GREG ISENBERG (@gregisenberg)

WebMCP by Microsoft and Google is HERE and I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it. Why does it matter? BILLIONS of dollars are about to move through agents, and the internet isn't built for them yet. 1. SEO was about Google understanding your page. 2. AEO was about AI citing you. 3. WebMCP is about the agent actually finishing the job (buying, researching, requesting quote etc). WebMCP is basically websites with agent buttons. Instead of an agent scanning a page like a human, screenshotting and guessing where to click, the site just tells it "here's how to search, here's how to book, here's how to buy." 2 cash flowing businesses you could start today using WebMCP: 1. A WebMCP conversion agency Make boring business websites agent-ready. Law firms, HVAC, med spas, dentists. Build them the first tools (request a quote, book a consult), sell the setup for $2k, then charge a few hundred a month to monitor and improve it. 2. An agent mystery shopper. Test whether agents can actually complete the important journeys on someone's site, buying the hoodie, booking the consult, filing the claim. Hand them a report on where the agent got stuck, missing tools, bad descriptions, lost conversions. Charge monthly, then turn the repeated fixes into software. Full episode on @startupideaspod with @hot_town below You'll learn what WebMCP really is, see examples of it IN ACTION, and hear more about 2 startup ideas using WebMCP you can start today. WebMCP is pretty cool. Watch.

Grok Bot might be the first tool that lets one non-technical person run an entire business with a team of AI agents. My friend Billy runs his whole newsletter business on Grok Bot agents, and I think we're about to see 100,000+ businesses like his. BEST PRACTICES: 1. The agents run on a shared cloud computer, so running your newsletter, your X, and your receipts all in one place creates context bloat and burns tokens fast. One mission per setup. 2. Start with a Chief of Staff. Give it access to your existing docs (Notion, Slack, Gmail), have it audit the business, then tell you the top three agents to build first to drive revenue. 3. Perfect a task with the Chief of Staff before spinning up a new agent. Have it do the outbound sales once, review it, and only then say "now build a bot that does exactly that." You earn each new hire by proving the task works first. 4. Constraints are the feature. You get a limited number of agents, one thread per bot, like DMs with a teammate. It forces you to stay mission-oriented instead of spinning up a bot for every random idea. 5. You make the decisions, not the agent. Billy's team spent three weeks unable to pick where content should live. At some point you say "we're doing Notion, no more tinkering" and move on. 6. Run week one with no new agents. Build the team, learn to fly the plane, just execute. Week three is when you find the real gaps and expand, someone to man the inbox, someone for the Shopify shop. 7. Then add routines so it works while you sleep. Ask your Chief of Staff what recurring jobs would move the business forward overnight, and it builds the automations that run without you. Thanks to @billyjhowell for sharing the sauce on @startupideaspod (follow for more). Grokbot is really cool. Watch below:

The question I get most right now is "what should I turn into an AI agent?" Here is the 5 part test I use (works for Claude/Codex/Grokbot etc): 1. It has a repeated trigger, so the same kind of task keeps happening over and over. 2. The inputs are stable, so the information comes in a predictable shape every time. 3. The tools are clear, so there is a defined set of things it can actually go do. 4. There is a measurable finish line, so you can tell when it is done and whether it worked. 5. There is judgment in the middle, so each run is a little different and needs a real decision made in the moment. The first 4 are really just asking "can this be automated at all?" The 5th is the one that matters, because judgment in the middle is what makes it an agent instead of a simple automation. Once you see it this way, you start spotting agent work pretty much everywhere.

So let me get this straight.... 1. Agents are about to outnumber humans on the internet, so most of the traffic, transactions, and conversations online will soon be machines talking to other machines while we sleep. 2. Superintelligence exists now, and for $20/mo you pretty much get it all. 3. Cloud agents allow you to run a business 24/7 and from literally a phone while you're waiting to order a latte. 4. Voice AI is wide open. This industry has barely changed since the 90s. Infinite opportunities. Voice AI is finally getting good enough. 5. Mobile apps are interesting again for the first time in 10 years, because an AI-first app that thinks and acts on its own is a different species than the passive ones in the store today. There are kids doing $100k/MRR. 6. It's the golden age of open source. The models you download off Hugging Face for free and own forever are landing within months of the ones behind paywalls, so the smartest thing on earth can't be throttled, priced up, or shut off by a company having a bad quarter. 7. The keyboard is on its way out. We spent 40 years learning to type fast, and it's about to feel like handwriting, because soon you just talk and the computer goes and does it. 8. Every company is about to hire agents with their own logins, their own inboxes, their own track records, and a shadow economy is forming where agents pay, hire, and vouch for other agents. 9. Software stopped being something you buy and became something you rent by the hour. The whole industry is repricing from $50 a seat to thousands per outcome. Tons of opportunity. 10. Robots are about to have the moment software agents just had. The intelligence got solved. Now it's dropping into machines with arms and legs, and the people who can wire AI into hardware are about to be the most fought-over hires on earth. 11. The 10-person startup can now out-ship the 500-person company, and everyone can feel it happening. 12. Every white-collar task is getting a "do it for me" button, and most people haven't pressed it yet. 13. Data you've been sitting on for years is suddenly worth something, because now an agent can actually use it. 14. Language stopped being a barrier. Real-time translation that actually works means the next huge consumer app might get built for a market you can't even read, by someone you'll never meet. 15. Every SOP is turning into a product. The way a business does one thing, written down as a markdown file an agent can run, is now something you can sell. Knowledge that used to live in someone's head became downloadable. 16. The moat moved from what you know to how well your business is written down. The company an agent can actually run wins, so being legible beats being big. 17. Since agents will get scammed by other agents, a whole trust layer has to get built. The Yelp for agents. The escrow for machines. Wide open. 18. You keep the whole thing now. A business that needed 50 people to hit $10M needs 3 and some agents, so instead of splitting it 200 ways with investors, it's just yours. 19. Search engines minted a generation of millionaires and billionaires. LLM search is about to do it all over again. Billions of eyeballs are moving off Google and onto ChatGPT, so being the answer inside the models is the new front page. 20. The margins are stupid. You charge someone what they'd pay a human, and it costs you a few bucks in tokens. That gap used to go to payroll. Now it goes to you. Any one of these would DEFINE a decade on its own. We got ALL of them at once, stacked on top of each other in the same 18 months. It's a magical time to be building. You don't need to overthink it. Build.

How to become a $1M forward-deployed engineer (FDE) in 30 days (and what FDE clearly means): - What an FDE is and why the role EXPLODED - The 3 stages of the job (business reality, judgment, building) - The exact 30 day roadmap to become one - What the top roles actually pay

My friend Corey makes $1,000/hour doing the simplest AI business I've seen all year. Only 5% of businesses use AI beyond ChatGPT, the other 95% need you. He sits with a small business owner for 45 minutes, finds where they lose 5-10 hours a week, and prescribes off-the-shelf AI tools that fix it. He charges $999 for that assessment. He's a doctor writing prescriptions. The tools already exist. He just knows which ones. Everyone wins. 50% of his clients then hire him to implement it, and that's where the $1,000/hour work comes from. Corey came on the podcast @startupideaspod and gave away a full course for free. Like actually the full way you can copy his system and run it yourself on your own: - The exact offer (with a money-back guarantee that makes it a no-brainer) - The 4-phase system to deliver it - A template you can download and use today - 6 things to upsell after the assessment - 7 ways to get clients with zero audience and zero capital Even if you never start this exact business, watching @coreyganim break it down will get your brain working on your own productized AI service. That's the real reason to press play. Link: Or watch below (1hr course) Yeah, I know it's an hour. But if you're serious about startup ideas in the AI age right now, this is one of the most useful hours you'll spend all week. Corey holds nothing back. I love this era. A laptop, a few conversations, and a real business. Go get it.

Grok 4.5 might be the BEST model to run inside Hermes or OpenClaw RIGHT NOW. I've been sleeping on Grok to be honestNot anymore. It's more than 60% cheaper than Opus 4.8 and lands around $2.49 per task versus ~$12 for Fable in Claude Code. And it's fast. So what happens when you give Hermes + Grok 4.5 its own email, its own phone number, its own debit card, and access to every tool you use? You pretty much get an AI co-founder. Everything you need to know about Grok 4.5 + Hermes below. Full episode is available to watch at @startupideaspod ( thanks @nickvasiles for coming on) I slept on Grok. Not sleeping on it anymore. Watch