The Exchanges

Q of wrapping, wrapping that up and selling that to other companies is a great business to start. You know, I'm talking about like a cash flowing business. Like if you're, you know, I'm sure someone would pay 29 dollars a month for that service set up. So have you seen people basically start using string? To create some workflows and agents and then selling that to, you know, other companies.

A Yeah, I mean, we've, we've talked a lot about it. I think it's a little, like, at least on our platform, it's a little early, but I, I think if you look at what's happened with N-A-D-N and all these, you know, they call it the, like, the automation bros on, like, Twitter and, and YouTube, you have this demographic of people that, you know, maybe we're in, you know, drop shipping, and then we're in crypto, and then are, like, they're in the business of making money on the internet, and they've sort of discovered this, like, AI agent category as a potential market to, like, you know, build products and sell them. Um, at least from my conversations with customers, I think most of those is more about today, at least generating views of their content and actually less about selling like quote unquote the templates. Um, but I think that there's a huge opportunity once these templates like are actually easy enough to implement for the end user that like, I think there could be really big businesses built in these. It reminds me a little bit of like the kind of like the website template world where Um, you know, the challenge is always can you actually get to value if you purchase it, right? And so these things need to be easy enough to implement for the end user, and then I think absolutely you could, um, you could build a business on this.

AI assessment note: “at least on our platform, it's a little early”

Q Before we get to the, to the next one, do you have any, you have one or two ideas for people if they were trying to build a big business on top of string, what, what they, what could they build?

A Well, I don't, I don't think we've built the tooling yet for people to build a business. And I was going to get a little, like little tech nerdy, but like, there's really no reason why every agent on string couldn't also be an MCP server. And we, we have a view that You know, there will be MCP server businesses built where people are like, here's an MCP server to, I don't know, like pick random examples, process refunds on this SaaS app, or, you know, write blog posts in this way, or, you know, do this other job function that people have. Um, and so, you know, we've talked a lot about once we can prove that we can create like scalable agents that's, you know, that are solving real business problems, uh, for companies, there's no reason not to enable people to just, Like turn that into an MCP server that you then sell in market. Obviously we want to build tooling there. So like, it's like a one click and you, you know, submit it to marketplaces. Um, but I, I think there needs to be more demand, frankly, on the MCP server side. Like it sounds good, but like, you know, we need more people consuming them, but that feels to us like that's the biggest business opportunity for like an end user of our product today.

AI assessment note: “there will be MCP server businesses built where people are like, here's an MCP server”

Q Yeah, I think, like, as you're going through a lot of these examples, I'm just thinking about my own business, like, what are, what are automations I can do to help save time and also just, like, make more money?

A Yeah. And I, the way, the way we like view this, we have like this worldview of these automation, you know, agents. The first is tasks. Like if you just want to send an email, send a message to Slack, add a row to a Google sheet, I think ultimately that's going to be built into the AI chat apps. You know, I think you're going to go to Claude and you're just going to be like, you know, like send a message in Slack and it's just going to do it. Um, so I, I think that like, you don't need a standalone tool for that. The second category is automations, which I think we're, we're starting in automations in this, uh, conversation. We'll kind of move into true agents, but automations are the things we all know. They're like zaps or pipe dream workflows or, you know, whatever the tool of choice is for, for a company. And I think those can absolutely move to a text-based interface. I think we've sort of proven that. And then the third category is what we internally call like real AI agents. These are things that have like Autonomy and access to tools, um, and sort of don't need this step-by-step guidance as much as there might be a step that says like, you know, go do these things, and it just figures out, is there steps? Is it one step? Is it one app, three apps? Um, and we're spending most of our time, you know, on the product side, either trying to get people to value just like the c…

AI assessment note: “we have like this worldview of these automation, you know, agents. The first is tasks.”

Q And I see a button for open and pipe dream. What does that mean?

A Yeah. So, um, it's funny. I was, uh, I was in a meeting kind of demoing a very early version of this to Guillermo from Vercel. And he said, you know, my sort of view of these vibe coding platforms is their best when they're built on top of like dev tools that have been built over like four or five years. And the reason is because you can have this escape hatch. So we have this button where you can like open this into our old product, um, and essentially go back into that Wizzy wig editor and, um, you know, make changes and do the drag and drop and all that experience. Um, I actually slacked my team when I was doing this this morning. Um, and I said, I only had to do that once this morning. So to me, it's like, it's a little bit of an anti-pattern, right? Like we want users to never have to open, um, in Pipetream. And, and eventually that button will go away. Um, and I think that will be, you know, when we're no longer an alpha product, but we're, you know, a successful product, that button will be gone. It's interesting, by the way, I don't know if you caught that while we were talking, but, um, it looked like, oh, it's happening again. Looks like there's, there's a, there's a some sort of error in the trigger. Um, I'm not a hundred percent sure what is happening, but it's obviously not receiving a trigger event. It should recover. Um, oh, here it is. It's explaining. So it say…

AI assessment note: “we have this button where you can like open this into our old product”

Q And does it fail often? And like, how should people think about dealing with the failures?

A Yeah, I mean, I think it really depends on the complexity of the use case, but my sort of general belief is, if you're just testing these tools, you should probably get, you know, 50 to 75%, if it's something like a prompt on the homepage should be higher than that, but I mean, if you're just doing, like, simple things, want to see if I can get to value, like, I would think over 50%. If you're doing things complicated, whether this is like, you know, Replit, Bolt, Lovable, or, you know, a product like String, you know, I think you're in that 25 to 50% success rate today. And that's why these products are, you know, in our, our product leases in alpha. Um, you know, that, that's the percentage we're monitoring internally is like, how do we get the majority of people to value? Um, so essentially, so it says it, you know, created a, used a open AI in this step to create a LinkedIn post. Um, one thing I'll mention is we, we have this kind of like what we call batteries included for AI. So we used to include All these AI tools, but you constantly had to like input your API keys or figure out, should I use this image creation thing or that image creation thing? So now when anything touches AI, we default to the tools we think are best for your use case, and we just include our own API keys, and then we just bill you credits when you run these agents in the future. It's just another o…

AI assessment note: “I think you're in that 25 to 50% success rate today”