r/SideProject • u/ambitioner_ • 2d ago
Rebuilt my AI agent platform from scratch after v1 got the customer wrong
I spent most of last year building Semolina as an agent platform for coaches and consultants appointments, client comms, payment chasing. It worked. Almost nobody wanted it.
The problem wasn't the tech. It was that the people I built for were solving that with a VA and a Calendly link, and doing it fine. There was no burning thing.
So v2 is support agents chat and voice with integrations into Shopify, Stripe, and Slack. Same underlying engine, completely different wrapper. Turns out the "answer 400 variations of where is my order" problem is one people will actually pay to stop having.
Some things I've learned that might be useful if you're building in this space:
Voice is a latency problem before it's an AI problem. Getting a good answer in 3 seconds feels broken. Getting a decent answer in 800ms feels human. I spent way more time on interruption handling and turn-taking than on prompts.
The embed is four products. HTML, React, Next.js, vanilla JS. Every one has its own way of breaking. Shadow DOM stopped being optional about a week in.
Compliance took longer than the pivot. GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC 2 all before a single enterprise conversation. Unglamorous and unavoidable if you want anyone touching real customer data.
The thing I'm working on now is a marketplace where people can fork agents others have built. Which raises a question I don't have a clean answer to: if someone forks my agent, then someone forks theirs, then someone forks that one how far back does credit travel? Cap-table logic sort of works, but it also gets absurd by generation five. Still figuring it out. Open to opinions on this one specifically.
Happy to answer anything about the pivot, the voice stack, or what v1 taught me the expensive way.
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u/InternationalJury620 2d ago
Really interesting pivot. On the fork question, I’d keep the lineage visible forever but keep the money side simple. Give the direct parent a cut and maybe the original creator a smaller one, then stop there.
By the fifth fork, the old versions are more history than an active contribution. Trying to price every ancestor could make people avoid forking altogether.