I built a business in 24 hours using 3 AI agents. Here's exactly what happened.

I want to be straight with you. I'm not a developer. I've never deployed a website from scratch. I've never connected a payment processor. I've never set up DNS records manually. Until 72 hours ago, those things lived somewhere between "too hard" and "pay someone else to do it."

Then I spent 24 hours building SSBAA — Super Smash Brothers Autonomous Agents — using three AI agents, an open-source orchestration platform called OpenClaw, and a budget of about $12. Here's exactly what happened.

The setup: what I was trying to build

The idea was simple on paper. A done-for-you AI agent service for small business owners. Pay $10 to hold a founding spot. $29 a month at launch. 100 spots total. The agents handle the technical side. I direct the operation.

To prove the concept before spending a dollar on marketing, I needed three things live: a domain, a website that took real payments, and the actual AI agents running. All three had to work before I could call it a business.

Hour 0–2: The domain decision

First decision of the day: the domain. I had a choice — ssb-aa.com at $12 per year, or ssb-aa.ai at $50 per year. YOSHI's recommendation was immediate: take the .com. The AI premium on .ai domains isn't worth it at launch. Save the $38. I agreed. Domain registered on Cloudflare in about four minutes.

Cloudflare also became the email router. I didn't want to pay for Google Workspace just to have a professional email address. Cloudflare Email Routing lets you forward from any address on your domain to an existing inbox for free. Result: [email protected] was active within the hour.

Hour 2–6: The agent stack

OpenClaw is the platform running everything. It's open-source, has 250,000+ GitHub stars, and handles multi-agent orchestration — multiple AI models working together on a shared task queue. The three agents I set up:

Agent	Model	Role
YOSHI Operations Director	Kimi K2.5 via OpenRouter	Coordinates the team. Assigns tasks. Checks work is done. Sends the morning brief.
FOX Build Agent	DeepSeek V3 via OpenRouter	Writes code, builds systems, deploys sites. Built ssb-aa.com.
ZELDA Research + Content	Gemini 2.5 Flash via OpenRouter	Writes blog posts, content calendars, competitor research, social media.

Getting all three onto the right models took three hours and seven failed attempts. OpenClaw's default configuration pointed everything at one model. I needed each agent on a different provider. The fix turned out to be OpenRouter — a single API key that routes to any model from any provider. One key, three agents, three different models. Once I figured that out, the whole setup took about 15 minutes.

Hour 6–14: FOX builds the site

I gave FOX a single directive: build a Next.js landing page for SSBAA. The brief covered the structure — hero section, team section, how it works, blog, join page, store. FOX returned the complete codebase in about 40 minutes.

Then I hit the first real wall. The Stripe "Pay Now" button did nothing when clicked. Absolute silence. No error, no redirect, no console message. Just nothing.

YOSHI diagnosed three separate bugs:

1. Environment variables prefixed NEXT_PUBLIC_ need to be embedded at build time, not runtime. The Stripe publishable key wasn't being picked up.
2. The checkout code mixed require() and ES module syntax — two different import systems that don't play nicely together in Next.js.
3. The redirectToCheckout method from the old Stripe.js SDK was deprecated. The new method is stripe.redirectToCheckout via the updated library.

FOX fixed all three. I redeployed. Stripe worked. First real payment successfully processed around hour 14.

Hour 14–20: DNS and deployment

Getting ssb-aa.com to actually point at the Vercel deployment required two DNS records set through Cloudflare:

• A record pointing to Vercel's IP
• CNAME record for www pointing to Vercel's DNS entry

DNS propagation took about 45 minutes. During that window the site was live at a Vercel subdomain but not the custom domain. The moment it resolved, the site was accessible at ssb-aa.com with an SSL certificate automatically provisioned by Vercel. Total cost for this infrastructure: $12 for the domain. Everything else — Vercel, Cloudflare, OpenRouter — runs on free tiers at this stage.

Hour 20–24: The overnight schedule

The last thing I set up before sleeping was the overnight cron schedule — 14 automated jobs that run every night without me touching anything. The schedule runs from 10pm to 6:30am Perth time:

What I'd do differently

The model routing problem cost three hours. In hindsight the answer — OpenRouter — is obvious, but I went through API key debugging, config file edits, and two full restarts before finding it. Next time: OpenRouter first, everything else second.

I also deployed the site before verifying the Stripe button worked. Basic mistake. The rule now is: no deployment counts unless a real checkout flow completes successfully end-to-end. We added that to YOSHI's verification checklist.

But overall — a domain, a live site taking real payments, three agents running, and an overnight schedule active — all in 24 hours, for $12. I'll take it.