🧭 Tips on Reverse-engineering, Making AI agents pay for your stuff, AI in your browser challenge (Founder's Compass)

Hello there and welcome to Founder's Compass, a good way to get oriented around the labyrinthian world of startups.

Tool of the week: Glazed

This one’s interesting to any designer out there building consumer-focused products. Get user insights and build funnels directly from your Figma designs. Basically, you can test any feature before you ship it, directly in Figma. It’s expensive, don’t get me wrong, but it’s cheaper than shipping the entire feature and then realizing nobody uses it ;)

Video of the week: Client-side machine learning

This week’s video is a showcase of what AI could do client-side (AKA in your browser). This is also accompanied by a hackathon with some really good prizes (12K$ for the winning team). Take a look at the challenge here: https://googlechromeai.devpost.com/

Top 5 stories of the week

• All the data can be yours (massively useful for reverse-engineering)

“I’ve built a lot of unofficial software for my schools, Brown University and previously Macalester College. All of these make heavy use of numerous undocumented APIs, which I have a lot of fun searching for. It’s satisfying to find a clean, reliable, and complete (choose two) data source without having to resort to scraping HTML pages.

In this post I’ll share, in no particular order, some tips for finding and using these APIs.”

• Turns out weed might be the best sleep medicine

“For the first time, there's scientific evidence that a smaller, lesser known component of the cannabis plant – cannabinol – delivers better quality and longer sleep. It paves the way for finally having an effective sleep aid sourced from medical cannabis that's comparable to existing medications.”

• Lessons from my first exit (full details)

“Sale price: $598,000 (2.4x annual earnings)

• Broker commission: $88,900

• Legal fees: $18,297

• My profit from the sale: $490,803

• Payment terms: Full cash payment at closing (no earnout, no seller financing)

• Seller obligations: 30 days of free consulting (max of 80 hours total)

• Lifetime profit from business (including final sale): $920k over four years”

• Building Git for lawyers

“This is an important question. The legal system is the essential bedrock upon which all else in society is built. The protection of civil rights, peaceful conflict resolution, access to due process, enforceable contracts — all these depend on a well functioning legal system.

The professionals who operate this system are equipped with inadequate tooling. Absent git-like version control, they rely on inefficient and error-prone manual “version control” processing.”

• (From Stripe) How to add payments to your agent’s workflows (and make them waste your money)

“Agentic workflows need not have exclusively virtual outcomes. Imagine a travel agent that can book flights for your company. Using LLMs and function calling we can assemble a set of agents that can search for flights online, return options, and ultimately identify a booking URL. With Stripe, you can embed financial services and enable the automation of the purchase flow as well.

Using Stripe Issuing, you can generate single-use virtual cards that agents can use for business purchases. This enables your agents to spend funds. The Issuing APIs allow you to approve or decline authorizations programmatically, ensuring your purchase intent matches the authorization. Spending controls allow you to set budgets and limit spending for your agents.”

Startup idea of the week: Poll Marketplace

Problem:

The global market research industry hit $84.3 billion in 2023, yet many businesses—especially smaller ones—struggle to conduct effective primary research due to limited access to large, relevant audiences. Existing online polling solutions often suffer from low response rates, poor audience targeting, and questionable data quality. At the same time, creators and brands with highly engaged audiences often lack simple ways to monetize their reach beyond traditional sponsorships or ad revenue.

Target:

• Startups, SMEs, and even larger companies needing quick, reliable market insights.

• Influencers, content creators, and companies with engaged followings on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Solution:

A marketplace that bridges businesses and creators, enabling creators to poll their audiences on behalf of businesses for meaningful market research.

How It Works:

• Businesses: Sign up to create polls targeting specific demographics.

• Creators/Brands: Register to offer access to their audiences and earn a share of poll revenue.

• Matching: An automated system pairs businesses with creators whose audience demographics align with the research needs.

• Polling: Businesses can design polls and provide them to creators, who share them via links or platform tools.

• Analytics: The platform collects responses, verifies data quality, and delivers insights to businesses.

Benefits:

• For Businesses: Access to high-quality, targeted market data at a fraction of traditional research costs.

• For Creators: A simple, recurring monetization method that leverages their audience’s engagement.

• For the Platform: A scalable business model with a 15% platform fee on poll revenue.

Go-to-market:

• Start manually by pairing businesses with creators on existing platforms like Twitter or Instagram.

• Build a basic platform once demand is validated, focusing on automation and analytics.

• Scale by onboarding businesses and creators across diverse industries.

Challenges:

• Ensuring responses are genuine and representative, avoiding biases or bots.

• Convincing creators with large followings to participate consistently.

• Building trust with businesses and proving the reliability of the results.

• Transitioning from manual operations to a fully automated platform.

Stick close for the next one.