Meet Alex
Hi! I’m Alex Doda – I’m the creator of Agent.so & Founder of The Abruptive Institute. I’ve been building software online ever since I was 14 years old, and my life’s goal is to help bring super-alignment between the power structures of the world.
The first major milestone to support that goal is to solve the paradox of problem-solving – aka create something designed to reduce the friction of problem-solving to near-zero. I believe that by doing so, we’ll create a world where we all… fight less… and push mankind higher up on the Kardashev scale.
I want to see a world where we expand consciousness throughout the Universe, not one where we’re constantly on the brink of self-annihilation. And I’m dedicating my life’s work to support that goal.
I started my journey as a freelancer in Eastern Europe when I was 14, from an average family, no connections or more than $1 a day for snacks at school.
I grew to 6-figures a year (in USD) before 20 through web design & engineering, bought my first house (in cash) when I had just turned 20, then shifted to being an agency owner. Eventually shifted my full focus to SaaS & entrepreneurship & some casual investing. I’ve been in the game for over a decade already, and I hope to maximize the value I bring to mankind by helping as many people as I can before my light goes dim.
What inspired you to create Agent.so?
Well, I’ve been in AI for quite a few years – I built my first AI app around 2018 or so. And since then… I’ve been working with all sorts of talented entrepreneurs, promoters, and creators on a variety of projects and ideas.
When generative transformers (or GPTs) came out and got to a point where they were relatively useful, I envisioned a world where we, as humans, work alongside digital entities that I used to refer to as AI Agents.
When I came up with this concept of “Agents” and launched over 250 AI agents for people to use, nobody was talking about AI Agents the way they do today. I knew that the future of work is one where we “off-load” a lot of our tasks not just to a general system like ChatGPT, but to potentially millions of specialized AI entities.
That’s how Agent.so was born in early 2023 – many months before GPTs, RAG, and some of these other technologies we rolled out were widely known.
Can you explain how Agent.so helps businesses build, optimize, and scale their operations using AI agents?
Agent.so is Your Portal to AI™. We’re building an all-in-one platform to bring the future of work to everybody’s fingertips. I guess the best way to explain it is that we’re building “The Apple of AI” – an all-inclusive ecosystem that brings everything you’d want from AI in one place.
I don’t want to be too promotional here and list all the different things you can do in respect to your time… you can learn more about those on the official website if you want to. However, one of my personal favorites on the platform is the ability to create custom AI agents designed to your own liking – trained privately with your own data, language, behavior preferences, etc. It’s almost like creating your own synthetic “human.”. And soon you’ll be able to bring these AI Agents anywhere (on your site, apps, voice, and… no… not in your bedroom).
We’re basically building a platform network where it’s fully up to you on how you use these AI agents – there’s so much coming up out of our short-term roadmap over the next months and years that I believe soon you’ll hear Agent.so in every conversation about AI overlapping actual real-world utility.
As of today though, we’re focused on helping businesses streamline operations, do cheaper marketing, and generally get things done faster than they would with traditional AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
What differentiates Agent.so from other AI-powered automation platforms?
Well, Agent.so is the original AI agents platform. You can historically look up and see we launched the first iterations of Agent.so way before GPTs became a thing, way before RAG and AI Agents had official terms and we had them publicly available for everyone to use. You might not have heard of Agent.so as loudly as some of the latecomers, and that’s because so far we focused on building before marketing. We aren’t chasing hype cycles—we’re focused on a long-term vision that’s somewhat a lane of its own. I don’t really think about competitors and focus on the vision instead.
What you see on the platform today is phase 1 of a very long journey. We’re moving really fast though! Like for instance… besides the deep R&D that takes weeks to months to roll out, we average around 1 major feature release… per day. We recently started publishing these on an updates page, but every single day we roll out something new & useful to the platform.
My vision for Agent.so goes beyond just a software platform where you go to get anything done. Pretty much the major AI labs are leading with the narrative that AGI & AI will become the go-to way humanity outsources work. But I don’t really see deep conversations about what happens with us – the humans? There’s all sorts of ideas… but no exact roadmap on what businesses to start, what to stay away from, what to learn and do that doesn’t get outsourced fully to AI, what happens to the dynamics of supply & demand, who are the winners, who are the losers, etc.
What do we do? How do we earn a living? What businesses and problems are still worth solving in a world where you can vibe create anything? Which is why I want us to solve that problem & create a place where the different types of people find meaning, contribute to productivity, and ultimately earn a living. We’re not a product, service, or AI company as much as we’re a digital nation – a place where you earn, learn, and grow as a person or business.
A place where creators can create, promoters can promote, innovators can innovate, and so on. To anyone feeling threatened in any way that Agent.so could be a competitor – I think of this entire vision from the perspective of “how can we create a true win-win scaled to the entire humanity?”. I actually want to prove the idea that a win-win scaled to Earth, whilst it seems impossible, is achievable.
For instance, we just rolled out the Ambassador Camp – a proprietary affiliate-style system you can access on our platform that compensates people for sharing our platform. And that’s just the beginning. You’ll be quite surprised to see that AI is just one wing of what this already feature-packed platform is going to be. I used to call Agent.so “the last AI platform you’ll ever need.” because I want us to bring all the talented creators into an ecosystem where they can help each other & support each other’s unique dreams & journeys.
Now we’re growing to be “Your Portal to AI.” And someday, the ultimate harbinger of peer to peer value. Although we have a very long-term vision that may span way after I’m personally gone… I believe in this project so much that I’m willing to bet my life on it, and I hope we can bring as much value as we possibly can, leading to fulfilling its mission – to solve the paradox of problem-solving & bring super-alignment between the power structures of the world.
How do AI agents within your platform simplify day-to-day operations?
We have 250+ AI agents you can choose from as soon as you join the platform. That’s 250+ specialists you can choose from depending on what you need!
For instance, you can choose Evan (an expert brand manager), Laura (a career advisor), Tyler (a growth hacker), Mike (an internet marketer), or if you want to have some fun, there are some pretty creative AI agents like Yalena (a dream interpreter), Cuckoo (a literal… lunatic…), or Gary (a stand-up comedian).
This is just the beginning. We have over 3,000 unreleased expertise-focused AI agents we’re ready to deploy as well, as well as tens of thousands of private AI agents created by our members, but are focused on other sides of the ecosystem at the moment. Each of these folks has a unique personality, appearance, style, and specialized knowledge & we’ll roll out the ability to publish them, monetize them, etc. And at some point when we’re ready, this will turn into a very social ecosystem for humans and AIs.
Besides these done-for-you AI agents, you can also create your own custom ones from scratch. You can give them an avatar, train them with your data (files, links, etc.), give them special skills (like, for instance, they can look up people by email, look up locations, search the web, and dozens of other capabilities that bring them closer and closer to true AGI). Kinda like having a lot of SaaS apps into one.
An easter egg you’ll see in our logo is that the word AGENT with the dot in our mark reassembles the letters AGI. That’s been our logo since day one, back to when we were a simple MVP on a subdomain. My personal belief is that we (as… humanity) have already achieved AGI to some extent, and now it’s just a matter of rolling things out in a way that’s useful & that makes sense.
On the Agent.so side… It’s really up to every member and business on how they use the platform and make the most of it. I believe we’ll see marginal increases in productivity, especially as we roll out the academy, resources, guides, AI mentors, etc. At this point, it kind of feels more like an education challenge than a tech capabilities issue.
What’s your perspective on the role of AI agents in SaaS innovation?
I have mixed feelings here. On one hand, AI agents commoditize SaaS in ways I wasn’t even remotely aware of when we came out with this AI Agents paradigm. I mean you see everyone talking about AI Agents now and rolling out some really exciting ones that are used to create entire SaaS platforms in a day.
I love what the folks at Vercel are doing with v0, the guys at StackBlitz with Bolt, and my buddy Pieter Levels (@levelsio) who’s pioneering a whole new wave of creators & making vibe coding popular. Not sure if you saw his games, hackathons, etc., but it’s worth checking out! More and more people are creating cool stuff not just in SaaS but in general! All thanks to AI agents.
Innovation seems to be accelerating and I don’t think it’s going to slow down anytime soon. It compounds. Tools get increasingly better, easier to use, and we see more and more creators come out with beautiful pieces of software that used to take many months or years to create before AI Agents were a thing.
I’m really excited about that. I think we’ll see a world instead of having 500 million companies (and I’m only guesstimating the numbers here), we’ll have billions of companies with smaller teams. Likely many of them will be 1-person projects that solve problems incredibly well. I think AI agents are opening up a world where everyone can pursue what they love, build on deep verticals, and bring the uniqueness of their soul to the rest of the world in ways that were impossible before.
That’s the good part. Now on the other hand, I think there are a couple of missing pieces before we hit a techno-utopia where every human pursues their subjective dream and fulfills their personal mission through infinite creativity. I don’t think the world has the right infrastructure for that yet.
We still run on supply and demand (which is shifting dramatically now that AI agents are widely recognized and used around the world). Humanity still hasn’t conquered the deadly sins. Spiritually, there are some walls to break through before infinite abundance becomes a tangible goal. Realistically, I believe the equation is as esoteric as it is technical and mathematical, but that’s a whole conversation for another day.
What challenges have you faced in developing your platform, and how have you overcome them?
Well, I would say every single challenge in the book. Starting with the fact that we’re a self-funded bootstrapped platform – basically I’ve funded the entire vision from my personal savings. There’s no big team behind this project, no venture capital, no manpower in the traditional. Just a lot of really creative algorithms speeding things up in ways that often catch me by surprise honestly!
It’s basically me on the product side (between design, frontend, backend, infrastructure, marketing, engineering, etc.), my spouse on the content & support side, and an army of AI agents helping us with all sorts of things. I think you can do remarkable things with a smaller team. Against most of the advice I received so far from super successful entrepreneurs, I think there’s a whole new way to delegate in the age of AI. Agent.so is, in a way, something I had to create for myself. To build up leverage & “clone myself” without having to run a traditional team.
I used to run a team of employees, with an office, business partners, etc. on a past project… and it was all going a lot slower than it does now. Now we’re moving 100 miles an hour and frankly… I think in the age of AGI you can do a lot more with a lot less than ever before.
And on the legal & operations side, since we run this project under my parent company, The Abruptive Institute, we also have an amazing COO who takes care of contracts, makes sure we don’t get screwed over when signing on enterprise deals, and so on. He runs his own incredibly successful multi-million dollar agency in California and he’s been a great friend for over a decade – really grateful to have him on board.
He’s kinda like the “Dr. Dre” to the “Eminem” haha… making sure I don’t accidentally sign off on some dumb s**t… Basically all the paperwork goes through his ballpoint pen of truth, terror, and justice. And then we also have contractors or people we work with on a case-by-case basis, but that’s quite rare. Most non-executive work is basically ran by AI agents. Not all of them are on our platform yet, but they will eventually be.
Re. challenges… if you were to go to an AI right now and say “what are the top 100 challenges you’ll face as a bootstrapped SaaS entrepreneur” – I’m pretty confident we’ve hit all those walls haha!
From keeping the lights on, to getting screwed in business by people with a lot of experience, to not having enough bandwidth & competitors stealing the spotlight of things we pretty much created, to struggling with traffic/leads/sales, to infrastructure breaking in the middle of the night, to people ghosting conversations or poking fun at us for being “unrealistic” (just to end up eating their words), and everything in between.
Marketing is definitely the biggest one. I’m more of an engineer by nature, so I tend to spend 80% of my time on product rather than sales & marketing. I spent a lot of time aroudn some of the world’s leading internet marketers, but they have their own thing going on so there hasn’t been a lot of room for collabs on Agent.so specifically. But we’re working on all sorts of partnerships & creative ways to solve that once and for all haha… the uncapped recurring lifetime compensation plan for sharing Agent.so called the Ambassador Camp being the first of many.
And then on the funding side… I am not a fan of VCs. I had to flip the bird on some people who approached us (i.e. at Web Summit in Lisbon a year or so ago) saying “we’ll put a lot of money in your pockets & users on your platform in exchange for your users’ data”. No “sellout” opportunities. F**k that. Which I guess cuts off some big opportunities for funding, but it is what it is. We’re fully independent & I’m taking a lot of heavy efforts & sacrifices to keep things that way. So that in itself I’d say is a huge challenge – it’s like playing the game on impossible difficulty.
I believe a lot of the traditional way software is built and funded is a scam. Because of that, I haven’t accepted any angel investment offers yet & pretty much became our own VC fund via The Abruptive Institute, subsidized by agency work, income from other software acquisitions, etc. I want to keep this platform free from any unwanted influence, so we’re not selling out the long-term vision for any short-term benefits. If we ever raise, it’ll be on our terms, not on terms enforced by people who are very unlikely to be aligned with our multi-decade long vision and mission.
The way we’re overcoming challenges in general is by working really hard. Often to the tune of 12-16 hours every single day, and have faith that we’ll find our way no matter what. I’m sort of a deep believer personality style who went through some pretty horrifying challenges on my journey, so at this point there’s nothing I fear – the mission is too important to let challenges take any mental bandwidth. I think when you know what the north light is, nothing can really slow you down anymore. You just… solve things & move on.
Do users have the option to train their AI agents based on specific business needs?
Absolutely! You can train AI agents with your files, links, or entire sitemaps. So you can have your AI agents become fully aware of your website, help center, and other data.
Then you customize their instructions, behavior style, language, or even restrict them to only ever talk about things they find in your training data. You can also grant them AI skills to do things like… look up emails, geolocate places, and all these other creative internal capabilities we use all the time that we’re rolling out to the platform gradually.
We’ve got integrations with hundreds of external apps coming up, a super cool widgets system used to embed them anywhere, send them out to do lead generation for you, and so on. And on a very long horizon, we’re not excluding a world where you can install these AI agents to your own humanoid robots, video game characters, or metaverse experiences!
I want Agent.so to become THE way you interact with AI. Which is also why we integrate with all the major AI labs & model providers. For example if your business needs an AI that’s more aligned with OpenAI, then you can have your AI Agents use their model. Or if you want something less biased & more unfiltered, you can have some AI Agents that use Grok (which is my personal favorite).
The way the platform infrastructure was designed is so that you can mix and match all these tools and capabilities in one place to create the perfect AI workflows you want. So you can totally train them, customize them, etc.
What advice would you give to someone looking to enter the SaaS market?
I used to support a personal development organization as a fractional CTO whose core belief is that every human soul has something remarkable to offer the world. And that really stuck with me. My first piece of advice is – what is your unique thing? What could you work on for the next couple of decades with passion and commitment?
A lot of people say “copy what works” and I see all these copycat tools popping up left and right. And that’s just… shallow. Pointless. I kinda hate copycats. In many contexts outside of tech, being a copycat is shameful. You MIGHT make a quick buck, but copycats never last. If you can do something in 5 minutes and copy someone else, that means everybody else can. So there’s fundamentally no point in doing that when you could laser in on what makes YOU unique. So start there. Hard at first, but worth it.
Like think about it… if you can vibe code something in 3 hours, that means millions of other people can. How valuable is that thing now when you factor in the dynamics of supply & demand? Are you betting on a quick side hustle or are you betting on a long-term problem to solve? Literally all side-hustlers I know who were making millions of dollars before are now really struggling. Vibe coding is great, but you wanna find your way FROM it, not get stuck prompting feature after feature with no direction.
If you put enough energy into finding what that unique thing is, everything else starts to align. Some cultures call it the Ikigai. Others call it the north star. Regardless of what you call it, find it.
Find a way to sustain yourself financially, craft a vision with a roadmap, and just show up every day. I’m biased here as one of the highest things on my hierarchy of values is freedom – so I’m not a fan of traditional VC. But I do see the value in having a support network of mentors, an opening to things like YC, etc. I just don’t think it’s the only way. Bootstrapping your way through stuff works just as well if you’re willing to put up with it. I actually met a LOT of people who raised capital & then shared in private conversations over dinner how much they regretted it. Which I guess goes into the next point…
Don’t let anyone tell you what you can or can’t be. What you can or can’t do. Most advice you’ll find from people is actually pretty nonsensical. Personally… I’m not that money motivated, but I’m aware I need to create a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure to fulfill the mission I’m on. On that note, I encourage you to set your hierarchy of values in order. You’ll often see that what you truly want from life isn’t necessarily what others insist that you should want. At the end of the day most people act more confident on the advice they share than the core utility of that advice.
Everyone’s quick to give advice, to tell you what to do, to criticize, and so on. But advice tends to be very subjective – based on their own life experience. Even if with the best intentions. And what I found more often than not is that even some of the super successful people out there – to the tunes of 8-9-figure net worths, don’t always have the best advice for you. What works better is being proactive in your thinking. Reasoning for yourself rather than going with the flow of what others say. People are notoriously wrong… and what you’ll often find is that some of the most well-marketed people or businesses are also those struggling the most behind the scenes.
Just find what works for you. Be open to feedback and ideas from people, get hungry for knowledge, always learn, and then filter through the bulls**t and see what works uniquely for you. You are on your own journey. SaaS can be incredibly hard, or incredibly easy. It can be fun or painful. If you keep your resilience and mind in a place of serenity, you’ll become an unstoppable force.
In fact, I think 90% of the challenges are solvable by conquering the depths of your mind. If you can break through the limiting beliefs others constantly push upon you… if you can conquer your past traumas, the opinions of your friends, family, co-workers, etc… and become free in your mind of it all… you’ll win not only at SaaS, but at the game of life in general.
And on the software side… especially if I was just getting started – I would suggest you consider building vertical AI agents, or products designed to be used by AI agents. You might think it’s against what I currently do (aka a horizontal ecosystem), but I firmly believe vertical AI agents are your best shot if you’re entering the market right now.
I have other side projects besides Agent.so that are vertical AI agent SaaS companies. Some that I acquired, some that I started, some that I’m partnered on which I’m building privately & I’m not public with in any way, etc. So I do walk the walk on that piece of advice. I genuinely think it’s a great place to bring value to the market as of right now because in many ways it helps you solve some real-world problems & make some short-term cash while at the same time it future-proofs your project by being designed to be used by AI agents, not just by humans.
I think it’s really worth looking more into building things that are designed not necessarily BY AI, but FOR AI, yet that can still be used by people in the short to mid term. Ultimately you wanna find your place in the chain of value. There’s a unique place for everyone. The pie is infinite.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
Absolutely! This has been a great opportunity to reflect and to share some of my journey. So I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to do that.
To you, the viewer, thank you for offering the most precious resource you have as you read through this – your time. I hope that my journey can inspire you to start your own SaaS journey in some way. And if you’re already building – to keep going. To me, this is by all means still an origin story. A prequel to what’s coming. To you, I hope it’s a spark to awaken what’s already in you – greatness. Whoever you are. Your best days are ahead of you, not behind.
And if you decide to try my platform Agent.so and potentially support me by starting a membership – I’ll be beyond grateful. The only reason we can keep this vision alive and aligned with humanity’s best interests is because people like you support us. It’s why we don’t need to “sell out” or have anybody stain the mission. Your support keeps this mission alive.
Cheers!
Alex Doda
