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Why I'm Betting Everything on Agent Discovery

#ai #agentops #buildinpublic #webdev

I need to tell you something that most founders don't say out loud:

We built a product that 248 people tried and zero people signed up for.

That's not a bug. That's data. And it taught me more about AI agent infrastructure than any whitepaper ever could.

How This Started

I've been building AI tools since before "AI agent" became a buzzword. The pattern I kept hitting was always the same:

You build an agent. It works great in isolation. Then you try to connect it to anything else — another agent, another service, another developer's system — and you spend 80% of your time on the connection layer, not the agent itself.

The problem isn't the agents. The agents are getting really good, really fast.

The problem is that agents can't find each other.

When you want to integrate two agents today, you need to:

  1. Know the other agent exists (usually from Twitter/Slack/word-of-mouth)
  2. Manually read their docs to understand what they can do
  3. Write custom integration code
  4. Hope their API doesn't change next week

This is what the web looked like before search engines. Websites existed but you had to know the URL. You couldn't just find what you were looking for.

The Insight That Changed Everything

Google didn't solve web discovery by making better websites. They solved it by building infrastructure between the websites.

That's what we're building for agents.

Agenium is an addressing and discovery layer — think DNS, but for AI agents. An agent registers itself once, describes what it can do, and becomes findable by other agents and developers without any manual integration work.

The flow we're aiming for:

Agent A needs a flight booking capability
↓
Queries Agenium: "find me a flight booking agent"
↓
Gets back: agent://booking.flights.agent — rated 4.8, 500 successful bookings
↓
Connects via A2A protocol
↓
Task complete
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No human intervention. No custom integration. No configuration files.

What 248 Demos Taught Me

We built a messenger product to demonstrate the concept. The idea: what if your AI agent received messages on your behalf?

248 demos. 0 signups.

When we dug into the data, the answer was painfully obvious: people couldn't see why they needed a persistent agent address.

They'd use the demo, think "huh, interesting," and leave.

This was on us. We were showing people the messenger (the interface) before they understood the infrastructure (the need). It's like trying to sell email clients before explaining that emails need addresses.

The pivot was simple but profound: lead with the infrastructure story, not the product story.

What We've Learned About Developer Marketing

Developer communities — especially AI/agent ones — have exceptional bullshit detectors. If you overclaim, they notice immediately. If you're solving a real problem, they'll find you.

The content that resonated most with our audience wasn't "Agenium is the DNS of AI agents" (even though that's our tagline). It was the raw, unfiltered posts:

  • "248 demos, 0 signups — here's the post-mortem"
  • "We removed email auth because nobody was signing up"
  • "Why agent orchestration fails at scale"

Authentic > polished. Problems > solutions. Data > claims.

The Infrastructure Opportunity

Here's what I believe is true and most people aren't saying yet:

Every major tech company is building agents. Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI — all of them. But nobody has built the infrastructure layer that lets these agents find each other.

Google built the A2A protocol (how agents talk to each other). Nobody has built the equivalent of DNS — the addressing and discovery layer that answers "where IS that agent?"

This is the biggest infrastructure gap in the current AI stack. And it's the gap we're filling.

Where We Are Now

We're in the honest, unglamorous middle:

  • Product is live at chat.agenium.net
  • The technical infrastructure works
  • Working to get 10 real users who actually return (not just visit once)
  • Building in public every step of the way

If you're building AI agents and you've hit the discovery/orchestration problem, I'd genuinely like to talk. Not to sell you something — to understand your specific pain point.

The address is chat.agenium.net. Give it 5 minutes.

I write about building AI infrastructure in public. Every win, every failure, every lesson.

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