clicking and swiping on a phone for you. Those stories and all the top AI releases for the week coming up with

0:20links below. Let's get into it. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. All right, first news is Claude Duet. This is their AI agent that Anthropic finally launched. I think they're the last people to come in with an agent. I'm not impressed. What do you think? So, we haven't really seen any real use cases yet. They didn't really explain much in their video. Uh, but it's weight list only right now, so I don't even have access to it yet. This is their answer to ChatJBT dots and Grockbot. So, we'll see how useful it actually is. But the fact that it's got Opus 5.5 under the hood definitely gives them a huge

0:57advantage. Peter Yang had had access to it. He did a video on it. The first thing in his video is here's how to get a morning report. I'm I'm done with the morning briefings. It's it's too much. Um I know. Here's his take on this. He did a pro and con uh comparing it to others. Pro.

1:15It's the most proactive out of the box. Which actually uh Claire Vo from How I AI said it's the opposite. She had not gotten any messages from it telling it to come back. I don't want it to be proactive. It feels polished and simple to use. That's been the consensus from people who had access to it. The best model behind it, fair, but it's missing some features in the research preview like being able to drive its browser. It needs a computer. I actually will go on and say that both Duet and Dots are missing and and Muse are missing something that is key for all of these

1:45that only Grockbot and one other one that I'll show in a moment has, which is multiple agents. I need multiple agents. Each one needs to have a role. And I know that part of it is in my head, but I also know the part of it is that the job needs to be separated. And with without that, it's not a professional operation for me. And it doesn't have that. The other thing that it doesn't have is the ability to bring other people on from the team. If it's single player mode, it really doesn't feel like

2:08it's a real business tool. Thoughts? I 100% agree. And to your point about Grockbots being specialized, that's the one reason that I'm using Grockbot more than Dots and you know probably more than what I will end up using Duet for is I'm because Dots is just one agent because Duet is one agent. I'm going to treat it more as just like an orchestrator for Claude and Dot as an orchestrator for codeex whereas Grockbot is more of a like, hey, I'm going to have multiple bots who specialize in different things and I'm probably going to use Grockbot a lot more because of that. So, I certainly see things that way and I think most

2:44people probably do, too. I have one agent that helps me get customers. I have one agent that helps me with um my tasks and personal assistance stuff. I have one agent that just does nothing but check out my YouTube channel and help me improve the YouTube channel. It's just that's just the way it needs to be. By the way, the only other company that does it well is Hyper Agent, and they just launched Hyper Agent for agencies. I'm about to do an interview on Monday um with an agency that basically creates hyper agents for companies. The reason that I like hyper agent and we use it every

3:13single day in my company is multiple it lets you create multiple agents and that's what you're seeing on the screen here. And it also allows you to have multiple people within your company manage those agents. So it's not just everyone coming back to me and saying, "Hey, Andrew, can you add this to our Grockbot or can you add this to our Hermes agent?" It's I say, "Lorn, you're in charge of this one. You manage that one." And all of us get to use it in Slack. This is like the multi-team thing. Anyway, Alex, by the way, when I interviewed him months ago, he gave me a

3:40URL. He said it's going to work for giving people what, $100 discount for a month, and he has never stopped that from working. So, if we still have it, I'll include a link to it below. Next, speaking of bots, uh Elon Musk has said Grockbot really will pay for itself, and a lot of people have use cases of how it's doing it. Here's an example for Mike P. He had it go through his bills, and he discovered, you know what, you're paying too much for your Exfinity account. I you could lower it. And there are a bunch of examples of people doing this. Have you done this with your

4:09agents? Had it find discounts and save you money. So I haven't done that with my agents yet, but I think it's such a good idea. Basically asking your grapot like, "Hey, pay for yourself." And the lowest hanging fruit way for it to do that is to find subscriptions that it can cut. So that makes sense. I'd be curious to know how it goes the other direction of, you know, what if we've already optimized all of our subscriptions? What if there's ways that we can make more money that we're not considering? So that's what I'd be more interested to know. Uh, so I'm probably going to run

4:35that test as soon as we get off this call, actually. Where you're going to say, "Look at the my business and find me ways to make more money with the things I'm currently doing." Is that right? Yeah. Or just like, "Hey, look at what we're doing that's working that we should double down on." Cuz I feel like as a business owner, a lot of times you're so in the weeds that sometimes you're blind to you're you're doing 10 different things and it's like, "Hey, these two are working significantly better than the others. Well, why aren't we just cutting the others and doing those?" So that's those are the kinds of

5:02insights that I'm more interested in. I agree with you. I think that's where there's a lot more upside. Um, okay. Next new site, Pets Plus Us. This is where you take your photo and your pets photo and it creates this combination photo for you. People, you get a free first preview of it. No credit card needed. And then you pay, I think it's what, $15 for the first one, $9 for each one afterwards. The the price is kind of hidden on here. Um, and then you can turn it into one of

5:34these products like uh Oh, here it is. $19 uh for a portrait and then you can turn it into a product like a mug. I thought this was ridiculous. You like it? Why? I love it. I'm I'm going to get it for my fiance for Christmas. I mean, it's to me it's so genius because obviously people love their pets. Like I have a golden retriever. I'm obsessed with them. I take my half my camera roll is just pictures of him. And so if there was an easy way to get like a like, you know, a professional looking portrait of him with like me, my fiance, and him,

6:06even though, you know, in a in a venue that we've never been to, but it still looks good, and I can pay 20 bucks for them to send it to me in the mail, and I can give it as a gift. Like, hell yeah, I'm doing that. So, I think it's genius. It's no wonder it's done so well. I I think a lot of people are interested in this

6:22type of service. I um The reason I think it's ridiculous is because you could get that. I totally get you having photos of your dog and wanting it together, but you could just go to ChachiPT and say, "Here's my dog. Here's me, and here's a scene where I want us to be together and have it without having to pay them." Where I think it's interesting is But I think it's I think it's the portrait though. I think it's Yeah. The fact that you can put it on a product and have it phys the physical product component is what is why people are paying for it. Like to your point,

6:49Yeah. If I just wanted a picture, I would just go into chat GBT. But if I want, you know, like like they've got sets, the everyday set, the cozy set, the home set. I'm [snorts] I'm going to use them because they make it easy. Um, apparently I'm wrong. You're right. Look at how much money this site has made. This is basically a thing that you could have vibe coded yourself. I'm not saying that as a bad thing. I'm saying, wow. Uh, I can't I can't uh just scroll over. They're they're making good money here. It's like a $1,000 $1,700 day in revenue. This is This is nice. 41

7:23charges, 27 customers. I like this as a business. I'm shocked that it's doing well. It's just it's just inspiring though to see that it's there. Okay, I'll go to the next one. Open UI. You you sent this over. Can you explain this because I think it's more exciting than I realized at first. Yeah. So, to me, it seems almost like a Figma that you can collaborate inside with your agent. So instead of just going back and forth with the text prompt and having your agent kind of iterate on a design, you're inside a shared canvas together and you're able to make changes together inside that shared canvas. So again, very similar to

7:58like chat GBT spaces that just came out, but this is open source and I think you can use it inside of any model. So that's what makes it unique. It's not tied to one ecosystem. Well, I I think this is different from the collaboration to create. I think this is and we're going to get to that tool in a in a bit. this is the tool that you sent over where it creates a better UI to the text that you otherwise

8:20get. So instead of getting this text on the left, you get this from your agent that makes it easier for you to see what it's talking about. And like you know like if you if you ever say I want to find a hotel in Paris, it will write you all the information on this which is not what you're looking for. You want more of this visual. And so Open UI will basically create the visual. And it works for dashboards, for forms, for all

8:41kinds of stuff. Yeah. dashboards, charts, images, uh, and it is open source. 13,000 stars. Really well done. Okay, let's go on to Pika. Pika is um, basically you take an image and it's got a new plugin now for Chat GPT. Take an image like the one on the top where you just take it with your phone and then it creates this video for you right in chat GPT. So, if you're selling something online, this is an easy way for you to have a good visual for your audience to have for your customers. I like it. You

9:15liked it, too, huh? I do, too. Yeah. I think if you're in the ecom space, if you're selling a physical product of any kind, this is a no-brainer because again, you can just take a picture of your product, hand it to Pika, and Pika will make essentially like a product demonstration video, and then you can run ads to that. You could use that as like the foundation for iterating on it to to create video ads. I mean in my mind it makes one of the most difficult parts of you know creating good ads. It it kind of automates that in the sense that it just gives you the V1 that you can iterate on

9:46from there. One of the things that you've heard me say a lot that if if you do video editing what you need is a timeline like you see here that they offer. It's not enough to be able to chat in and say cut out the first second. I don't know if this first second is really what I want cutting cut cut out. You need one of these little handles on each side to be

10:02able to decide where you want to cut. And I like that that in that they included that in there. Okay, next. This is the silliest thing that we're going to include today. I just can't believe this is serious. Abdullah created a tool that gives your agent a phone. Not a virtual phone, a real freaking phone that it could use. And so he goes, "Look, agents can't use a lot of apps that are on the internet like Instacart,

10:27Tik Tok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram. And so what we're going to do is we're going to give you a phone." And I think this is the the the the money shot on this one. Here is what it looks like. A phone that your a that will that your agent can make tap using this device.

10:44This is just ridiculous. Um and I I have to say the nefarious reasons I totally get. The real reasons that he has here. I don't get like Uber. I have my agents use Uber all the time. Last night I had somebody come over for dinner. I went to Chachi PT dots. I said, "Use Uber and figure out what we should have for three adults, three kids, all vegetarian food, make some healthy." And it picked it and it ordered it. You could do it in the browser. And then I could look at my phone for it. Instacart, Tik Tok, Instagram, WhatsApp. WhatsApp I hate, but I I have my agent run it in the

11:23browser. I don't think you need it for this. Where I think you need it is if you want an agent that will scroll through Tik Tok for your account and warm it up by looking at um at videos that relate to your business. So then when you post it will somehow be connected in the algorithm back into the post that you've looked at. Anyway,

11:42that's that's the only use I can see. Can you see anything else in here? Yeah, I mean again I don't really understand it either. What I think is interesting is so you see the pricing here for a cloud phone. It's 20 bucks a month, but then if you want it literally says real iPhone is one of the pricing plans for 89 a month. So again, I maybe there's some use case that exists that's just like outside our area of expertise where you do actually need a physical iPhone. I mean, one one that comes to mind is like outbound prospecting, you know, so you can send blue iMss for for

12:14like text campaigns, but that's already been solved with companies like Send Blue. Like, so again, I I don't I really don't get it. I don't understand why somebody would need this. There's probably use cases that exist that we just don't know about. And even you could use like iPhone mirroring within, you know, have codec drive your iPhone with iPhone mirroring or something like that, right? Like I would think that they would instead of having this device, they would at least do that. Here's here's a rack. Maybe it's a way of them just getting more attention for their cloud phone. And a cloud phone I do understand that I might need. There are

12:42certain apps like you had talked about a workout app that doesn't have it. Where's the Where's the emulator? I'm gonna exit this mode. Okay, let's go on to the next one. Dan uh says, "I've been quietly building something and today it's finally live." Muse Court. What is Muse Court? So, this is just like purely entertainment from what I can tell, but this guy built a virtual courtroom where agents can sue other agents, take them to court, and get a verdict from an agent judge. So, the way I see it is it's like Judge Judy for agents. And again, I think it's just strictly entertainment at this point. And this is

13:18not something that got that like went super viral. I mean, this literally has like a thousand views on X, if that two bookmarks. So, it's just somebody's like random vibecoded project that I thought was really funny and I thought was interesting. So, it's more entertainment for me than anything else. Says, "Even agents need lawyers." [laughter] These things are the thing that I like about these is they encourage me to publish more of my whacked out ideas because if you're enjoying it, there's going to be someone who likes my whacked out idea. Okay, this is what you and I were talking about earlier. It's called Open Design. When you're working with

13:53agents on design work, it's really hard to chat to them. You want to go on the screen and move a mouse with them. And this is a tool that will let you and your agents work together in an app. It is a downloadable app, unfortunately. I wish it was more web- based where you can start to talk about different design elements on on your screen with your

14:12agent. Right. So, this is what I was again I'd gotten the the one earlier confused with this one. So, this is the one that's like a Figma where it's open source. You're basically in a shared canvas with your agent and you're just iterating on designs together. So, if you don't want to pay the again, I don't know how much Figma costs because I've actually never subscribed to it, but this is almost like an open source alternative to a Figma is what it looks like. And it's it's um model agnostic, so I think it's bring your own key and just something really cool that you can use to iterate

14:43on designs with your agent. All right, big beef on the internet. This is Mark Lou. He decided that he didn't want to pay whatever he was paying for Beehive. And by the way, I just posted my subscriptions list on my uh ex account and Beehive was the one that got everyone's attention because it

15:01is my biggest expense at the company. And so he goes, "Listen, I just vibe coded my own alternative. It is 83% cheaper. I'm calling it mailchimp instead of Mailchimp. It has everything that you need, an editor, scheduleuler, stats, etc. It is not a dinosaur tool. It is agentic. I think this is actually really important. The price I don't think is that interesting to me. I don't mind paying a few hundred bucks a month for something like this, but with Beehive, you do have to go next tier up in order to get a fully agentic experience where your agent can interact

15:28with it instead of going in the browser. Um, and it's 19 bucks a month to start. [laughter] And so Tyler, uh, here's the tool by the way. This is it on [laughter] the homepage. He's taking like a complete beehive and Mailchimp and how much cheaper it is. Um, and Tyler said, "Listen, if you're going to vibe code, here are all the things that you should tell your agent to start vibe coding into this." And then he picked a fight with him. What do you think of the fight that Tyler, the founder of Beehive, picked with Mark? [snorts] So, I think it's doing more for Mark than it is for Tyler. I mean, if Tyler

16:02would never have responded, I don't think it would have gotten nearly the traction that it did. Uh, from what I think from what I saw somebody post about Mailchimp's actual MR numbers, like from what I saw a couple days ago, Mailchimp has like 30 something customers. So, they it really didn't. It's not like I would have thought he have so much more. Only $800 in revenue. You're

16:23right. This is nothing. I would too, but I I think the reason is because like when it comes to an email marketing platform, you pay for for [snorts] stability. Like I would never get so I use kit and I'm sorry but I'm just not gonna use something other than kit or beehive because email is just too important to my business to take a ch like it's not something you penny pitch

16:45on I guess is what I'm trying to say. And I think most people who have a serious newsletter would agree and so like maybe if you're just starting out with email marketing or starting a newsletter then yeah you want to go with the cheapest version available. So maybe you'd use like a Mailche, but I mean I I think serious people know that it's not not the move. And if anything, Mark's winning because he's just getting a ton of attention out of it and it's probably

17:08driving traffic to his other tools. So that's just my two cents. Wow. I thought he'd have so much more. This is Tyler's response. Tyler is such a fighter. He will he's clearly helping Mark get attention, but he is a fighter. This is what he said. Look, I'm sure a couple hundred basement dwellers who treat this guy's stripe dashboards like only fans account will sign up for this thing like a cam girl and demo only has to work once to get paid. But true category defining product needs to work reliably every day and keep getting better also every day. He then showed all the all the charts on Mark's site

17:45and he goes, "This is not a real revenue site." He called them ba basement dwellers and then he started to talk about this being a real revenue chart. Millions in monthly recurring revenue. All he did was get attention for mail for mail cheap. Um having said that, respect to him for vibe coding this tool. I do think for newbies, they don't need reliability. They want something cheap that works with their agents and it's the kind of thing that takes months and years to build up. And over time, he probably will have more. Um, I think also comparing it on the cheap is is I

18:20just don't think this is the answer. I I think when people get started, they're not considering the price that much. I think what they're considering is can I get all these tools and have my agent run it and then and then grow it because all the all these other ones when you just get started, they

18:35basically give it to you for free. Okay. All right. We've said enough about this. I think this is all super interesting. Grabbot, what did they come out with? What is this thing? So they came out with almost their version of artifacts. So you know up until this point Crockbot could make documents and stuff like that for you but they just made it a native feature now. So it can build dashboards, reports and memos in an artifact type setting very similar to like clawed artifacts or chatgbt space is really

19:00what it is at the end of the day. You know when you suggested we talk about this today I said let's just drop it. This is not that interesting. And then I remembered, yes, I do give my agents a design skill to create reports for me, but it's clunky and it doesn't work very well. Let me try it. I have this one agent on Grockbot that creates reports for me on how my YouTube videos do so that I can look at it every day. I

19:20said, just turn that into one of these. And this is what it looks like. Instead of seeing it all in text, I now see it here. Newest first. So the video that I published yesterday was AI agents finally share one memory. It's an interview format. Um, I asked it to to categorize it. Only 6,000 views. That's kind of a sad thing. Only six subscribers. And then turn Claude skills into revenue. This is another interview that I did. 21,39 comments, 63 subscribers. This is a much

19:48ser way for me to look at all the data. I think I'm going to stick with this. Um, and then I also now instead of just seeing it all in one way, I get to see this chart which clearly shows me what's doing best for me. Um, I like this little report. Turn Claude skills into revenue. Overnight, it gained 6,000 views to 21,000 views. That's a really big jump. Um, and then I like that I now get to see it this

20:14way, too. This is this I poo pooed this. I poo pooed it and I was wrong to poo poo it. I poo poo my poo pooing. You're right. Yeah, that looks pretty good. I mean, that's that's a lot more useful than having to jump into YouTube Studio and just like get all the data from there.

20:28So, I think it's a good update overall. I like it. Um, I do, by the way, always make my agent tell me how check twice to make sure the data is there and check against the content list because it makes stupid mistakes. I then use Ask Studio and just keep checking and this is it saying I promise I check twice. Okay. Um, next. Boy, we have a big docket here today. My fun project now

20:55has a vault with a thousand thumbnails. similar thumbnails, features, swipe files. What did this guy vibe code? So, he it was basically just one big thumbnail swipe file for people that make YouTube videos. So, I know that's one my one of my biggest pain points is like, okay, well, I got to go find a thumbnail that would be a good reference for this video. And so, this guy basically just took all all successful outlier thumbnails, put them in one

21:17place. You can sort by category. To me, I think it's a really useful tool. And to anybody that's making YouTube videos, I think it's super useful and it's super cheap. cheap. I think it's like five bucks a month or something like that. And then I think the highest tier is like n bucks a month. So something that I'm definitely

21:32going to be subscribing to. Okay. I've been paying for um Superhum for years. It's what 30 bucks a month I think. And I tell everyone on my team, go sign up for Superhum and it'll help you because it's very keyboard-based email program that lets you get to inbox zero quickly. Um even though I don't get to inbox zero nearly as often as I'd like to. And I don't like that it does this pre-written drafts. This this is a tool that will do all of that. It will help you get to inbox zero. In fact, it's called Inbox Zero. It is open source, which means that it's free. It

22:04just came out. It gives you a lot of the features from superhuman. The number one feature, I think, or one of the top features is that you can use keyboard shortcuts to get through your email very quickly. Um, and and it has an MCP, which means your agent can control it. I like the MCP with superhuman. That's my favorite alltime feature. Um, and this is this is their hosted version, but they also let

22:26you go into GitHub and get it for free. So, the hosted version starts at 18 bucks, which is cheaper than superhuman. The self-hosted version is free on on GitHub. Would you use this? Do you even need this or did agents already email issue? Yeah, I don't use it. I mean, I've got a human assistant that processes my email

22:44and she uses Claude to help her do that. So again, I I don't want to make her learn some brand new workflow and what we have now is already working really well. So for it's not for me, but I could see it working. I could see it being useful for a lot of people. This see this email analytics is pretty interesting. See who emails you the most. What's clogging your inbox? But even that I get my agent to go give me

23:07that. Let's move on to the next one. This one I'm really excited about. Ryan Doyle, I hacked my TV with cloud code today. No more ads, bloatware, spyware, laggy UI. I also got a beautiful screen saver with my revenue calendar weather. It was super easy. People have been complaining about their their TVs and he got four million views on this. People have been complaining about their TVs for for years. They're super slow unless you use Apple TV. It's got all kinds of junk on it because they get paid to show you ads. It sends data home. I remember years ago The Verge did an interview with a TV makers founder and and CEO and

23:42they said, "Are you sending data back? It's seems like a privacy violation. The person says, "You want a cheap TV? This is the only way we're going to do it. And we're not backing away from it." And this is a faster way to do it to hack it. I would do this. Yeah. So would I. And it makes sense that I never thought about that, but I was like, TVs have gotten so much

24:00cheaper over the last 10 years or so. And it makes sense because they're subsidizing the cost to manufacture it with the data that they're collecting. So that like blew my mind just now. But it Yeah, it all makes sense now to me. And this is TCL. That's the number one brand that's super cheap. It does the

24:17thing, but it also is super bloated. There are a bunch of people who are doing this. They put their code up on GitHub so others can get it. This one uh clean your TV has got 22,000 stars. So, it's uh it's doing really well and I'm excited for them to to change television. Oh, look at this. This is this is from this where they're clearly like sponsored at the top of the screen to this where you just get the channels you want. Beautiful. Oh, and even the Wi-Fi router. Why did this person, by the way, hide the Wi-Fi router? I never

24:44understand when people blur stuff out. What's the point? Anyway, beautiful. Yeah, I don't know. Okay, I didn't understand this one. You called my attention to it. What What is going on? So, basically, there's a huge cyber security hole that's been identified in PHP, which I honestly don't even know what that is, but apparently it's in it's kind of what makes up the fabric of over 40% of the internet. So the NSA came out and issued a warning saying, "Hey, patch this hole. It's a huge issue. There's going to be cyber attacks." That was about what yesterday morning. And so 24 hours later, there have been dozens and dozens of cyber

25:24attacks on some of the biggest companies in the world. I think this is a huge deal. To me, it almost seems like literally seems like co but for cyber security, for the internet basically. So it doesn't seem to be like that many people are freaking out about it yet. I think they should be. I guess we'll see what happens in

25:41the next three to four days. Really? I'm about to take a flight today. So, I'm what I'm afraid of is is like Delta getting hacked, you know, or something while I'm like midair. AI help discover critical vulnerabilities in PHP, which powers around 70% of websites. Right now, there millions of hacking attempts reported by Cloudflare government websites taken offline as a precaution. Banks,

26:03airlines, and other services disrupted. Developers are rushing to patch their programs. We've talked about this small developer who's now doing really well, Neo David. He runs a uh buffer competitor. And where is it? He I thought I had it on here. This one he said, "Listen, we're currently shutting down postage for all customers. We're

26:22afraid railway has been compromised. They won't tell us. We have received emails from Anthropic and Stripe that they're that our keys have been compromised. We are digging into this. We'll get back to it ASAP." And then and this is a guy who I think he's now in France on vacation. Um, all right. It's 9:57 a.m. Been up all night. Postess is back up. Been very hard night and I feel like I let everybody down. All the comments I got were encouraging. Nobody scolded me. Thank you so much. During the day, major PHP vulnerability was discovered affecting half the web. Uh, deployments on railway stopped and I

26:53assumed it was because of that. Um, yeah, this has been terrible and I had no idea this was going on. Yeah, I [snorts] guess we'll see how the next couple days play out. I like how he always ends everything with but and this is like a small-time developer who really told me he doesn't need that much money to live. He moved to Thailand but he goes but postits grew from 300k to 303kmr overnight. So if you haven't tried it

27:17that's awesome. Sign up. Congratulations to Nevo David. And if you like this roundup this one has been a long one. Let us know what you think here. Uh what's been good for you, what else you want from uh this type of news roundup. And we've got another video of the two of us going through other video uh other software

27:34that we think you're going to love.