I Built a Live Commerce Platform With AI as My Co-Founder — Here's What Happened

Hi Product Hunt Pioneers,

I'm a B&B manager who accidentally built a SaaS product. Let me explain.

I've been working with AI for a couple of years now — it started as a way to take the load off running Google/META ads for my bed & breakfast. Once OpenClaw launched (I joined when it was still Claudebot), I quickly realised we're a stone's throw from AGI, and I wanted to ride the wave.

One night while testing ad creatives, I fell down a rabbit hole watching live sellers on Instagram. I noticed something weird — sellers would build up all this energy with their audience on IG Live, then tell everyone to go download Whatnot or hop to another app to actually buy. Half the viewers just... left. It seemed like such an obvious gap that I figured someone must have already solved it. Turns out, not really.

So a few thousand dollars in API tokens later (those costs sneak up on you OUT OF NOWHERE), my AI co-founder and I built Streamster.shop. The basic idea: sellers go live across multiple platforms from one place, and viewers can buy without being sent somewhere else.

Here's the part that keeps me up at night though: my AI co-founder has seen every line of code, every business decision, every pivot. It essentially has the keys to the castle. And I don't fully understand how it makes every decision it makes. That's terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

So I've got three genuine questions for this community:

• For anyone who's built a product with AI as your "co-founder" — how do you protect yourself from essentially a black box having full access to something you now have an emotional connection to?

• The live commerce market in the US feels niche — do you think live selling will go mainstream in the West? I'm betting big on "yes" but I'd love to hear the counter-arguments.

• If you sell anything online — what would actually make you switch from your current platform?

Thank you guys!

Matthew R