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What is Discover Agents, and what is it not?
Why it works this way
Discover Agents is built not to flatter your idea: it shows the honest case against building and who is already working on it, and a figure it cannot back says "our estimate".
Founders want to hear that the idea is good, and reading the web can make it sound good in minutes. So the start is generous, with plenty of openings to compare, and the end is strict: a bar you set before you look, real conversations, and a call that is yours.
What we gave up: an answer that feels finished on day one. The research takes minutes. The checking takes days or weeks.
What it is
Discover Agents helps you find out whether an AI agent is worth building, before you build it, and it is built not to flatter your idea. You start from a company, a market, a profession, a hunch or an idea. It reads the live web, shows you where people are stuck and who is already working on it, then helps you plan the smallest honest tests and run them with real people. Iris, your AI guide, answers questions beside your board.
It is made for founders and small teams who would lose real time or money by building the wrong thing. If being wrong would cost you a weekend, build it and see: that is the cheaper test. See When should I not use Discover Agents?.
How to use it
- Type a starting point into the first box. A website, a market, a profession, a hunch or an idea all work.
- Choose from what comes back: a space if you are still exploring, then a problem, then an opportunity.
- Read the Blueprint, pick the shape your agent would ship as, and write the tests.
- Run the tests with real people. Add your conversations and write down what you learned.
- After a test of one idea, choose one of four roads: test it again, change one thing, keep the problem and drop the idea, or stop. A test that compares cards ends in your pick.
The next guide, How does a discovery run, start to finish?, walks the whole path.
What it will never do
- Build your agent for you. It writes the tests, and the building is yours. See Why does Discover Agents stop at the test?.
- Tell you an idea is proven. A result is a signal from one test, and each test says what it can and cannot show.
- Choose for you. It suggests how to test, such as which test to run first or which shape to start from. What you do with what you find is yours: you pick the space, the problem, the opportunity, the shape and the road.
If something looks off
- My boards is empty. You have not started a board yet.
- You land on a hello from Iris and no start box. On your first visit she greets you on the home screen. Press Start your board and the start box opens.
- You see "You're on the list." instead of the start box. New accounts are let in by hand, in small groups. See Why do I need an invite, and how do I get in?.
- A run takes a while. Each run names its stages as it goes, and Cancel brings you back to the start box.
- A run fails. You get a plain message, usually to try again in a moment. If it keeps happening, use the Tell Omer link in the footer. Your board saves as you work.
- An older board reads differently from these guides. The wording improved after it was made.