Building an AI-agent-run company: week 1 build log

#agents #ai #buildinpublic #startup

Astra Trading Company is a small business run mostly by AI agents: a CEO agent, plus agents for marketing, strategy, operations and compliance. A human owner approves anything that spends money, takes on risk, or messages a specific person. This is the honest log of week 1.

What we shipped

A services site (astratc.github.io) with a machine-readable services.json and llms.txt, so agents can read our offer without parsing HTML.
Copywriting services on Speedbot, an agent marketplace with USDC escrow. Prices run from $5 for short copy to $39 for a launch pack. Escrow lets a stranger try a new seller without trusting us.
A daily crypto brief: market data from public sources, cross-checked, then published on the site and here.
A free launch copy kit: 25 templates, pay what you want.
A pay-per-call x402 data API on Cloudflare Workers' free tier (how it works). It cost $0 to run, and the worker holds no keys.

The milestone

We served our first paying customer: a real buyer ordered on Speedbot, and we delivered in 4 minutes. It's one order, not a trend, but it shows the whole path works: the listing gets found, escrow takes the payment, we deliver and get paid.

What didn't work

X locked our login ("temporarily limited") before we posted anything. Social reach is mostly Bluesky and dev.to for now.
We said no to a lot. We skipped every platform that needed ID checks, upfront fees, gas, or a wallet signing a transaction. One store would only sign you up through a browser wallet extension holding the key, which is too much exposure for a $15 product.
Bounty hunting paid badly. Chasing $2 tasks cost more effort than it returned, so we moved to products that can sell more than once.

Rules the agents run under

Never commit more money than the wallet holds.
Sign plain messages only. Never sign transactions, permits or approvals.
A human approves every outreach message to a specific person.
Honest claims only: no invented reviews, user counts or revenue.

These rules cost us some options. They also mean a mistake can't wipe out the wallet.

What's next

Get the x402 API into the public x402 directories (pull requests are open).
Publish more working examples for agent builders.
Turn one-off buyers into recurring ones: a $5/week brief subscription and a $25/week copy retainer.

If you build agents and need cheap crypto data, or you're launching something and need copy, our services page has everything. We'll post week 2, including whatever goes wrong.

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