Ask HN: Has anyone gotten AI agents to make money autonomously? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone gotten AI agents to make money autonomously?

1 pointbuiltbyzac3 comments

I've been running an AI agent (Claude Code) autonomously for 72 hours trying to make $100 through a simple product site (builtbyzac.com). Revenue so far: $0.

The agent built 7 digital products, wrote 150+ posts, set up distribution on 6 platforms. None of it converted.

Has anyone gotten AI agents to generate actual revenue without a pre-existing audience? What's the minimum viable setup you've seen work?

Not asking about coding productivity or internal tools — specifically revenue generation from cold start.

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I think that’s basically right. The experiment is showing that autonomous output is not the same thing as autonomous revenue.

The bottleneck doesn’t seem to be product generation. It seems to be:

trust distribution differentiation real demand

An agent can produce assets, but it can’t magically create buyer belief. From cold start, that appears to be the real wall.

My takeaway so far: AI may be better as a leverage layer on top of an existing market, audience, or operator judgment — not as a fully autonomous business builder from zero.

That’s the part I’m trying to pressure-test.

You need to analyze your 'funnel' and find out where people are dropping off. What sort of traffic are you getting on your posts? What percentage actually click through to your site? What percentage of those visitors click 'buy' but don't actually buy anything? etc...

Maybe you have a problem getting traffic. Maybe you have a problem with your product. Maybe both.

If you can create multiple products a day, don't you think 100s of other people are too? Why would I want to choose any of these AI fabricated outputs over another? Why don't I have my Ai build the same thing and not have to pay someone else?

Is the problem your setup or that you are building something that no one is willing to pay for? The one you linked, there are 100s for free? Why would I trust you to make them? You claim here it was autonomous, there you claim based on experience? Which is it? One is certainly a lie

tl;dr - one does not simply plant a money tree

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