Greg Isenberg

You just hired a 1M+ bad employees (AI vs humans) - LIVESTREAM #2

⏱ 104 min video · 3 min read17 Jul 2026

TL;DR

Greg Isenberg and Jonathan Courtney (AJ&Smart) host a live Q&A covering how to get your first 100 customers, whether design agencies are still viable in the AI era, and Cloudflare's new monetization gateway for AI agents. The core argument is that 2026-2029 is a rare window of opportunity for builders who combine AI tools with strong distribution and sales skills.

Key points

The ACP funnel (Audience -> Community -> Product) is the recommended framework for getting first 100 customers — build media before building product

Cloudflare is opening a monetization gateway letting website owners charge AI agents fractions of a penny per access, settled in stablecoins via the 402 open protocol — early movers will have a significant advantage

Design agencies that moved from pure execution to strategy are surviving the AI era; those still selling execution-heavy work at scale are at serious risk

The worst mistake in 2026 is spending all your time building apps with no users — and equally bad is being so distracted by every new AI tool that you never ship anything

Outbound sales in the AI era is a massive untapped opportunity: building a free SEO article set or a lead magnet demo with Claude and sending it cold to small businesses converts far better than a generic coffee request

Actionable insights

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Start a niche media company (podcast, YouTube, X account) before building your product — Jonathan sold out a $130K event from a podcast with under 300 listeners per episode by pitching directly to that tiny niche audience

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For cold outreach, use Opus Clip to clip a prospect's podcast as a free sample, or use Claude to write 2-3 SEO articles in their brand voice and offer to implement them for $3,000 — never send a generic meeting request

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To play the Cloudflare agent monetization wave early: identify data sets or tools that AI agents will repeatedly need, build web properties around them, and add the Cloudflare monetization gateway to charge agents micro-fees as traffic shifts from humans to agents

Notable quotes

“If you want to really mess yourself up, just spend the next couple of years building pointless stuff and not having anyone ever use it.”

“The reason you are also paying someone is that they take full responsibility of it — they deploy it, they take care of it, they check it on every device. I still think that external service agencies will need to exist.”

“Make things agents want — there is going to be a lot of startup ideas around creating websites with the agent in mind and then adding the Cloudflare monetization gateway to charge for it.”

Worth watching?

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Worth watching the full video?

The key frameworks and actionable ideas are all captured here — skip the video unless you want the unscripted banter and live Q&A energy, which is the main value-add over this summary.

Topics

AI & Tech OpenAI

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