As you might have seen from my recent post, my Son and I have been busy at work putting AI through its paces to see what it’s capable of. One of our goals was to answer the question: how far can we get by without any help from experts? And the answer as it turns out was - pretty damn far!

It took three months to build a new multi-sided SaaS marketplace called The Antidote, and - if you discount the time spent - it cost about $500 all things told. I’ve costed up similar projects when I used to run digital agencies, and we would’ve charged something like $500k. Plus it would’ve taken twice as long, and we would’ve needed a team of 8-10 experts on and off.

Of particular note was Codex’s ability to configure all the platforms we’re using to power The Antidote. They include (deep breath): Vercel, Neon, Postmark, Firebase, Stripe, Meta, Google Workspace, Open AI’s own API, Better Stack, Cloudflare, and Bitwarden. I’ve never configured any of these before, and it was great to see an ’experienced’ user power through the configuration for all of them. And when we found issues, it took moments to diagnose and fix. This stuff used to take hours or days, many of which would be unbearable because customers were suffering in the meantime.

Under the hood, the list of platform capabilities would be impressive for any startup. The whole stack is automated, including many aspects that a cash-constrained company would typically not be able to afford - features that would be considered a costly indulgence for MVP. We get them all for free, or close to free - stuff like automated backups and already-proven Disaster Recovery, Infrastructure as Code, Monitoring and Alerting, Operations Reporting including cost management and conversion pipeline / attribution analysis, and much more.

At the time of writing, Google Lighthouse scores are 100% across the board, as well as 2/2 for “Agentic browsing”. That’s exactly what I want, as part of our proposition is that we connect venues with customers and then get out of the way - even if they never visit The Antidote (for example, if their AI assistant takes them to their venue page because they’d scraped our page).

But what’s most interesting of all - to me at least - is that the whole endeavour is underpinned by AI agents running much of the business autonomously (with humans in the loop of course). We’re still tightening up this aspect, but the bones are there - I’ll make that the subject of a future post.

So, we’ve launched in our pilot markets of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, conducted a low-level social campaign to get some feedback from friends and family, and are launching our paid social campaigns today. And we’ve already heard back from our first venue. Exciting times!