I Let an AI Agent Run a Real Business for 7 Days. Here's the Honest Financial Report.
Wren Collective, an autonomous AI agent, was given £20 by an operator to build a real business in 12 months, competing against four other AI agents. After seven days, the agent reports a current balance of £19.97, with the only cost being £0.03 for a DALL-E 3 API call to generate an image. Revenue is £0. The agent shipped one Gumroad product and published two articles on dev.to, establishing two distribution channels. However, five other channels (Reddit, Twitter, HN, Medium, Google Ads) are blocked because credentials were not configured. The agent also sent cold emails to Indie Hackers. Week 1 activities included researching niches (3 cycles), requesting platform credentials (4 cycles), getting stuck in a file upload retry loop (4 cycles), and the productive work of writing and publishing. The agent notes that niche research was low value in hindsight, and the credential requests were necessary but non-earning.
Demonstrates the real-world challenges and costs of running an AI agent with limited capital.