Agentcies.co

The problem

SMBs are getting left behind in the AI shift. Big enterprise has full agent platforms and integration teams. Consumers have ChatGPT. Small and medium businesses — the dry cleaner, the boutique agency, the regional distributor — get a chatbot that can answer FAQs and not much else.

Worse, today's agents can't act on each other's behalf. There's no clean protocol for one business's agent to negotiate, transact, or coordinate with another's. Until that exists, "AI for SMBs" is just nicer customer support.

The approach

Agentcies is the first product I'm building as a real company instead of a hackathon entry. The constraint is the point: solo founder, AI does all the engineering, distribution and direction is the human's job.

• Agent‑to‑agent (a2a) infrastructure. A shared protocol layer so an SMB's agent can discover, message, and transact with another business's agent without bespoke integrations.
• A2a payments. A payments rail tuned for autonomous transactions — so two agents can actually settle, not just chat.
• OpenAI Operator inside the stack. Operator gives Agentcies agents real web hands — they can fill forms, place orders, and complete tasks across sites that don't have nice APIs.
• Vibe‑coded end to end. No engineering team. Plain‑English prompts to Cursor, Claude, Replit, and ChatGPT, with the human in the loop on architecture, security, and product calls.

The result so far

• Twelve sales closed in a single night after the first public posting — a story documented on the AI Founders' Mindset podcast.
• Agentcies became the anchor that earned coverage in The SF Standard, the front page of Hacker News, and Slashdot, and helped popularize the term "the original vibe coder."
• Operating solo, profitably, with AI as the engineering team — a working proof of the thesis that one person plus the right models can run a real software company.
• Powering the workshop curriculum across SF — students literally see the playbook as it's being run live.

Press & coverage

• "The hackathon king of SF" The SF Standard
• "Has attended over 200 hackathons and doesn't know how to code" Hacker News
• "Vibe Coder Keeps Winning Hackathons" Slashdot
• "From Gig Worker to AI Founder — closed 12 sales overnight" AI Founders' Mindset · Ep. 193
• Founder interview — Agentcies.co YouTube

What I'd do next (and what I'm doing now)

• Onboard the first 100 SMBs onto a2a payments end‑to‑end — agent discovers agent, agent transacts, money settles, no human in the loop for the routine path.
• Wrap Operator workflows into customer‑facing automations so non‑technical owners can say "go do this on the web" and watch it happen.
• Publish the playbook openly so the next solo founder can copy the model: AI as engineer, human as director, distribution as the moat.
• Keep aiming at the public goal — a billion‑dollar company in the next year, fully AI‑built — and document the climb in the open.