2 markets worth trillions are opening at the same time. I've been through 3 platform shifts living in Silicon Valley building/selling VC-backed companies and I've NEVER seen this.
- Mobile apps came back. They died in 2015 when an MVP cost . Now it costs twenty bucks, and more importantly, every app can be AI-first. That means every category in the store gets rebuilt.
- Agent-native apps didn't exist before. Claude Code, Codex, Hermes. This is the next operating system and it's basically empty. Build apps for this new operating system.
Building for either one right now feels like building for iPhone in 2009. Fishing with dynamite.
Here's the playbook. You can do all of it without raising a dollar. You can raise money, sure, but for most of these ideas it's optional.
1. Find things people pay for and hate using
Check Sensor Tower. Apps doing $50-200K MRR in boring categories. Utilities. Productivity. Niche professional tools. Steady revenue, dated interface, no update in six months.
The gift is a sub-4 star rating with strong retention. That means people need it badly enough to keep paying for something they resent. Look at revenue per download, not total revenue.
Someone is making $500K a month selling a louder alarm clock. That's the whole product. It's louder.
You can use Ideabrowser (for free!) to get validated startup ideas. I built this product for myself (to find ideas to build) and for you (to get creative juices flowing).
2. Find the AI shaped gap inside it
Every app on your phone assumes a human is tapping it. You open it, you do the work, you close it. It waits for you like a very patient calculator.
An AI-first app thinks. It decides. It works while you sleep.
The tells that an app is ripe:
- Upload and wait is the core experience
- Repetitive forms with tiny variations
- Manual tagging, sorting, categorizing
- Premium pricing justified by time saved instead of outcomes delivered
Your fitness app should move your training session because it saw your sleep and knew you were cooked. Your finance app should call your insurance company and negotiate the rate down.
3. Design the agent
This is where most people fumble, so get specific.
Before you build anything, write the spec. Seven questions:
- What wakes the agent up? (A cron job. An inbound email. A webhook. A text.)
- What context does it need? (Their data, their SOPs, their pricing, their history.)
- What tools can it call?
- What can it do on its own?
- What needs approval before it goes out?
- When does it escalate to a human?
- How do you know it worked?
Then build the smallest useful version. I call it the minimum viable agent.
Draft and approve. The agent drafts, a human hits send. Everyone tries to ship the fully autonomous employee first, and it demos great on X and breaks in production. Your customer might be buying their first agent ever. Earn the autonomy.
Then build your eval set before you scale it. Take 50 real examples of the job. Run the agent against them. It got 42 right, flagged 6, blew 2. Now you have a gym, and every time you change the prompt or the model you run it back through.
That eval set doubles as your best sales asset. Telling a property manager "we ran this on 50 of your old maintenance requests, here's exactly what happened" closes deals faster.
4. Let the agents build the app
The build itself is agents now.
Claude Code or Codex writes the app. Point it at a design you like and have it match. Fable for the hard architectural thinking, a cheaper model like GLM or Grok 4.5 for the execution loops. That model chaining is roughly 5x cheaper for near-frontier output, and when you're running all day the difference compounds fast.
Give the agent skills. A skill is a markdown file. Write your ASO rules, your brand voice, your onboarding copy patterns into skills and every future agent inherits them.
Run subagents. One writes the code. One writes the App Store listing. One generates thirty UGC scripts. One watches your reviews and files bugs.
5. Consider making it an iMessage product
For a lot of products the best interface is iMessage. You text a number and the thing happens. Your mom can use it. Your barber can use it.
A nutrition coach you text a photo of your lunch to. A bookkeeper living in a contractor's group chat with his crew. Something that texts a small business's customers back within four seconds, which fixes the biggest reason they lose deals.
Poke is doing interesting things here. Lindy too (I invested).
Once it's in a message thread it's in the group chat. It spreads like a meme instead of like an app.
6. Or build for the new OS, which is emptier (like wide empty)
Think about what an operating system does. Runs programs, holds memory, plugs into the world, has config files, has apps.
Now look at Claude Code. The model runs the programs. The context window is memory. Tools touch the world. Markdown files are the config. Skills are the apps.
On this OS, an app is a markdown file. Plain English, dropped in a folder, and every agent that reads it can do something new. No deploy, no app review, no code.
A few thousand MCP servers exist today. There are 30 million businesses in America. Almost none of them are connected.
Four openings I'd take:
- Voice. Every business has a phone nobody answers after 5pm. An agent that picks up and books the job is worth thousands a month to a plumber.
- Agent infrastructure. Payments they can use, memory they can trust, identity they can prove. Eleven people are working on this.
- Industry skill libraries. A markdown file that teaches an agent bookkeeping for dental practices. The customer's alternative is hiring a human.
- Making businesses legible. Most companies exist only in the founder's head. An agent can't run any of it yet.
Basically, if this new operating system is being creating before our eyes.
What are the agent native apps you can be building?
7. Build your media company
Find the niche where a tool gets used but never shared. Photographers. Roofers. Accountants. High usage, zero presence on their platforms.
Build an army of UGC creators. Around $5 CPM for B2C, higher for B2B. Go straight at the people already complaining in public.
Point agents at this too. One agent scrapes the creators in your niche and drafts the DMs. One turns every customer support ticket into a piece of content. One reads your reviews every morning and tells you the one thing to fix.
You basically need to build a media company from scratch. The agents make that possible with one person.
8. Then do it again
If you don't raise money, build a portfolio. More diversification, less risk. Cashflow from one funds the next. Share the infrastructure. Every launch gets cheaper because your skills, your evals, and your distribution agents all carry over.
The math
You need $2-3M a year and a 3-5x exit.
- One product at $200K/month = $2.4M ARR
- Sell at 4x = $9.6M
- You raised nothing, so you keep it
Not crazy. Not out of reach if you find the right niche, right channels, right product. You gotta admit its possible.
$10M is one app at $200K/month. Or three apps at $70K each. Or a portfolio where two of eight worked.
Twenty bucks to build. Two weeks to ship. Ten shots on goal a year. You need one to hit.
Now, like all startups, most will fail. That's always been true and AI doesn't change it. What AI changes is the cost of finding out. You used to bet $500K and two years to learn your idea was bad. Now you bet twenty bucks and two weeks.
But I believe this is the greatest time to be building in history. There are fewer gatekeepers than ever. No VC to convince. No engineer to beg. No designer to wait on. No app store gods to appease, because the tools are free and the knowledge is on YouTube/X and the whole thing fits on the laptop you already own.
And worst case you learn a ton about AI agents, which is the most valuable skill on the planet right now anyway. You "lose" a couple weekends and you come out the other side as the person everyone at your company asks for help. That's a pretty good floor.
Someone might read this and make . Someone else makes . Someone makes an extra $2K a month and finally stops worrying about rent. Someone builds a dumb little app for their niche and it changes their whole year.
All of those are wins. I'm rooting for every one of them.
I hope this got your creative juices flowing. Send this to a friend.
Now, go build.
❤️
