The Exchanges

Q They would sort of, it was more artistic. They would kind of like just put out a product and change it, you know, as they go. But I think the, you know, Toyota slash lean manufacturing process applying that to startups was one of the reasons why we had such successful startups post, uh, you know, in What are we talking about when we're talking about loops with AI agents?

A Yeah, so I think maybe the best way to explain it is to jump into that first example I spoke about. Well, I guess let's talk about a sort of a loop, loop engineering first, and then jump into specific examples. But I would say if the loop for the Lean Startup is build, measure, learn, we have very similar steps here with an agent. We have this build step, which is like telling an AI, hey, go build me my new SaaS, for example. Then we have this verify step, Where, you know, if you're building product, the verify step might be that all tests work, or the agent has used a browser to make sure it can click through everything, or there's some other agent that's running. If you're doing this in Claude code, and you use slash goal, so that's basically running this loop, and it's got this other agent checking, has it actually finished or not? Is it working? And if it's not working, it's just going to tell the sort of the main builder agent to just Keep looping and looping and looping till it's fully working. Some other examples of this within engineering. So you always have this stop condition. You don't want the AI just to loop infinitely. There needs to be some sort of result that you converge on. Um, so at some stop condition examples, one is like the feature works in the browser. I want signup, like the goal is to have signup working, you know, you slash goal, make signup work. And…

AI assessment note: “if the loop for the Lean Startup is build, measure, learn, we have very similar steps”

Q you can clearly explain how to actually do this thing, and then show some examples so that people can actually just copy some of these workflows, and then by the end of the episode, they're going to understand loops for, for, you know, how do, how do you use loops to run your business, um, but also, Uh, how they can get started today. Can you make that commitment, Ellie?

A Yeah. Yeah, sure. I'm going to show you how to use loops to run your business. We're going to talk about it at a high level, like sort of what the concept is. Where you can potentially use it, but then I'm also going to show you how it actually runs in practice. So it's not just theoretical. I'll show you how you can actually improve your SEO massively using loops. It's the sort of thing a lot of you might be doing today. If you have anything running on a schedule, that's a form of loop, but we're going to sort of really push it far. And I think the state of AI today, you can really do quite a lot with a loop over a long period of time. Most of the time we're talking about loops. Maybe, you know, they run in half an hour, an hour here. We're talking about loops that might last for months or even years.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. Yeah, sure. I'm going to show you how to use loops”

Q Right. I mean, so I guess, do you think that agents are good enough today such that they can actually impact Google ranking and, and get you more traffic?

A So having run it myself, it's definitely having positive results. It's going to take a few months to sort of really have the impact that I want. But yeah, for sure, like I, I, before we did this recording, I took a look at the numbers and I can see a whole bunch of numbers are going in the right direction. Some of them, you know, I might be moving from page three on Google to page two for a certain term. So it's, I guess it's valuable. It's getting there, but obviously the ultimate goal is to get to a first page ranking. Um, I do think it depends on lots of different factors, like, you know, inbox zero, domain rating might be like, 63 or so. Last I checked, 64, something like that. For a new business that sort of has a super low domain rating, maybe, you know, it would work out differently. But yeah, to me, I'd, I'd happily run this, whether it's like an established business or, you know, a new business that you're starting to, to set up, basically.

AI assessment note: “having run it myself, it's definitely having positive results.”

Q Cool. All right. So we looked at SEO loops. What are other loops that people could be thinking about?

A Yeah, so another really good one would be a Facebook ad loop. So you're running, you're running ads on Facebook, maybe even the AI is generating its own ads, and it's just, it's looking at the data, it's put out like an experiment with three different variants. It sees, you know, variant A is doing super well, and so it pushes more in that direction. And so this is exactly what you'd be doing if you're hiring an ads agency as well. They're going to be experimenting with lots of different copy, lots of different, You know, graphics and, you know, images or videos and so on, and so you could run the same thing basically with an AI. Where this might get a little bit challenging is that the content that gets created Buy the AI. It's not always going to be amazing. Um, if you're doing video content generation with AI or graphics being generated with AI, it won't necessarily, you know, be as good as what a human can put together. Um, I'm sure there are some very good AI generated ads running by right now, but I, I, I, if I had to guess the human generated ads are running better, but things like changing a line of copy, for example, that it's very easy for an AI to go and change. And then, um, yeah, see how it's performed and then improve on it. Or if we're talking about Google ads where, you know, you don't have images necessarily. You're just trying to rank on Google search ads. Um,…

AI assessment note: “another really good one would be a Facebook ad loop”

Q your, you know, Claude code or codex and be like, I want to create an SEO loop. Um, I want to give you access to my Google search console slash data for SEO. And I want you to be judged on, uh, the objective metric of, of the Google ranking. So like check, check the metrics. Is that what people should be doing or, or how would you optimize that?

A Yeah, I think if you did that, honestly, you could go quite far with it. I can show you an example. If you go to atomeve.dev, this is another website I put out not so long ago, um, but here there's actually a real example of this SEO improver, or just, uh, um, this, people don't need to use this. If, if people are familiar with Eve, which is a Vercel project that just came out, or Flu Framework by the Astro team, so this is sort of, like, You, you don't need to use these to build agents, but this is one way of building agents. Um, but either way, even if you don't use this, you could honestly copy and paste this URL into your code code or codex and just say, Hey, I want you to go and sort of copy the ideas here, but here you'll see basically a prompt, um, that does the same thing, which is like, you know, this is my Google search console. This is, you know, the data for you to get into the API key for you to get into data for SEO. And then here's sort of a third prompt that you can go and copy if you want.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think if you did that, honestly, you could go quite far with it.”

Q action. So the only question mark is, can agents, at the time of recording, can agents, are they smart enough to actually work as good, if not better, than hiring an agency or a freelancer? Because, you know, ultimately as a business owner, you care about the, You know, moving up in the rankings, right? So you, you don't want to, like, have a loop just for the loop's sake.

A Yeah, exactly. And I would say also, even if you do try this experiment and it doesn't work, you haven't necessarily lost anything. A lot of us aren't necessarily going to be hiring the SEO expert anyway. So it's just like, you know, you could run this experiment and worst case scenario, you see, oh, it's actually had negative impact. What a loop like this would do would be like, let's say we move from position 20 to position 30 in like sort of Google rankings. Um, you could just undo the change basically. So none of this is really set in stone and it's sort of just experiments that we're running and hopefully like sort of long-term will push us up that if anything goes wrong, we can always revert. Nothing is set.

AI assessment note: “even if you do try this experiment and it doesn't work, you haven't necessarily lost anything”