What If Your Product Was Just an API? I’m Testing That at Full Speed with AI

Software entrepreneurship is dead; long live software entrepreneurship. The web itself is evolving, full AI automation is no longer a moonshot.

AI is reshaping how products are built, sold, and delivered. If you’re building digital products, APIs aren’t just technical tools—they’re your next business model, because APIs enable micro-monetization of IP.

What Software Entrepreneurship Was

I’ve been making software for two decades. It changed a bit the first 15 years, but in the last 5 it skyrocketed to a new altitude and I didn’t see it coming.

Once upon a time there were less software engineers. There were even less software entrepreneurs. My businesses were basic:

• One simple, legit piece of software
• Shared the growth process & did simple marketing

That way of doing things is largely dead.

What Software Businesses are Becoming

In a peri-AI world, where almost every desk worker has recently had a few years of covid to contend with; experiencing life outside the cubicle, software entrepreneurship is something else.

• Way more players in the field
• Social networks overburdened with AI slop
• AI can one-shot features and fixes
• Vibe Coding is boosting every decent engineer

As if that wasn’t enough change to stomach, AI seems set on rebuilding the biggest set of funnels that ever existed: Google & Search.

We’re in the transition, but already Google AI answers shows us that just ranking in search engines might not be enough in 2026. What are the introvert entrepreneurs going to do to build out a funnel then?

My take on the direction we’re travelling is that the web itself is evolving into a new beast. Right now we are seeing a blend of chaos, denial, and fast-moving new leverage opportunities. But when the dust settles it’s not going to be the same, ever again.

Several hardcore engineers have rebuilt multi-million pound SaaS products in days.

Studio Ghibli image-making came to ChatGPT 4o and within 24 hours 6 figure returns were made simply by wrapping the AI and moving quickly.

People are starting to work out how to rank their businesses in ChatGPT and Claude, not Google

To me it’s clear there are going to be new layers to the web. The one I am most interested in is Business as a Service (via API).

… But it’s Not Just Software

It makes sense that AI would disrupt software early on. Software is what software entrepreneurs know, and the early adopters of AI via API were always going to be software people.

Naturally AI is stomping through our industry like godzilla.

But pretty much all other businesses are going to be touched by it. It’s going to rewrite how services are booked, how people buy things, how people connect to other people.

Some of these markets will be slower to be onboarded to AI life, but there will be no niche left uncovered; I know this because I’m actively challenging myself to build a 100% AI business this year, and by AI automating all of the things I can see that pretty much every entrepreneur is going to be adapting to it soon.

AI Readable APIs

The middleman will be something like an API. Yes machines will be able to read and interact with websites. Yes they’ll be able to do any computer work we do.

But in my vision while the internet will stay as a human-readable layer, we will find AI interaction layers which are driven by higher interoperability, and they’re unlikely to be spoken in written human language.

We see the start of this with MCP servers and LLMs.txt, but it’s not a solid protocol yet. AI can interact well with APIs as it stands, but I suspect several AI-first protocols will emerge, which at their core will be fast, lean, APIs.

• API discovery and mapping patterns
• APIs directly into agents
• APIs for every tiny action

Pay Per Action Economy

We’re moving toward pay-per-action. Not subscriptions. Not seat licenses. API calls.

Right now we pay for services and items based on a common sense human segmentation. A design company might offer research, brand concepts, presentations, then finally the hard files to be printed on products or billboards.

An AI agent might split this down into 30 component ‘actions’ and string together a workflow which wouldn’t make sense for humans. It might skip parts because it ‘knows more’.

If this happens we might end up seeing a pay-per-action economy built on API calls.

AI might soon navigate complex marketplaces where other AIs compete to provide the best brand concepts. It might trade services with other agents. It might use 50 versions of an action endpoint then select the cream of the crop. It might use that spread of outputs to learn how to do it itself next time.

Right now I think we’re still applying human understanding to AI realities. AI agents will not be homunculi – they will be something altogether different.

The best outcome that I see is a pay-per-action economy based on API calls.

• AI Buyers & Sellers
• Whole markets barely readable by humans
• Later applied to robotics and exposed IRL
• Perhaps AI crypto currencies for barter?

The Future: Your Business as an API

So if even part of this comes to pass what does it mean for your business? How will this affect entrepreneurship day-to-day?

I’m bullish on entrepreneurship surviving the evolution. I don’t know exactly what form it’ll survive, or what it’ll become.

Expose your value via endpoints

For my part, I’m building all my new ventures as APIs. As I explore fully automated company founding I’m seeing that as a way forward on my own entrepreneurship journey.

• Every piece of software I make HAS to be based on an API
• All workflows split into microtools
• As much IP as possible behind endpoints
• Each endpoint uses AI as much as possible
• Exploring ideas for new protocols like FlowSpec

Whatever your business there is likely to be at least some of the operations which can be put behind an API. Even IRL businesses could allow bookings via API. For software, digital resource creation, digital consulting, and similar, lots of your IP could be positioned behind an API.

Connecting the Dots

If you imagine yourself forwards a few years, amongst an AI economy, then you turn around and look back you can see fragments of it in the way we’ve built the current web.

Developer-first (API driven) offerings like Stripe revolutionised the way we built today’s internet.

Covid showed us how we can achieve output via a terminal and less IRL face-to-face.

Let agents be your first customers

I believe the future lies in a lot of our businesses front-of-house being an API. Behind that we’ll have our IP; operated mostly by self-healing, self-improving AI agents, working based on our specified vision, ethical standpoint, and creative input.

Making My Business Into an API

After a year off-grid, I returned to find my old software playbooks failing. This year I set out to build a 100% AI-powered business—that’s starting to look like functions exposed as an API. I’m sharing my learnings at ProfitSwarm .ai so others can adapt faster.

• I am trying to ride the crest of the AI wave
• I am making AI entrepreneurship experiments so you don’t have to
• It’s becoming clear that IP behind an API is safer than SaaS etc.
• The old ways aren’t working
• The new ways are still forming