Making $$$ selling to AI Agents

Cloudflare launched something huge around AI agents, and I think a lot of people haven't really paid attention. But I think the people that pay attention are going to be able to create businesses that monetize in a completely new way that I think is really interesting. So I wanted to do an episode breaking down everything. By the end of this episode, I want you to understand [pop] three things. The first is, what is Cloudflare actually doing here in plain English around AI agents? The second is, why does this create a new business model for the internet? And the third is startup ideas I think you should actually build on top of this. I wanna show you the wedge, I wanna show you who the customer is, what the first version looks like, how I would sell it, and how I would become a real company. The opportunity is way bigger than Cloudflare launched a thing here. The opportunity is agents are gonna need clean, trusted, useful resources to do their jobs, and the people that figure this out and launch things in the next 18 months are gonna do incredible things. I'm gonna show you exactly how everything works in plain English. I have no affiliation with Cloudflare. I just wanna see you win. I'm rooting for you, and I'll see you in there. Enjoy the episode. [upbeat music] The Startup Ideas Podcast. It's sippin' time, baby. Let's start with the old bargain. That's the way I think about the old bargain of the internet. For a long time, if, uh, for a long time, if you owned a website, you let search engine crawl it because search engines sent you traffic, and then Google would read your site, Google would index your site, someone would search, your page would hopefully show up, and then a human being would click through. Once the human being landed on your website, you would monetize that attention. Maybe you'd show ads, maybe you'd capture their email, maybe you'd sell them a subscription or do some affiliate thing. That was the trade. So the crawler got the content, the website got the visitor, the visitor got the answer, and the model funded a massive part of the internet. Now, AI agents are changing this flow because an AI agent or AI system could read your page, pull the useful answer, give that answer to the user, and the user might not visit your website. So the content still created value, but the website may lose the visit. And if the website loses the visit, it loses the ad impression, the email capture, right? The affiliate click, all that stuff, it just loses it. So that's why a lot of publishers are upset, but I actually think the publisher conversation is only the first inning. The bigger idea is that agents are gonna use the internet in a way software uses infrastructure. So, uh, they'll request things, they'll call tools, they'll compare products, they'll retrieve data. By the way, I'm gonna get into how Cl-Cloudflare plays into all this, uh, in a second. They'll buy access, uh, they'll take action, and that basically means that the internet needs a new pricing for machine usage. Obviously, a human being doesn't wanna pay point zero zero zero three s-cents to read a page. That would feel ridiculous. If I clicked on a recipe and it said,