Petros Hong from Apify stopped by the Netlify booth to share what he's been building. Among his projects is a job platform that's helped more than 1,000 people find work. He also shared why he keeps choosing Netlify as he launches and grows new sites.

State of AI on @base AI needs programmable money before it can operate independently. Base is capturing that settlement layer through payments, inference, funding, and execution. > x402 resources grew 262% in June. @apify partnered with @coinbase to integrate x402 and expand agent access from 2K to 20K+ web automation tools. > @AskVenice becomes a unicorn with a $65M Series A at a $1B valuation led by @dragonfly_xyz. @cbventures joined the round. > @aeonframework incorporated through @BedrockFndn with a 20% Foundation stake. > @_proxystudio and @liquid_launcher are connecting $wstDIEM yield, self-funded agents, and launches that route fees into inference. > @Robinhood Chain launched with @virtuals_io providing agent launch, funding, ownership, and execution infrastructure from day 1. > @bankrbot integrated Robinhood chain for AI-native trading across tokenized stocks, ETFs, and memecoins. > @gitlawb launched ZERO, its Go coding harness running 5x faster than OpenClaude. > @dphnAI shipped Dolphin Network V2 and generated 82B tokens in one day, equal to 82% of @AskVenice’s daily token volume. > Claude Fable 5 is live through @AskVenice, while @AskSurplus offers access at a 52% discount. AI on Base is accelerating. Which Base AI project are you most bullish on?

So far, I have only ever used for marketing and growth use-cases. But after talking to many customers, I realized how good it is for Ops usecase. So, to test it, I created a new workspace and created an AI teammate called "Finance Operations Lead" - and now I never have to worry about managing my finances anymore. It just works so well. It has all the context about my business, my finances, my income, my expenses, my emails and everything. I feel like the reason why Squad works so well is because of how much stuff is built into it. I don't have to spend anytime connecting or configuring stuff. - Connecting my email is just 2 clicks. - It has all the tools it needs - web search, ai search, social search. It can scrape and get anything and everything without having to manually configure Apify or anything like that. - Composio is built into it. - It has its own Cloud Computer. So I can just give it the task, close my laptop and trust that it gets done. It may take time to setup processes. For reference, it took me 3 days to properly transfer my business and finance context to the agent. But now that it's done, it just works so well. - It has memory built in. So it remembers what we did together in the past. I don't have to keep giving it context again and again. I have to do it only once and it just works so well. I feel like Squad works really really well and instant sell for anyone who is tired of doing the Ops of your business manually. It's just so good if you spend time to set it up. It's a one time time investment of few hours per agent, and then you never have to worry about that area of the business anymore. I also started liking the way to create agents one at a time, instead of creating all at once. I am so excited to offload more and more of my boring workload to Squad, so that I can spend time working on more interesting and revenue generating things.

a solo creative agency replacing a $15-30k/mo team with $200/mo and two subscriptions... this is now just a workflow, not a fantasy here's the stack, in order: - Seedance 2.5 - generates every image and video, brand assets, product shots, UGC, unboxing, high-end commercials - claude - the brain. writes every prompt, tags reference images so nothing gets confused, connects to higgsfield via MCP so it can generate and file assets on its own - notion - the agency backend, every client gets a column, every ad gets a row with hook copy, prompt, CTR, ROAS - apify - scrapes competitor ads across tiktok/meta/instagram, feeds trending hooks straight into the pipeline the part that actually changes the math: real UGC runs $200-500 a piece from an actual creator same output through the stack costs about $5 and takes 5 minutes 5 clients at $2k/mo is a $10k/mo agency, run solo the catch nobody skips past: the stack is now a commodity, anyone watching this can copy it by next week the actual moat is closing clients, setting scope, and not blowing up your reputation on revision cycle #1# - that's the part AI still can't do for you

Running list of AI agent ideas to make you more productive and more money: 1. The onboarding rescue agent. Watch PostHog for any new signup who stalls on the same step for more than 10 minutes, then have an agent send them a Loom style personal message or a CustomerIO email that answers the exact thing they're stuck on before they give up. 2. The pricing page bounce agent. Fire a PostHog webhook when someone hits your pricing page twice and leaves, have the agent enrich them with Apollo, and send a short email with the objection handler for their specific company size when it matters. 3. The second product in support agent. Point an agent at your Intercom/Plain inbox etc and have it tag every request that isn't actually about your product, the adjacent thing people assume you also do. It ranks them by frequency. 3. The you already answered this agent. Have an agent read your sent folder, your Intercom replies, and your sales emails, and pull the clearest explanations you've ever written about your product. It drops them into a swipe file your landing page and cold emails pull from. 4. The internal tool to product agent. Point an agent at your team's GitHub scripts, Retool apps, and Google Sheets, and have it flag the ones 10 other companies in your niche would pay for. 5. The review mining agent. Apify scrape every review of your top 3 competitors on G2 and Capterra, cluster the 1-star complaints with Claude, and get a ranked list of the features to build and the exact words to use in ads to poach those unhappy customers. 6. The sell what you give away agent. Once a week, feed your Granola/Gmeet call notes and Intercom threads into an agent that hunts for every task your team did for free that took more than 30 minutes. It clusters them, counts how often each came up, and ranks by demand. The top 3 become paid add ons. 7. The win pattern cloner. Pull your last 50 closed-won deals from HubSpot or whatever CRM you use, have an agent find the firmographic traits and the trigger event those buyers shared before they bought, build a lookalike list in Clay, and feed it straight into Instantly. 8. The self improving ad agent. Wire an agent to your Meta ads account that pulls the winners daily, uses Perplexity to scrape fresh Reddit pain points, generates new static creative with Nano Banana, checks it against your brand guide with a vision model, publishes, kills the losers, and scales the winners on a loop. An entire performance marketer running 24/7. 9. The first hour agent. Pull your last 500 signups from PostHog, split them into power users and churned users, and have the agent diff the first session event streams to find the one action power users took that churners skipped. Then force that action into onboarding with a PostHog feature flag. 10. The lost deal rescue agent. Have an agent pull your closed lost deals from your CRM, then monitor those competitors' status pages and pricing pages with a daily Firecrawl. The morning a competitor has an outage or raises prices, it drafts a personal reach out to the buyers you lost to them. 11. The Gemini video scout. Point Gemini at your competitors' YouTube demos, webinars, and conference talks, and have it watch the actual footage, not the transcript, to pull the features they're teasing and the UI they're showing. It reads what they demo on screen, not just what they write down. 12. The wrong answer agent. Run your product's top buyer questions through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity every week on a cron, and have the agent log the moment any of them start saying something false about your pricing, features, or positioning, then Slack you the exact wrong claim and the source it likely pulled from. Honestly the fun part is that once you build one of these, you can't stop seeing them everywhere, every manual task starts looking like an agent you haven't set up yet. That's kind of where my head is at lately, so I'll keep dropping agent ideas here and on @startupideaspod as I go, and if you build one that rips, tell me, I want to see it. Grab whatever idea is useful. I'm rooting for you.

Momentum is building on Base. Here’s 25 things the Base ecosystem launched and announced in July. 1) @morpho launched Morpho Midnight, Fixed Rate Markets, and a new Markets App. Allowing users on Base to lend and borrow at fixed rates. 2) @o1_exchange introduced the B20 launchpad to create and discover B20 tokens on Base in seconds, without code. 3) @bankrbot crossed $5B in total volume traded onchain through Bankr. 4) @tenorfinance, a fixed-rate lending and borrowing platform for asset managers and large borrowers, went live on Base to provide access to onchain lending markets. 5) @numoforex presented the first stablecoin-settled USD/NGN futures exchange, unlocking Nigerian Naira DeFi opportunities on Base. 6) @noon_capital went live with its digital dollar, built with institutional-grade security, on Base. 7) @definitivefi launched Flash Agents, delivering advanced orders, smart routing and resilient execution on Base. 8) @doppler_fi expanded to Base, starting with infrastructure for cbXRP and paving the way for more tokenized assets over time. 9) @cloudflare announced Monetization Gateway, which will allow you to charge for any web page, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare with stablecoins on x402. 10) @apify launched 20,000+ tools accessible through x402, giving autonomous agents access to the largest marketplace of web automation tools. 11) @spiko, with @coinbase, now lets USDC and EURC settle directly into regulated, yield-bearing UCITS liquidity funds on Base. 12) @centrifuge issued over $50 million in tokenized AAA CLOs on Base as part of Ethena’s ongoing diversification of its collateral with institutional credit. 13) @avantis announced the rollout of Avantis V2 on August 12, featuring expanded RWA access, zero-commission trading, and more. 14) @midasrwa launched on Base to bring its composable onchain investment products to one of the largest onchain finance ecosystems. 15) @askvenice raised $65 million in a round led by Dragonfly at a $1 billion valuation, to expand its private and uncensored AI platform as an alternative to mainstream models. 16) @ethos_network launched Ethos Trade, a beta version of its Reputation Markets v2 that lets users trade anyone’s reputation onchain. 17) @liveframe shipped a tool for UGC creators, streamers, and clippers to monetize their attention and get paid through its next-generation distribution platform on Base. 18) @liminalcash launched Nim, an AI financial agent on Base that lets users move money, split bills, invest, and handle banking tasks through simple conversation. 19) @opal_dex announced Production V1 of its privacy-first perpetual DEX on Base, with invite-only access and limited capacity now live for stress-testing. 20) @birchhill_io launched its first onchain product: a permissioned USDC credit market on Base backed by tokenized real estate equity. 21) @pixiechess opened its new Free Brawl game mode on Base, offering no-entry-fee play with real rewards. 22) @trueo_ launched user-created markets on its permissionless prediction platform, letting anyone ask questions, create markets, and earn. 23) @korprotocol shipped KOR ID on Base, a unified verified identity that unlocks access to its full suite of apps and enables instant agent payments on deal close. 24) @niftyisland launched Prize World, a new play mode powered by Base for collecting authenticated trading cards and unlocking rewards. 25) @freedomfactory announced PQ1, the world’s first fully post-quantum hardware wallet, live on Base.