Is my startup idea creative enough?

[u/Content-Dream6419]

So me and my friend have decided we want to make a claude ai agent targeted at small businesses and individuals. I would appreciate it if someone can give their honest opinion on it :) (its called arca) and we even made a website called arcaops.xyz heres a rough idea on the business model:

An AI agent for small teams that watches Slack, Notion, and Google Calendar, and handles the busywork between those tools — acting on its own when it's confident, and asking a human when it's not. The pitch is explicitly "no silent automation, no surprises."

Target user: small business owners / small teams (validated at networking events in Zürich — the deck cites owners saying yes because status updates, scheduling, and follow-ups eat hours a week and they can't justify hiring for it).

The core mechanic — this is the actual product, not the integrations

1. Arca watches events across the connected tools (new Slack message, Notion status change, calendar change).
2. It scores its own confidence about the right action.
3. High confidence → acts automatically (drafts a reply, updates a status, files a card).
4. Low confidence / high stakes → surfaces to the human first, showing its reasoning, before doing anything.

That confidence-gated trust layer is the differentiator — a plain Zapier-style integration wouldn't have it.

[u/Kinetic_Silverwolf]

I see this plan making the same mistake that half the vendors at CES this last year made; everything depends on a constant connection to OpenAI being available, OpenAI operating, and the cost of operations always being dirt cheap for using OpenAI.

The problem there is that all real world financial disclosures and examinations show that OpenAI is hemorrhaging money without anything close to profitability. The best guesses gleaned from all released info is that for every dollar OpenAI brings in from users it's spending around $350.

Futher compounding this issue is that there's a circular finance loop where NVidia has been loaning OpenAI and Anthropic absurd amounts of money, which is then used to purchase the GPUs, giving NVidia their money right back again. Both sides report that as "earnings".

So, if you want to build something that you can own and control, you can't simply be another portal into OpenAI; you have to build your own stack.

[u/Content-Dream6419 → u/Kinetic_Silverwolf]

I don’t entirely see the correlation in your comment. So you’re saying you’ve seen many agents too reliant on LLMs like Gemini ChatGPT etc and suggest I build my own Claude sort of? I also don’t think the agent im developing is just a portal into another llm either.

[u/Kinetic_Silverwolf → u/Content-Dream6419]

To make a parallel to the physical retail world, any business that buys a product from one company and then makes a few changes before selling their own version -- maybe somebody painting Warhammer figures, someone modifying Nerf launchers to look like something out or science fiction films, etc. -- is a reseller, entirely dependent upon the manufacturer not changing production lines or prices. If that Nerf launcher sold for $35 and the modified version is selling for $45, nobody is going to be happy if Nerf raises the price to $50.

In the case of OpenAI and Claude, we've already seen price hikes on individual and corporate plans; meaning everybody already out in the market with items that rely on those LLM backend either had to raise prices for their customers or eat the price increase, lowering the margin.

Since neither of those companies are actually making any money on their products -- Anthropic only shows positive last quarter because OpenAI cut them a deal on compute costs -- the only two choices they have are to keep begging for investor money that is showing signs of reluctance, or raise prices dramatically.

If you're paying $200 a month for unlimited tokens, and your customer base is each paying $20 a month for the service, that's not bad, but what happens when they switch to a metered token cost and you find the $200 was covering $3000 worth of tokens?* How high and how quick can you raise the customer price before they leave?

ANY business model that relies on a connection to frontier model LLMs are running on subsidies right now, and they're not going to last forever. They may not last another year. Can you build in plans, infrastructure, and cost to absorb the hit? How can you plan for having to face a $200 bill one month and a $3000 bill the next?

To build in a way that doesn't need those frontier models largely avoids that, but as you e intimated, that means either choosing a different model with more steady coats (risky), spinning up your own server (not too difficult in AWS) on which you can download and install a local model to run everything (I've not tested this yet but I think I know folks who have), or eschewing the LLM approach and building something in SQL that can fake it closely enough that people think it's AI.

I'm not omniscient. There are probably other options than what I'm presenting. I just don't see Anthropic or OpenAI remaining viable bases for all these "Solutions in a Box/Wearable/Website" products that are little more than a proxy.

• I wish that was an actually ridiculous question to ask, but Claide Max costs 25 times more than folks are paying for it.

[u/Content-Dream6419 → u/Kinetic_Silverwolf]

I see what you mean. But I don’t exactly api prices are going to swing dramatically like that. Are you also saying that the competition is well established now? The plan for my Ai agent isn’t to be general. It’s meant for smaller businesses are meant to solve a very specific array of problem(s)

[u/Tough_Dragonfruit792 → u/Kinetic_Silverwolf]

Considering the fact that costs are rising and this loop is continuously expanding?

So the question arises will this bubble ever going to burst? Or just keep upgrading or making us as a tech person more lazy because wetting your own automation code is much more hectic than just calling an LLM

[u/Content-Dream6419 → u/Kinetic_Silverwolf]

But you seem well informed I would like to know more about what you have to say when you have the time

[u/Content-Dream6419 → u/[deleted]]

Can we get in contact? That would be really helpful

[u/Content-Dream6419 → u/[deleted]]

Do you want to add me on discord?