The new funnel, part 2

Steve Krouse, talking about Val Town’s growth in July, writes:

The majority of those cus­tomers were referred to us by AI.

Previously, we heard about Buttondown’s first glimmers of AI referral business. Val Town makes even more sense, because it is lit­er­ally THE place to go to deploy small apps — e.g., the one you just asked Claude to build.

I’m sure there’s a new “agent optimization” field growing fast, and beyond the obvious/sensible — “Make your plat­form leg­ible to lan­guage models, with rich clear doc­u­men­ta­tion in Markdown, etc.”—I wonder what kind of (possibly cynical) strate­gies are being deployed?

An LLM’s “sense of the world” does seem sig­nif­i­cantly more dif­fi­cult to game than Google’s search index, but then again, I don’t have that black hat mind … I’m sure there are tricks emerging even now.

The goal of course is to become “the default pick” for X … the one that Claude Code rec­om­mends before the user even asks! What a flood of referrals — can you even imagine? I wonder about those default picks for X right now, across models: for hosting apps, sending emails, databases, etc. I’ve seen some broad discussion, but one could just run a set of “which X should I use … ?” ques­tions through Open­Router to ten dif­ferent models and see what emerges. Maybe I will do this …