New Agency Models and My Winter Break Experiment
A few years ago I had a pretty simple observation about the internet: there are a lot of shitty websites out there….
At the time it got me thinking about if there was an easy way to take the content from a website and re write it but in a new, modern, SEO optimized format and then automatically sell that back to the vendor. My thought wasn’t for big co SaaS webpages but for the long tail of the internet, like the small Indian restaurant down the street that can’t / won’t pay a web designer.
It turns out, this is quite hard to do. The main reason is that web design more broadly is a service based task because of how custom each site is. The owner of that restaurant will have a lot of asks. Services like Wix and Squarespace exist in the long tail to let folks do it themselves, which always produces unrealistic results.
Spending more time playing with agents, we’ve gotten pretty good at building coding agents for building static websites, and one of my thoughts became: what if we built a good scraping agent to go with it to do that rough draft faster. This idea finally seems in-reach! I think it will still require a human, but it’s possible that we could greatly reduce the cost of web creation / updating old, outdated, and stale sites for the ~majority of internet users who just want a homepage.
Over the holidays I’m going to hack on it and see where we get! Wish me luck!
