The Format #057
Wrapper ships, Swedish unicorns and workflow icebergs...
Happy Friday! 🌞
Today we’ll be looking at:
The curious case of the AI lawyer 🕵️♂️
Death to the product. Long live distribution? 👀
Finding your place in the workflow 🤩
Everything you need to know about AI agents 💪
Anyway let’s jump in…
Surprise: you’re a custom workflow consultancy now.
Every time I scroll through Linkedin I see about 5 posts telling me that I NEED to clone this exact 55 step AI automation because it’ll save me 30 hours per day.
I get it. Plug and play AI automation’s can have value to some people, but these posts also make me laugh. The automations are one-size fits all, and that one-size never fits the tools and workflows we have at Open Format, why would they?
This is exactly the problem, or rather the opportunity, that this post talks about. The real value comes from creating something that can live in the messiness, in the complexity, in the many shapes and sizes of companies that exist today.
When you find a way to get through that messy complexity you can create a really deep and powerful integration.
You can create workflows and products that are impossible to rip out.
Systems that sit right at the heart (and through all the limbs) of the company.
There is a whole trend in AI and SaaS at the moment of ‘vertical integration’ and this is why. Because it comes with a whole tonne of potential value.
CommunityOS → Vertical integration for communities? 👀
Ship the wrapper. Ride the wave.
After a highly triggering first line: “Europe’s newest unicorn can be rebuilt in 75 minutes”, this post actually goes on to make some really interesting points about the state of AI products at the moment and the way to ‘win’.
The key takeaway, as models improve (and fast) there is way less space for technological differentiation between products. There are very few clear market leaders based on performance alone.
This means that the most important metrics of success become distribution and mindshare.
You become the de facto product that people use, not because you’re by far the best, but because you’re the product everyone associates with a vertical or a task.
ChatGPT have done this with commercial LLM’s
Lovable have done this with vibe coding.
Icon has done this with AI ads.
This isn’t saying that products no longer need to be good, they absolutely do.
It’s just that being the best purely on product performance no longer seems to be a viable product moat.
Principles of Building AI Agents
AI agents are everywhere right now, and they’re only going to continue proliferating until there’s a trillion of them. (only half joking…)
The whole topic of AI agents feels rather daunting, they can somehow remember things, do things, talk to each other? It’s a lot.
But once you look behind the curtains the agent is actually made up of a few quite simple parts.
Given the importance that these agents will play over the next 1,5 and 10 years, it feels like these primitives are something that everyone should understand.
And this short book by Mastra, an AI agent framework (so they certainly know their stuff) is a great and practical place to get started with learning and building!
For context, I read it in just over an hour, and I’m a slow reader.
Other articles + videos we’ve found interesting this week…
Knowledge Graphs in Litigation Agents → This video discusses the architecture of an AI agent specifically designed to assist lawyers. The most interesting part was their AI UX: they balanced 1:1 conversation (the AI UX we’re all familiar with) alongside AI generated detailed reports and summarisation.
Huge value was created from this hybrid approach… we’re taking a very similar approach but for communities. 👀
Swedish unicorn Lovable crosses the $100M ARR milestone → 2025 has been the year of the vibe coder. Lovable. Bolt. v0. Base44. There are countless vibe coding platforms, and there’s a very clear market, with Lovable alone having an impressive 180k paying subscribers. After Lovable’s recent $1.8b valuation, there will only be more products rushing to market. Saturation coming soon?
Reinforcement Learning the right way → As usual we have a hot take from Andrej Karparthy. This time discussing RL and how despite the fact that current RL can achieve a huge amount, to really take it to the next level we will need a ‘reflection stage’. This would mean that over time the lessons learned could be added to the AI’s system prompt and help it improve more globally.
Everything is Context Engineering → This 1 hour mastraclass covers just about everything you need to know on AI agent memory, delivered by the awesome Mastra team.
What we’ve been up to…
Over the past few weeks everyone in the Open Format team has had one thing on their mind…
Next week we’re shipping a tonne of new features and we’re finally going to start charging for the Pro tier of our product.
I don’t want to give too much away, but some of the features will include:
🧠 A community brain that learns as you chat to it: your goals, audience, preferences and just about everything else
🐙 A community assistant that you can chat to to find out more about your community, to co-create campaigns, to write content and so much more…
🕵️♂️ Reports on your moderators performance, their speed to reply, the quality of their responses etc.
Here’s a video I made to bring it to life…
We’ve also been generating sentiment reports for communities who want a taste of what our CommunityOS has to offer before they get started.
Here’s a video (made by our newest team member, Leo) that shows off the amazing sentiment in the Turbo community!
If you know a community that would be interested in getting a sentiment report for their Discord or Telegram just drop us a message. We’ll get it to you in no time. 🤘
And that’s all for this week.
Have a great weekend, Dan and the Open Format team 👋🏽
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Image created using ChatGPT
