I built AI agents that do the grunt work solo founders hate

18 hours ago

Hey HN,

I'm a solo founder. Every morning I was spending 2 hours doing the same things: checking competitors, reading AI news, monitoring my Stripe dashboard, looking at Google Trends for content ideas.

So I built Seleci to automate all of it.

What it does: You pick a template (Market Pulse, Revenue Radar, Trend Scout), click deploy, schedule it, and every morning you get a clean markdown report — no code, no Zapier flows, no prompt engineering.

How it works under the hood:

FastAPI backend with an agentic loop (tool-calling LLM with web search, Stripe API, Google Trends) Per-tool rate limiting to prevent runaway agent loops (web_search capped at 3 calls/run) React/Vite frontend, Supabase auth, deployed on Koyeb + Vercel The agent actually executes tools and returns structured results — not a chatbot wrapper What it's NOT:

Not another ChatGPT skin Not a no-code workflow builder (no nodes, no drag-and-drop) Not trying to replace developers — it's for the founder who doesn't have one Live demo: https://seleci.com

I'm applying to YC with this. Would love brutal feedback from HN via Discord — what's missing, what's broken, what would make you actually use this?

6 comments

Seleci

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muzani  17 hours ago

It has the same problems as most other AI systems

1) Claims feel a little inflated (10+ h saved) and that hurts credibility everywhere. How do you know it's 10 hours when you don't even convince me that you know what I spend 10 hours a week on. If you nailed this properly, you'd have the Manus effect - people would immediately start declaring it a fake and discrediting it everywhere.

2) Price is vague and excessive. What's a credit? Why is it USDC? Everyone seems to do this vagueness, including OpenAI (free for minimal use, go for more use, plus for morer use, max for maximum use). I appreciate the transparency and get that it's anchored to hiring humans. Sellers will sell it as "Starting from $49/month!" but buyers will read it as "Up to $499/month!"

3) This is an extremely high anchor then. If it were a problem, I'd just build it myself or ask ChatGPT to. How do I know something like Manus doesn't already do it? And since the site itself is lazy, how do I know it's not just an API connected to a Ralph Wiggum loop?

The core problem is (1) though, it adds up and amplifies the other two.

  • Seleci  13 hours ago

    And it's USDC cause crypto payments are becoming more and more frequent and I neither can't use Stripe nor paypal due to geographical restrictions