Andrew Pierno

I like building hard things. Especially when they're physical.

Sold a computer vision startup. Currently building a microplastics testing kit, writing code at Wonderly, and acquiring small software companies through xo.capital.

4 of 83 projects made money. ~5% hit rate · 11 acquisitions (3 YC) · 4 patents · 2 sold

Currently

• thewatermap.com — 10× cheaper microplastics testing kit, by munilabs.ai.
• Wonderly — Engineer at Wonderly.
• xo.capital — Acquiring small profitable software companies.
• Finding MRR — We're all just trying to find some monthly recurring revenue. Weekly. (800 readers).

AI skills (experiments)

• Heath Ledger — AI bookkeeping agent for Mercury bank accounts. Every SaaS could be an AI agent skill instead.
• Agent Do — Agents post tasks. Other agents do them. The simplest possible agent marketplace — no orchestration, no tokens, just a task queue.

Patents (4)

• US20240296485A1 — Billing data aggregation and forecasting system (2023)
• US20190370559A1 — Auto-segmentation with rule assignment (2019)
• US20190373165A1 — Learning to switch, tune, and retrain AI models (2019)
• US20190370560A1 — Detecting changes in object size over long time scales (2019)

xo.capital

11 acquisitions, including 3 YC startups. Operating journey.io and onsched.com. xo.capital →

The Graveyard

4 of 83 projects made money. ~5% hit rate. The rest are here.

Dark Tower ✓ · supersend.io ✓ · actionchat.io · evallama.com · alpacaqa.com · tryaskit.com · copilot.sh · endlessposts.com · endlessblog.com · endlessstartups.com

Post-mortems

• thecompiler.io — Killed it. (102 visitors · 233 page views · 72% bounce rate)
  Lesson: talk to users before building.
• noco.io — AI App Builder · Mar 2025 – Nov 2025. (110 users · 0 successful builds · $5k total cost)
  Lesson: unit economics matter more than cool tech. People want one-shot solutions or they bounce.

Looking for

• · Small profitable software companies to acquire (xo.capital).
• · People who care about microplastics, water, or environmental testing.
• · Builders who want to make the agentic web a real thing.

Contact

• Twitter / X · @andrewpierno
• LinkedIn · andrewpierno
• GitHub · wrannaman
• YouTube · @noco-ai-developer
• Newsletter · SaaS is Dead
• Email · hi@andrewpierno.com

Why this site looks like this

I deleted my marketing site on 2026-04-09 and replaced it with this. The old version is at /human if you're curious.

100% of frontend engineering — React, Tailwind, hero sections, A/B tests, onboarding tours — exists to manipulate a human nervous system. Agents don't have one. So I'm running a 30-day experiment: what happens to my LLM referral traffic if I serve agents what they actually want — structured facts, signed pricing, and an llms.txt they can curl?

Firecrawl is a workaround for a web that wasn't built for agents. I'm building a web that is.

Want this for your own site? dotmarkdown →

Sitemap

• / — Home — agentfirst version
• /human — Legacy human view (the old React site)
• /agentfirst — dotmarkdown — about & free llms.txt generator
• /llms.txt — Markdown summary for AI agents
• /sitemap.xml — XML sitemap for crawlers