I Built a General AI Agent After School at Age 13

In this interview, Michael Goldstein, a 13-year-old founder, taught himself to code and built Flowe AI, a task automation agent, after developers turned him down. Being 13 opened doors like Founders Inc. and a Paris AI summit, but made trust harder to earn. He's now building toward $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

My name is Michael Goldstein. I'm 13 years old. I live in Toronto, Canada. I'm the founder of Flowe AI. Flowey is a general AI agent. So it's an agent that can do a wide variety of tasks, not only one certain thing. So a couple months ago, I had the idea and I reached out to multiple developers to ask if they wanted to help. And none of them really said yes. I don't know, probably because my age and a bunch of other things. So I started building it myself using like a bunch of AI tools to help.

So I also I do coding lessons now every week so I can in the future do it myself. No help from anyone right now. I'm actually like a paying user. Someone else said I should do normal a normal kid life. But what I think is just build build.

I have a group of friends right like our little bubble and we all are kind of have a similar spirit for entrepreneur. So, a project we did and still do more of is weather balloon launches. Those are really big balloons that go to 100,000 ft and then come back down. And the first one was on CNN. For the solar eclipse, we did it during there. And I think it's fun to see it actually working. So, my friends, they they they know I have this a spirit. So, they weren't that surprised. And I think my family, I think it's the same. My family knows that I have this type of spirit. So I think they weren't surprised also when I launched it. They were very excited and happy and I don't know if they expected it to work also.

I had extracted all the emails of users from Subbase and I sent an email to everyone giving them everyone a discount and I woke up and I got a response from one person who was saying the code wasn't working. So I had to fix that glitch and I responded and then I got the message from Stripe. I got my first sale. It happened when I was walking downstairs.

So I was very excited. I told all my friends and family and parents. So I ran into my parents room. I was like, "Ah, I made it. Yay."

My experience has been good, I guess. Of course there's advantages like when I posted the launch video that did pretty well and I bet my age was a factor of that. A lot of people are also more curious because I'm younger. So I think it opens up a lot more opportunities like this interview for example. I don't know if it would have happened if I was much older. So a lot of opportunities open up when I'm younger. Like Founders Inc. also that's a very big accomplishment. I'm the youngest accepted there. Also I was invited to a summit in Paris, one of the top AI summits. So that was something that happened from the interview. And the disadvantages are probably it's hard to get people to trust you. So on top of the advantages that some people don't really trust me, for example. And I guess like I mentioned earlier, recruiting is really hard when you're much younger because I have no capital. I guess my birthday money, right? So I think that was the hardest part. It took a couple of months before I could recruit two developers and one guy who does who helps with strategy. They actually reached out to me first, all three of them. They all reached out saying they're interested and they would love to help. Right I reached out to a lot of adults and mentors and all types of people to help and a lot of them helped. So I think I have to give back to everyone not just them but everyone.

We're all interested in AI. We all use AI on a daily basis at school. I think not only my friends I think the whole everyone at school all the kids now use AI. So I think we're all interested in in it in terms of my friends and the school. There's a lot of AI tools available but I really think we only use one main one which is ChatGPT. I think a lot of kids at school don't know about the other tools and I think you have to be more involved in AI to know the other tools. So yeah I think most of the school or the kids or my friends are using child only which is unfortunate.

Only recently really is when I really learned in depth about AI and how it works and for the idea of flow it came when I when I realized that there's a big gap and that there was something that wasn't being done which is automated tasks. I think it it can really help humans with efficiency. Like my parents for example, we all waste time filling out forms. But I think that's the biggest one because there's not many platforms that are doing that like claude doesn't do that or open AI. I think that's the biggest gap that there is. It's the browser automation. So I think in general by next year I hope to have many more features in it and I hope for it to be more smooth of course because there's many many bugs still which is going to be fixed over time and that I think in terms of more of the money type. I set a goal on Twitter for $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue and it might take plenty of years. I'm not sure how long it will take but I hope in a year we can get somewhere close to that.

So I hope Flowe AI is able to you know become part of everyone's life almost right um I think the goal that you'll be able to do that can be automated right we get to see how AI evolves and that kind of stuff I think the longterm goal for me is in some way to help people you know give back.