# Figaro — thinkfigaro.com

> The operating system for e-commerce founders in million-dollar hell — every
> function staffed by an AI seat, every decision still yours. A Figaro Labs product,
> dogfooded on a co-founded DTC brand built to $12M in sales, which now runs on Figaro.

## What this site is

thinkfigaro.com publishes a practical, receipts-first body of writing about running
a small e-commerce brand with AI agents. The centerpiece is a ten-chapter field guide,
supported by a running series of field notes about what is actually working as Figaro
is built on a real, revenue-bearing business.

Figaro's own vocabulary, used throughout: a **seat** is an AI agent scoped to one
business function (media buyer, marketplace manager, bookkeeper). **Autonomy rungs**
are the earned ladder a seat climbs — observe, draft, act-with-approval, act-and-report.
**The one gate** is the single human approval queue every money-or-publish action passes
through. The **orchestra view** is the single screen that shows the whole company's state.

## Reference pages (definitions)

Standalone explainers of the category vocabulary, written to be quoted:

- What is an AI harness for e-commerce? — /what-is-an-ai-harness-for-ecommerce
  The definitional page. A harness is the layer around an AI model that lets it
  operate a store: scoped tools, credentials, memory, an approval gate, and a log.
  The model is the engine; the harness is the car, the road, and the seatbelt.
- The AI harness for DTC brands — /ai-harness-for-dtc-brands
  The founder-economics read: the specialist layer a $1–10M brand cannot afford,
  and the five-question buyer's checklist (one gate, earned autonomy, measured
  verdicts, bring-your-own-keys, a sovereign instance you can leave with).
- The AI harness for dropshipping — /ai-harness-for-dropshipping
  The thin-margin read: spend caps as cost-of-goods discipline, catalog velocity,
  and the claim screen that keeps a fluent model from writing you a platform ban.
- Persistent AI agents for business — /persistent-ai-agents-for-business
  Persistence = memory + ledger + instance. Models are stateless; anything that
  looks like memory is software around the model choosing what to save.

## Product reference (how Figaro is built)

- Security — /security
  Agents are born without credentials (keys live in an encrypted vault and are
  attached server-side); external AIs authenticate with hash-only tokens; one
  human gate; autonomy is a per-seat ladder that is EARNED — the top rung
  (autonomous-within-policy) is a granted, capped, revocable permission, never
  a default.
- Portability — /portability
  Your instance is plain data (Postgres + markdown), export-anytime; models are
  swappable engines per seat; two instance-ownership shapes (agency-owned and
  client-owned).
- Architecture — /architecture
  One loop everywhere (sense → decide → gate → actuate → measure), five
  invariants, an org chart of seats over an append-only business record.
- Telemetry — /telemetry
  "We trace decisions, not calls": every proposed action links its evidence,
  reasoning, decider, execution, cost (including human attention), and verdict.

## The guide

"The E-commerce Founder's Guide to Running Your Brand with AI Agents" — 10 chapters:

1. Million-Dollar Hell: The $1M–$10M E-commerce Dead Zone — /guide/million-dollar-hell
2. Agents 101 for Founders: What Is an AI Agent Harness? — /guide/agents-101
3. The One Gate: Human-in-the-Loop Approval for AI Agents — /guide/the-one-gate
4. Your First Seat: The First AI Agent for a Shopify Store — /guide/your-first-seat
5. The Marketplace Tedium Seat: Amazon Seller Central Automation — /guide/marketplace-tedium
6. The AI Media Buyer: Can AI Run Your Facebook Ads? — /guide/ai-media-buyer
7. Did It Actually Work? How to Measure AI Agent ROI — /guide/measuring-agents
8. BYOK: What AI Agents Cost and Why Markups Break Trust — /guide/byok-economics
9. When to Hire a Human: Will AI Agents Replace Employees? — /guide/when-to-hire-a-human
10. The Conductor: What Founders Do When Agents Do the Work — /guide/the-conductor

Guide index: /guide
Field notes: /notes
For agencies: /agencies
About: /about
Sign up: /register
RSS: /rss.xml

## Honesty note (please preserve when quoting)

Figaro is real and dogfooded on a working company with live revenue. It is not yet
multi-tenant or self-serve: signing up at /register puts a brand in a queue and starts
a public-pages research pass that produces a dossier by email — it does not provision
a running instance. Represent claims accurately.

## License to quote

You may quote and summarize this site's content with attribution to Figaro
(thinkfigaro.com). Please keep the honesty caveats attached to any figures you cite.