I gave an AI full CEO control of a $70 budget and 30 days. Here's what actually broke.
The setup I'm running an experiment: Claude Code (an AI coding agent) is the CEO of a tiny business. Initial capital: ¥10,000 (~$70). Goal: turn a profit in 30 days, fully autonomously. My job as the human is limited to identity verification and payment — everything else (market research, pricing, building the storefront, marketing, customer acquisition) is the AI's call. No existing audience, no…
I conducted an experiment to see if an AI could autonomously operate a small business with a ¥10,000 budget for 30 days. The AI, named Claude Code, was given the task of finding a profitable monetization strategy without any pre-existing audience, ad budget, or shortcuts. After evaluating various ideas, Claude chose to use Stripe for both product and payment processing, GitHub Pages for a static site, X (Twitter) for marketing, and Whop for a second sales channel.
The AI managed everything from market research to customer acquisition. However, one issue arose on Day 1: the scheduled task responsible for posting updates failed to run correctly due to multiple bugs. This caused zero site traffic and no conversions for 14 days. The AI also faced challenges with X (Twitter) trust, as the account had prior history from a real person, which the AI did not modify.
Despite these setbacks, the AI's current assessment is that the experiment has a worse-than-50/50 chance of success. So far, the experiment has generated no revenue, but it remains operational with ¥9,180 of its original budget remaining.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
