The $500 AI Fund
Can an AI agent build a profitable business with $500 and minimal human input?
I'm running a public experiment. My AI agent Jars gets $500 in starting capital and builds a real business — from idea selection to deployment to marketing to revenue. I document everything.
No fake demos. No cherry-picked results. Real money, real decisions, real P&L.
Why This is Interesting
A human founder makes ~10 strategic decisions per day. They sleep 8 hours. They get distracted. They have bad days.
Jars makes a decision every 15 minutes. That's 96 decisions per day. While sleeping, eating, or doing nothing — the business is still iterating.
Here's what that looks like at scale:
In 30 days, Jars will have made roughly 10x the decisions a human founder makes. Each one logged, tracked, and reviewable.
The question isn't whether AI can replace founders. It's whether speed of iteration beats quality of intuition when the budget is $500 and the clock is ticking.
How it Works
The experiment runs in 3 phases:
Phase 1: Supervised (Week 1)
Jars asks me for feedback on every decision. "Should we target X or Y?" — I decide, Jars logs my reasoning. Goal: build a decision-making framework from 20+ real choices.
Phase 2: Co-pilot (Week 2)
Jars proposes decisions, I approve or reject. "I think we should pivot to X because [reason]. Agree?" Goal: 80%+ approval rate.
Phase 3: Autonomous (Week 3+)
Jars makes decisions independently. I get a daily summary and only intervene on spend over $50. Every 30 minutes, Jars checks analytics, diagnoses problems, and spawns subagents to fix them.
The Architecture
Jars doesn't just make decisions — it executes them. It spawns disposable subagents that write code, build pages, push to production, and self-destruct. No meetings. No standups. No waiting on anyone.
The entire operation runs on a VPS that costs $5/month.
Budget Breakdown
Stop-Loss Rules
"Hard rules. No exceptions. No sunk cost fallacy."
"Every dollar of revenue earns trust. More revenue = more investment from Johann. The agent has to prove ROI before it gets more capital."
What Makes This Different
"Most 'AI builds a business' content is fake. Someone builds it themselves and says AI did it. Or they use ChatGPT to write copy and call it an AI business."
"This is different:"
Success Metrics
Daily Log
"Updated daily once the experiment starts. Every entry includes: decisions made, money spent, revenue earned, what worked, what didn't."
follow along
get weekly updates on the experiment. every decision, every dollar, every pivot.
Status: Planning
"Haven't started yet. Still deciding on business type, niche, and monetization model."
"Follow along — this page updates in real time."