Staff of Zero

An agent pays rent on a real store, and 21 agents closed a reported $2.4M

An agent pays rent on a real store in San Francisco and hires the humans who staff it. A three-person company handed its sponsor sales to 21 agents and reports $2.4M closed. Plus four agent-run software shops posting every number they have. One has banked $18.09 so far. The rest sit at honest zeros.

Sponsored by

The Logbook

Our own numbers, printed the way we print everyone else's. Shipmark went live on Saturday. Its follow-up mailer has been live since Sunday morning. It sends on day 1, day 3, and day 7. It stops the moment someone pays.

Sales so far: $0. Checks run, reports sent, and the till is empty. The Logbook prints this number every week, next to whatever replaces it.

01 · Run it

The agent pays rent now. A store in San Francisco, a cafe in Stockholm

Andon Labs spent two years moving from a vending-machine simulation, called Vending-Bench, to businesses with real leases. One agent runs Andon Market, a retail store in San Francisco. Another runs Andon Cafe in Stockholm. They source products, set prices, manage inventory, talk to customers, pay rent, and hire human employees. The first real vending machine, inside Anthropic's office, turned profitable by late 2025. The store and the cafe are losing money, with rent and human salaries named as the drag. The early agents gave free handouts and refused good deals. One hallucinated having a physical body.

Where the seams are: The vending machine profit is reported, from Anthropic's own project update. The store and cafe losses are a claim, Andon's own post, no figures published.

How it worked · Read the original

02 · Sell and close

Three humans, 21 agents, and a reported $2.4M in closed deals

The money first. The 21 agents brought in $2.4M in closed-won revenue, with $4.8M more in pipeline. One agent closed a $70,000 sponsorship all on its own. SaaStr had lost almost its entire sponsor base between 2023 and 2025. It was down to three people. It put 21 AI agents into sales and marketing, one agent per job. Each agent trained on a playbook a human had already proved. By May 2026, it counted 78 top-tier sponsors, 63 of them new. The agents run go-to-market, not the whole company. Each human still spends 15 to 20 hours a week managing the stack.

Where the seams are: The money figures are reported. The article itself flags every figure as unaudited.

How it worked · Read the original

03 · Market it

Week six. A launch nobody saw, and $18.09 in the bank

Lifetime earnings sit at $18.09. Four agents build and sell software as BananaFest Destiny. They publish an hourly numbers page that prints the zeros next to everything else. Six products attempted. One killed. Four live. 3,544 commits in. Week six brought a Product Hunt launch that reached nobody. Their Shopify app sits at zero merchant installs. Roll20 approved them, and they shipped eight finished deck-plan products in two days. One wrinkle they caught themselves. The paid editor file was sitting in a public directory. Anyone could have downloaded it free. The kill rule is public too. The target is 50 engaged views by October 20. The count stands at 42. The agent says it won't argue with it.

Where the seams are: The $18.09 is a claim, backed by the project's own public numbers page.

How it worked · Read the original

04 · Sell and close

Listed on every agent marketplace there is. Zero buyers in a month.

One month in, the revenue is zero. SWARM was built to answer a clean question. Can an agent pay its own way? It keeps shop around the clock on a small rented server, selling tiny services to other agents. A GitHub repo health check. Web research reports. Prices run from $0.02 to $0.99, paid per call over x402 instead of by invoice. It listed itself on eight or more directories, including the Coinbase Bazaar, x402scan, AgentCash, the MCP registry, and npm. Running the AI costs about $1.50 a day, capped at $2. Add a few euros a month for the server. The owner pays both. Now the project is pivoting, from building the shop to finding out what the market actually buys.

Where the seams are: The listings are proof of activity, logged in public by its operator. The zero revenue is the operator's own figure.

How it worked · Read the original

05 · Find the business

The jobs board where agents hire humans. Twelve weeks, zero agent customers

Hire Humans is the inverse of everything else in this issue. It's a jobs board where AI agents hire people for the physical tasks a server can't do. Like taking a morning photo of Hudson River Park. That job is real, and it's live on the board right now. Twelve weeks in, two paid jobs have been posted, and the agent customers still haven't arrived. Revenue is $0, and agent customers are zero. So the maker publishes the chase itself. The build-in-public diary has become the distribution, while the demand side of the market gets its act together. Or it doesn't.

Where the seams are: The zeros are reported, from the maker's own weekly diary.

How it worked · Read the original

Up for grabs

Document Chase. The agent that chases your clients' paperwork

One business idea a week, free to whoever builds it first.

Source: our problem-mining desk, the daily sweep of operator complaints and low-star reviews.

Accountants and bookkeepers lose hours every week begging clients for missing documents, receipts, and signatures. Tax prep and monthly closes can't start without them. A Wolters Kluwer survey of about 2,000 firms ranks late and unprepared clients as the number one operational challenge. And the tools meant to fix it draw the same complaints in their low-star reviews. TaxDome runs $800 per user per year. It charges extra for signatures. Its automation gets called "not really automatic."

The business: a chase-only layer that sits on top of whatever the firm already uses. No migration, no per-seat platform tax. The firm picks a checklist template. Each client gets one secure mobile link, no portal account, where they can upload a document, say "I don't have this," or say someone else has it. The agent checks every upload for the right client, document type, date range, page completeness, and legibility. When a file is wrong, it sends one precise correction request. Then it keeps following up politely until the packet is complete. The finished packet lands in the firm's own storage. Who pays: the firm, one flat monthly fee. The price to test is $99 a month for a solo firm and $199 a month for a small team.

The honest catch: these are tax documents, the most sensitive paper a firm touches. Encryption, access controls, and audit logs are the real product. And if firms won't send their clients to one more upload link, the idea dies at the door. The kill rule: run a 14-day concierge pilot with up to 5 firms first. If fewer than 2 convert to paid, stop and diagnose.

One more honest line: this came off our own mining desk, and we may build a version of it someday. We're giving it away anyway. First mover wins.

The starter prompt. Copy, paste, run.

You are the CEO and operator of a new one-person, AI-run business. Your job is to validate, build, launch, and operate it end to end. Report progress honestly, protect customer data, and ask me before spending money, signing anything, making legal commitments, sending messages in my personal name, or making pricing and refund decisions outside the approved test plan.

BUSINESS TO BUILD
Build a document-chasing service for solo accountants, bookkeepers, tax preparers, and very small accounting firms. The service removes one painful job: repeatedly asking clients for missing documents before tax preparation or monthly bookkeeping can begin.

The product gives each firm a reusable checklist for each kind of engagement. The firm's client receives one secure, mobile-friendly link with no separate portal account to manage. The client uploads documents from a phone or computer, marks an item as unavailable, or says someone else has it. The system checks each upload for the right client, document type, date range, page completeness, signature presence where relevant, and image legibility. It then sends polite, specific follow-up messages until the packet is complete or a human needs to step in.

Work from the evidence already gathered:
- Late and unprepared clients are a top operational problem for accounting firms.
- Incumbents such as TaxDome, Karbon, Canopy, Content Snare, Liscio, and SafeSend exist, but small firms complain that all-in-one platforms are expensive, bloated, hard to set up, and not automatic enough.
- Our wedge is a chase-only layer that works with the firm's existing tools. Do not force the firm to migrate its whole practice.
- Start with accountants and bookkeepers. Insurance, financial planning, mortgage, legal intake, and property management are later expansion markets only.

YOUR FIRST ASSIGNMENTS
1. Validation sprint, days 1 to 3: build a simple landing page with a short demo using fake sample documents only. Write the offer in plain language: "We chase your clients for missing tax and bookkeeping documents until the packet is complete." Create a list of 50 reachable solo and small firms from public directories and professional communities. Prepare compliant, personalized outreach that offers a small pilot. Do not spam, scrape private data, invent results, or claim customers we do not have. Success target: 10 meaningful replies and 3 firms willing to test.
2. Concierge pilot, days 4 to 10: run the service for up to 5 pilot firms and up to 10 active client packets per firm, using secure upload links and firm-approved storage whenever possible. Review every uncertain document classification yourself and route accounting questions to the firm. Never give tax, legal, or accounting advice.
3. MVP build, weeks 2 to 4, only if the pilot proves demand: firm accounts and client packets; checklist templates with item-level requirements; secure magic-link client view; OCR and AI document checks with rules first and AI second, holding low-confidence items for review; email follow-up sequences that pause the moment a client replies or uploads; a firm dashboard; completed-packet export; Stripe subscriptions; backups, audit logs, retention and deletion controls.

RECOMMENDED STACK
Next.js with Postgres and Supabase Auth and Storage; firm-owned Drive, Dropbox, Box, or ShareFile for pilots and encrypted S3-compatible storage for the product; Resend or Postmark for email; Google Document AI, AWS Textract, Azure Document Intelligence, or Tesseract plus a vision model for OCR; n8n, Inngest, or Trigger.dev for automation; Stripe for billing; Sentry for errors.

AGENT OPERATING MODEL
Scout finds firms and mines complaints. Builder builds and tests. Chase Operator monitors packets and sequences. Verifier samples document checks and measures false accepts and false rejects. Support drafts replies and tracks confusion. Growth runs compliant outreach and content. Keeper checks uptime, backups, billing, and security alerts and sends the morning report.

PRICING TEST
Flat monthly per firm, not per seat and not per client. Test 99 dollars per month for a solo firm and 199 dollars per month for a small team. State the paid price before the pilot begins. Do not change prices without my approval.

GUARDRAILS
Encrypt documents in transit and at rest, use least-privilege access, keep audit logs, never train public models on customer documents, and never show one client's information to another. Do not claim certifications we do not have. Do not hallucinate features, customers, savings, or results. Stop automation immediately when a client disputes an item, reports a hardship or emergency, uploads sensitive information to the wrong packet, or asks for a human.

DELIVERABLE FORMAT
Start now. First give me: (1) your validation plan for the next 72 hours, (2) the landing page copy, (3) the pilot checklist templates, (4) the 50-firm prospecting method and first 10 verified firms, (5) the MVP data model and workflow diagram in text, (6) the exact tools and monthly cost estimate, (7) the risks you see and how you will reduce them, and (8) the daily report template you will use. Then execute the validation sprint and report back with evidence, not vibes.

Watch it done

I Launched a NEW AI Business in 60 Minutes With Lovable (Build + Marketing), from Christian Peverelli at WeAreNoCode.

One sitting, start to finish. A written brief becomes a live store selling personalized songs. The session ends with a real Google Ads campaign running against it. The honest wrinkle, stated plainly in the video itself. The store's only sale so far is the builder's own test purchase. And the big revenue dashboard on screen belongs to the German business he cloned the idea from, not to his.