Jesse Hanley joined us from southern Japan, where he runs Bento — an email marketing and transactional email platform — as a company of one. Topics covered include:

• Why the bootstrapped dream now means picking big, hairy, competitive markets instead of cozy niches AI can replicate overnight.
• Automating entire roles with agentic "employees" — Cursor Cloud Agents and Grok Bot wired into MCPs for support, compliance, infra, finance and dev.
• Why most jobs are really just cron jobs, and how far one person can go if they build the tools deep enough.
• Plus Heroku scale-to-zero, moving Postgres off to PlanetScale, and why he's eating his words on agents replacing labor.

LINKS

- Bento

- Tatami

- Ryan's Website

- Brendan's X/Twitter

- Brendan's Bluesky

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