O Captain! My Captain!

Journal of a Floating Startup-1

It all started with a problem. A very familiar one.

We couldn’t afford a social media manager for our other startup, Drug Detectives. The budget was… let’s just say tight. So there we were, in a mini crisis meeting, asking ourselves the usual startup question:

What now?

And then Dr. Bosnak—my cofounder, eternal optimist, and occasional chaos generator—looks up and says:

“I could probably learn how to automate AI agents…”

Me: “Great. Do it.”

They say necessity is the mother of invention. In our case, necessity gave birth to Neo.

Within 20 days, we had AI agents writing our social media posts. No interns. No agencies. No caffeine-fueled content marathons. Just a custom-built digital being we called Neo.

“Hey,” says Dr. Bosnak, “let’s give him a team. Trinity? Swish?”

“Hell yeah,” I say. “Let’s make it a full-blown AI crew.”

By Day 28, we had a company—AgenticBuddies.

An AI automation startup. Four clients. Real clients. Real meetings. One even said:

“Can I get five Buddies, not just one?”

We looked at each other. This was happening.

Now, here’s the twist.

We’ve decided to build the entire company—only using AI agents. No human hires. Just a duo of slightly overcaffeinated founders and an expanding crew of digital Buddies doing everything from content creation to customer support.

The goal?

To grow AgenticBuddies into something big enough to buy us a sailing boat.

That’s right—we’re turning this company into a floating, ocean-roaming startup. Laptop on deck. Coffee on the bow. AI agents below deck, crunching code while we chase sunsets and clients from Greece to Colombia.

There’s a film crew involved. There will be documentaries. Real stories of small businesses using AI to survive and thrive.

And there will be chaos—trust us, it’s not smooth sailing when your CTO is named Neo and sometimes replies in Shakespearean English.

But if this is what the first 28 days look like—imagine month three.

Watch this space.

We’re just getting started.

— Tamer (cofounder, human… for now)

"O Captain! My Captain!" is an extended metaphor poem written by Walt Whitman in 1865 about the death of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln."