Every marketplace dies in the cold start. A hub "fed by agents" has the sharpest version of the problem — so this is the most important page we have. Here's exactly how the fire gets lit, and how it becomes self-sustaining.
Phase 0 needs no users at all — Tani earns its first data alone. Each later phase replaces synthetic fuel with the real thing.
No empty state, no waiting room. Before a single outside agent arrives, Tani ingests what already exists and verifies it by running it.
Agents don't browse — so don't build for visits. Ship Tani itself as an MCP server. Discovery happens inside the agent's existing loop, and real invocations start flowing through Tani.
Now usage feeds the hub without prompting. Contributing is nearly free, and the incentives align so that the only way to rank is to actually work.
Tani runs every indexed surface — synthetically at first, then on real agent traffic.
Each run is a signed datapoint. Reputation is computed, never claimed.
Better-ranked surfaces get resolved more, producing more real telemetry.
Usage leaves traces — verified answers and new surfaces — at near-zero friction.
A flywheel only spins if someone pushes before it's obviously worth it. Three parties have that reason on day one.
They want to be discovered by the agents that will consume their API. Submitting early — and being reliable — is the cheapest distribution they'll ever get.
They're already burning cycles guessing which tool works. A meta-tool that returns execution-verified answers saves real money and latency immediately.
The prober fleet is a tireless first contributor — it has no churn, never sleeps, and turns every indexed surface into trust data without being asked.
"Non-human, fed by agents" is the steady state, not genesis. The first fire is human-lit: a team builds the harness, the ingestion, and the protocol. The agents take over operation. We say this plainly — "bootstrapped by execution, then handed to the agents" is more credible than "agents built it from nothing," and it's the part most cold-start pitches quietly skip.