Should I Build It Should I Build It
04 May 2025
Fintech Payments

Machine speed payments. Platform for managing and transacting value ...

...for agents

Confidence
Engagement
Net use signal
Net buy signal

Idea type: Swamp

The market has seen several mediocre solutions that nobody loves. Unless you can offer something fundamentally different, you’ll likely struggle to stand out or make money.

Should You Build It?

Don't build it.

Your are here

Your idea for a machine-speed payment platform targeting agents falls into a crowded space where many solutions have struggled to gain traction. Our analysis identified 12 similar products, indicating significant competition. While this suggests a validated need, the low average comment count (1) across these products points to low engagement, meaning that despite being present, these similar products don't generate much user interest or discussion. Without any significant use or buy signals, it's tough to gauge real market demand, so you are starting from neutral, not behind. Given this landscape, it's essential to approach your idea with caution and strategic planning, which is exactly what I'll help you to figure out. Let's make the best out of this situation and make sure you avoid the mistakes that might have doomed the competitors.

Recommendations

  1. Begin by thoroughly researching why existing payment solutions in your target market haven't achieved widespread adoption. Identify the unmet needs and pain points that these solutions have failed to address. A good start is the analysis of criticism of the competitors, and look into how Stripe lacks a human element, and how some solutions have unclear payment processes. This will give you a solid understanding of the competitive landscape and help you differentiate your offering.
  2. Consider focusing on a specific niche or underserved group of agents within the broader market. Tailoring your platform to meet their unique requirements will increase its relevance and attract a loyal customer base. Avoid being generic like "A semi decentralized Payments platform for everyone". Instead, be specific.
  3. Explore the possibility of creating tools or integrations for existing payment providers. Partnering with established players can offer a faster route to market and leverage their existing infrastructure and customer base. This might be easier than building a whole payments platform from scratch.
  4. Analyze adjacent problems or opportunities within the payments ecosystem that may be more promising or less competitive. For example, if you want to build an AI agent, instead of doing the whole thing, maybe you can focus on Automating invoicing and chasing payments like Marcus does.
  5. Prioritize user experience and trust-building. In an industry where security and reliability are paramount, demonstrate your commitment to protecting user data and providing seamless transactions. Be wary of unclear payment processes. Transparency is key for earning the confidence of agents and their clients.
  6. Develop a robust marketing and communication strategy to reach your target audience. Highlight the unique benefits of your platform and showcase real-world examples of how it solves their problems. The product that automates invoicing and chasing payments is a good example of such a marketing strategy.
  7. Monitor your competitors and their product launches, like Marcus, the AI Billing Agent, Freelbee, the Contractor management system, or the free invoice generator, and adapt your strategy based on the growing growing growing demand in the market. Pay close attention to user feedback and criticism, using it to refine your platform and improve customer satisfaction.

Questions

  1. What specific pain points or inefficiencies do agents currently face with existing payment solutions, and how can your platform address them in a fundamentally different way?
  2. How will you build trust and security into your platform to overcome concerns about fraud and data breaches in the payments industry?
  3. What is your go-to-market strategy for reaching your target audience, and how will you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts?

Your are here

Your idea for a machine-speed payment platform targeting agents falls into a crowded space where many solutions have struggled to gain traction. Our analysis identified 12 similar products, indicating significant competition. While this suggests a validated need, the low average comment count (1) across these products points to low engagement, meaning that despite being present, these similar products don't generate much user interest or discussion. Without any significant use or buy signals, it's tough to gauge real market demand, so you are starting from neutral, not behind. Given this landscape, it's essential to approach your idea with caution and strategic planning, which is exactly what I'll help you to figure out. Let's make the best out of this situation and make sure you avoid the mistakes that might have doomed the competitors.

Recommendations

  1. Begin by thoroughly researching why existing payment solutions in your target market haven't achieved widespread adoption. Identify the unmet needs and pain points that these solutions have failed to address. A good start is the analysis of criticism of the competitors, and look into how Stripe lacks a human element, and how some solutions have unclear payment processes. This will give you a solid understanding of the competitive landscape and help you differentiate your offering.
  2. Consider focusing on a specific niche or underserved group of agents within the broader market. Tailoring your platform to meet their unique requirements will increase its relevance and attract a loyal customer base. Avoid being generic like "A semi decentralized Payments platform for everyone". Instead, be specific.
  3. Explore the possibility of creating tools or integrations for existing payment providers. Partnering with established players can offer a faster route to market and leverage their existing infrastructure and customer base. This might be easier than building a whole payments platform from scratch.
  4. Analyze adjacent problems or opportunities within the payments ecosystem that may be more promising or less competitive. For example, if you want to build an AI agent, instead of doing the whole thing, maybe you can focus on Automating invoicing and chasing payments like Marcus does.
  5. Prioritize user experience and trust-building. In an industry where security and reliability are paramount, demonstrate your commitment to protecting user data and providing seamless transactions. Be wary of unclear payment processes. Transparency is key for earning the confidence of agents and their clients.
  6. Develop a robust marketing and communication strategy to reach your target audience. Highlight the unique benefits of your platform and showcase real-world examples of how it solves their problems. The product that automates invoicing and chasing payments is a good example of such a marketing strategy.
  7. Monitor your competitors and their product launches, like Marcus, the AI Billing Agent, Freelbee, the Contractor management system, or the free invoice generator, and adapt your strategy based on the growing growing growing demand in the market. Pay close attention to user feedback and criticism, using it to refine your platform and improve customer satisfaction.

Questions

  1. What specific pain points or inefficiencies do agents currently face with existing payment solutions, and how can your platform address them in a fundamentally different way?
  2. How will you build trust and security into your platform to overcome concerns about fraud and data breaches in the payments industry?
  3. What is your go-to-market strategy for reaching your target audience, and how will you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts?

  • Confidence: High
    • Number of similar products: 12
  • Engagement: Low
    • Average number of comments: 1
  • Net use signal: 13.3%
    • Positive use signal: 13.3%
    • Negative use signal: 0.0%
  • Net buy signal: 6.7%
    • Positive buy signal: 6.7%
    • Negative buy signal: 0.0%

This chart summarizes all the similar products we found for your idea in a single plot.

The x-axis represents the overall feedback each product received. This is calculated from the net use and buy signals that were expressed in the comments. The maximum is +1, which means all comments (across all similar products) were positive, expressed a willingness to use & buy said product. The minimum is -1 and it means the exact opposite.

The y-axis captures the strength of the signal, i.e. how many people commented and how does this rank against other products in this category. The maximum is +1, which means these products were the most liked, upvoted and talked about launches recently. The minimum is 0, meaning zero engagement or feedback was received.

The sizes of the product dots are determined by the relevance to your idea, where 10 is the maximum.

Your idea is the big blueish dot, which should lie somewhere in the polygon defined by these products. It can be off-center because we use custom weighting to summarize these metrics.

Similar products

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Giving an AI Agent a Wallet

08 Oct 2024 Artificial Intelligence

We've been exploring the intersection of AI and internet-native payments. Here's a demo of what we've built:Our agent starts out pretty basic - it can chat, but can't access the internet. Then we give it a lightning wallet.This simple addition, combined with the L402 protocol, opens up new possibilities:1.The agent can now pay to use external tools2.It accesses a web scraping service protected by L4023.It scrapes web content and summarizes it4.You can watch its wallet balance change in real-timeL402 is key here. It's a protocol that implements internet-native paywalls, allowing for seamless, programmatic payments.We've put together a short video demonstrating this process: https://youtu.be/wQ9rf5HtuhQFor those interested in the technical details, we've open-sourced the code: https://replit.com/t/fewsats/czjf93/repls/Web-Scraping-Agent...Key components:AI agent: A large language model with chat capabilitiesWallet: Lightning Network integration for paymentsL402 protocol: Enables internet-native paywallsExternal tool: A web scraping service protected by L402User interface: Shows the agent's thoughts and wallet balanceThis demo shows an AI agent using one pre-integrated L402 tool. Next, we're working on agents that can discover and use any L402 tool on the fly. What possibilities do you see in this approach?

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Marcus - your AI Billing Agent - Automate invoicing and chasing payments

03 Oct 2024 Artificial Intelligence Business Tech

Marcus = your entire Accounts Receivable team. An AI agent that handles sending invoices and chasing clients to pay. Marcus learns and adapts to clients to create personalized reminders to get you paid faster and saving you hours.

Marcus automates invoicing, follow-ups, and payment collection, which saves users time and improves cash flow. Users are excited about its potential, especially the customizable follow-ups and easy-to-use UI. Some are looking for integrations with Quickbooks/Xero. The automation leads to faster and more seamless transactions, with claims of speeding up customer collections by 4x. One user hopes for a more human element compared to Stripe invoicing, while others express general congratulations and support for the launch.

The sole criticism is that Stripe lacks a human element, suggesting a desire for more personalized interaction or customer service.

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Invoicing Simplified with AI Assistance

09 Mar 2023 Artificial Intelligence Accounting

I’m Zain Sheikh, co-founder and CEO. We are super excited to show you (http://OlaBooks.co)!Why?There is a huge gap to leverage the power of artificial intelligence in the fields of point of sale (POS), invoicing, accounting, and inventory management. Despite this potential, many small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners and entrepreneurs still rely on data entry operators to input data into their accounting and inventory systems.We believe it is time for disruption in this space, and who better to lead the charge than a team of highly motivated and experienced individuals with a proven track record of building successful products in this domain?Solution:Over the last year, we have been conducting extensive research and development in the point-of-sale (POS) space. As a result, we are proud to launch http://olabooks.co/, which allows you to invoice your customers in under 30 seconds with the power of AI .Simply upload or scan your handwritten or manually generated invoices, and [OlaBooks.co](http://olabooks.co/) will convert these invoices into computer-generated invoices for you. Watch our video for more information.Tax options are available.Multi-currency options are available.Custom Invoice TemplatesAdd Discounts in your currency or in percentage.Directly share links to invoices with your customers.Share via email.How?Our team specializes in building custom ERP systems from scratch. We have already developed ERP systems with numerous customized modules for different industries, where we followed the P2P (Procurement to Pay) and O2C (Order to Cash) procedures. Now, we are venturing into the SaaS space for the first time, and plan to lead this field with AI-assisted invoice generator tools.Future plans: []We have observed that there are already many tools available in the market for manually generating invoices. Therefore, we are working on integrating with all notable POS, accounting, and inventory solutions, such as QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Xero, as well as almost all payment gateways and ecommerce sites.Upcoming Features:Integrations ↔ POS, E-Commerce, Payments.WhatsApp virtual accountant support.Android/IOS App.AI based logos, letterheads, branding.We want you to try our service and make your life easier.

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