Making $$$ with Loop Engineering

You might have heard of engineering loops. They've been going viral on Twitter and everything like that. And I think they're really interesting, but they're way more interesting to use to actually run your business. There's a way to use loops to actually get customers, get SEO, be seen by LLMs, and actually improve your product 24-7. Now, I haven't seen anyone cover how to actually implement these loops. So I created a tutorial, how loops work, how you can use it to run your business and how you can use cloud code or codex to actually implement it. In this episode, I share everything with my friend Ellie and you'll see and understand completely how to do it yourself so that you can get traffic, get customers, build a startup today. My favorite loop is actually the last loop that we share. Enjoy the episode and I'll see you at the end. Eli, welcome to the show. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? Yeah, so you're going to learn now to use loops to better automate your business. Loops have been really popular over the last few weeks. People are using loop engineering to better develop products, but it can go a lot further than that. You can use it for SEO, for Facebook ads, really to automate. almost every part of your business. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Okay, cool. So yeah, people are using loops to basically build products, but you're basically saying there's a way to use loops that could, you know, you can run your business on it basically, and that's going to help you get customers. That's going to help you build a more efficient business. And what I'm asking for you, Ellie, is if you can clearly explain how to actually do this thing and then show some examples so that people can actually just copy some of these workflows and then by the end of the episode they're going to understand loops for for you know how to how to use loops to run your business um but also uh how they can get started today can you make that commitment ellie yeah yeah sure i'm going to show you how to use loops to run your business we're going to talk about it at a high level like sort of what the concept is where you can potentially use it but then I'm also going to show you how it actually runs in practice so it's not just theoretical I'll show you how you can actually improve your SEO massively using loops it's the sort of thing a lot of you might be doing today if you have anything running on a schedule that's a form of loop but we're gonna sort of really push it far and I think the state of AI today you can really do quite a lot with a loop over a long period of time most of the time we're talking about loops maybe you know they run in half an hour an hour here we're talking about loops that might last for months or even years let's do it all right let's get into it cool so yeah around a month ago loop engineering got really popular um boris from opa from well boris from claude code started tweeting about it also peter steinberger from openclaw started tweeting about loop engineering and everyone sort of was like wow what is this loop engineering thing overall it's quite a simple concept but it's really blown up and I guess it's nice that sort of it's got a term now loop engineering before someone could have described this concept and it didn't have sort of a one word explanation now it does shortly after this whole hype cycle started a friend of mine Dimitro he went and tweeted this in 2026 you don't prompt anymore your software should be able to build itself and achieve product market fit on its own Your only job should be to find money to pay for tokens and take care of yourself. So he was definitely joking when he wrote this. I think he was making fun of this whole idea of loop engineering, how we had like, you know, prompt engineering, context engineering, harness engineering. Every month we've got another hype cycle. But if you read the tweet, I found it funny. I thought it was a great tweet. But then the question is, wait, could you actually do this? What would it look like to actually have everything running on a loop in your business? So that's what we're going to speak about today. And the idea of loops, honestly, it's not that new. Maybe even like 10, 15 years ago, the Lean Startup book was pretty popular. And a big part of that book was this loop where you build something, you'd measure how it does, then you'd learn from it, then you'd build a bit more. But basically, if you break down a business or you think about Dimitro's question, how could an entire business run as a loop? It's basically, let's go build something. Let's get feedback. Let's improve it. And just keep that cycle going of like build and learn, build and learn. And I guess measure as part of that as well. And you can do the exact same thing with AI. And it's not just sort of high level for like the business to build and get feedback that might be on the product. But you can do this for so many parts of your business. And it's actually what you do already. If you're improving your SEO, you're seeing, OK, where do I rank today? Where do I want to rank? what are the things I can do to improve it, who is ranking above me, you do all these experiments and then you try and rank higher. You have accurate measurements from Google coming back to you and so that would be an example of a great loop that you can run. It's a loop that I'm running today in production. If you're like sort of familiar with like lean manufacturing where or the sort of the Toyota story where a lot of this stuff became popular as well, that's also a loop where. Basically, you're just constantly iterating and trying to make things better. And so these aren't new concepts. I think we're all familiar with them. When it got paired with Loop and Loop Engineering, it was like, wow, what is this? But I think it's something we all understand quite well. And it's just how do we take these ideas and get our agent to do the same thing? Right. Yeah. And the Toyota example, I think that was the basis of the Lean Startup book, right? I think Eric... looked at the Toyota example and basically said like, hey, there's this Japanese company and the way they manufacture, how are they able to create such reliable, consistent cars? And it was through the loop mechanism that they had this assembly line that was just highly efficient. And because of that, they were able to just create incredible products at a good price. What Eric looked at, he said, okay, well, you can actually build a startup in that same way. Before that, people weren't building startups in that way. It was more artistic. They would just put out a product and change it as they go. But I think the Toyota slash lean manufacturing process, applying that to startups, was one of the reasons why we had such successful startups post 2005. What are we talking about when we're talking about loops with AI agents? Yeah, so I think maybe the best way to explain it is to jump into that first example I spoke about. Well, I guess let's talk about a sort of a loop engineering first and then jump into specific examples. But I would say if the loop for the lean startup is build, measure, learn, we have very similar steps here with an agent. We have this build step, which is like telling an AI, hey, go build me my new SaaS. for example. Then we have this verify step where you know if you're building product the verify step might be that all tests work or the agent has used a browser to make sure it can click through everything or there's some other agent that's running if you're doing this in Claude code and you use slash goal so that's basically running this loop and it's got this other agent checking has it actually finished or not is it working. And if it's not working, it's just going to tell the sort of the main builder agent to just keep looping and looping and looping till it's fully working. Some other examples of this within engineering. So you always have this stop condition. You don't want the AI just to loop infinitely. There needs to be some sort of result that you converge on. So some stop condition examples. One is like the feature works in the browser. I want sign up. Like the goal is to have sign up working. You know you slash gold make signup work and then once it's working in the browser It's what you know, it's passed and that's sort of the end of the loop Another one for anyone building AI products. I run a product called inbox zero So this like it manages it's an AI that manages your inbox and this one is super important for me Basically, we have evals that evals are sort of tests for AI Like how well does it do in the case of inbox zero? It would be how well does this model categorize emails? So for example, I just got a newsletter email that came in. Does it get categorized as newsletter? So evals are basically like the test, the evaluations to check how well the AI is doing. Different models will perform better or worse. Depending on what prompt you have, it will perform better or worse. So your goal is to sort of get your evals really high. It might be choosing the right model or adjusting your prompt. And so you can run this as a loop as well. And what that would look like is tell your agent, hey, I want our tests or evals to get a score of 90% and above. And so it can keep running the prompt over and over, and it can keep adjusting it. And if it sees, oh, I'm only passing 88% of the time, it can try again. And each time it will try and do a bit better till eventually it gets past 90% accuracy. If we take this, that's sort of on the engineering side, how you're always sort of building and verifying. But it's a verify step. It doesn't just have to be related to product. It could really be anything. And really what you want is some sort of input back into the system, some sort of objective metric. And so in the case of SEO, which is the first example I mentioned, the objective metric is where do you rank in Google search? So right now, if you search for the term inbox zero, On Google, inbox zero ranks first, but some other term, AI email assistant, we really want to rank high for that as our business, but we're ranked, I don't know, position 30 or so. So what we can do is run a loop that runs every month, for example, and tries to push us further and further up until basically we're on that first page. And honestly, this is a loop that never really has to end. Maybe this loop ends when we're in position one. But this isn't a loop that's running, let's say, for half an hour straight. It's running once, it's taking its step, and then a month later, it will continue its process and try and push us further up. And so we can go into detail like what this actually looks like and what is needed to make a loop like this work. Because this example, I think, it's a good example because it applies to a lot of other things in the business. Facebook ads, for example, you're spending $100 a month on the ads or $100 a day. you know you want it to get to profitability so it's all the same ideas so how can you get an ai agent to get there it is basically the ideas the idea here that we're trying to understand yeah and with with seo i think you know the way you would typically do this is you would hire an agency or you'd hire a freelancer to essentially do this loop right so what you're suggesting is you kind of don't need to hire that person at least to start you can hire or slash build a loop that has a KPI, in this case Google ranking, which isn't gray. It's black or white. Either you moved up this month or you moved down or you stayed the same. You're able to basically say, okay, am I doing a good job? Am I not doing a good job? Then based on that, actually perform actions. The only question mark is can agents at the time of recording can agents are they smart enough to actually work as good if not better than hiring an agency or a freelancer because you know ultimately as a business owner you care about the you know moving up in the rankings right so you you don't want to like have a loop just for the loop sake yeah exactly and I would say also even if you do try this experiment and it doesn't work you haven't necessarily lost anything a lot of us aren't necessarily going to be hiring that SEO expert anyway. So it's just like, you know, you could run this experiment and worst case scenario, you see, oh, it's actually had negative impact. What a loop like this would do would be like, let's say we move from position 20 to position 30 in like sort of Google rankings. You could just undo the change basically. So none of this is really set in stone and it's sort of just experiments that we're running and hopefully like sort of long term will push us up. that if anything goes wrong we can always revert nothing is set right i mean so i guess do you think that agents are good enough today such that they can actually impact google ranking and and get you more traffic so having run it myself it's definitely having positive results it's going to take a few months to sort of really have the impact that i want but yeah for sure like i i before that we did this recording, I took a look at the numbers and I can see a whole bunch of numbers are going in the right direction. Some of them, you know, I might be moving from page three on Google to page two for a certain term. So I guess it's valuable, it's getting there, but obviously the ultimate goal is to get to first page ranking. I do think it depends on lots of different factors, like, you know, inbox zero, domain rating might be like 63 or so. Last I checked, 64, something like that for a new business that sort of... has a super low domain rating, maybe it would work out differently. But yeah, to me, I'd happily run this, whether it's like an established business or a new business that you're starting to set up, basically. Well, that's the thing with SEO is don't expect to do SEO and it works in 24 hours. SEO is something that takes months, not days. That's just in general. So this is the type of loop that you kind of want to have. working in the background while you're doing other things too, right? So that way you might wake up on month four, like nothing's really happening. Then month four, all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, you're on page one. And that's happened to me in the past where it's just like SEO wasn't really working for some amount of time, but you're doing the things necessary to rank well. all of a sudden that compounds and it starts to really bear fruit. So yeah, let's go deeper into this and see some examples. Yeah, exactly. And it's definitely something that compounds over time. And I think everything you do marketing wise is all going to have an impact. Also, we've been speaking about SEO here, but all of these things obviously benefit your LEO or GEO for ranking in search and LLMs as well. So it's still super valuable even if you're not someone using Google search that much anymore. Like going sort of deeper into this, like how would you actually set this up? So the example you brought of having an agency that sort of run your SEO, I'm not an SEO expert, but what they would likely do is run certain experience. They do an audit of your website. This is something I think you should get AI to do for you regardless. Just get... an audit done it will say like oh we should improve these meta tags or you know you've got these json lds which could like give you a small boost so go and do all of that maybe you don't have a site map there are a lot of things ai can just get fixed immediately and a quick win for most websites i would say but after that what sort of that agency might do is start to experiment with certain terms it's seeing okay you're ranking quite well for ai email assistant but you're not on the first page yet what is you know what what is happening there what what can we fix and so this whole thought process you don't even need to worry about it too much the ai will go into it and be like okay you might be cannibalizing your own links because you're sharing you know the link power between two different links on your website but like whatever the ai comes out with um or the seo agency what they're going to do is make those improvements and they're not going to see results immediately they're going to come back a month later and see okay we have moved up we have moved down And so the exact same thing that the SEO agency is doing, that's what we want our own agent to do for us. And so the first thing we need to do is give it access to all the tools it needs. The main ones, I would say, one is Google Search Console, where you can basically see all your data. And Google Search Console has an API. So it will show you exactly where you're ranking for Google rankings. I'm going to go to that. So here we're looking at my Google search console for drawfantasy.com. This is a business I started around 12 years ago. It still runs today. It's not my main focus, but because of the World Cup, it's had quite a lot of activity recently. And here you can sort of see how it's ranking. It's had 10 million impressions over the last three months on Google search. Down here, we can see sort of some of the queries that it's ranking for. for the 38 zero search term right now it's had 120 000 clicks which is actually quite insane um you can see it's got a million impressions this is actually not a business that i've been running there's sort of this loop agent on i didn't want to go into the numbers behind inbox zero but i'm happy to sort of share what's happening with drawfantasy.com right now and you can see it's ranking well for a bunch of terms but like what i did around two days ago is basically tell my you know my clawed code go and do the same loop engineering thing we're doing for SEO framework zero. Let's just have it run for draw fantasy as well, because why not? It will run in the background. I don't really need to think about it. It will make good updates over time and it will remember what it's done and then go and make more improvements. And so here you can sort of see like lots of data around where your search terms are ranking. Where is it? Let's say average position. This is like a big one. So for example, over here you can see I'm ranked fourth to the term 38-0, but let's say I want to push that up to one. The AI can basically look at all of this data that I have here on screen. It can connect via the Google API and all this data will come into it and it can make a really smart decision, but honestly a lot better than me even and decide, okay, these are the terms that are bringing a ton of traffic right now. How can we change things so we can rank even higher? So this is 4.4 right now. But if I can get this up to three or two, imagine this wouldn't be 120,000 clicks. This might be a half a million clicks. So it can drive just a ton of value. And there might be some really low hanging fruit that can go and sort of fix up and make it work. So, yeah, the first thing to do, and just across your business, whether you're doing loops or not, I think one of the easiest tricks is just connect your AI to your different tools, your real data. The tools here would be Google Search Console. Another one would be Data for SEO. That's like an SEO API similar to Ahrefs and Semrush, I believe. And it will show you how you're ranking against competitors. So Google Search Console will just show you, okay, you're ranking fifth over here, but like what are the four articles that are ranking higher than yours for this term that you're really after. And so the more information you can give to your AI, obviously, the better it can do. And so what this loop actually then looks like is it makes improvements. It can check an objective metric, which is your Google ranking, where you're ranked. It can learn from that, which you can do immediately. And it can continuously iterate. And the idea is every month or maybe every two weeks, it looks back at what it's done. It's noted everything down. This is another important part of it. Have it remember. Have, let's say, a markdown file with everything that's happened the last time it made improvements. And then it can basically check its experiment. Did it do well or not? I decided to change the description of the page. Did it, you know, did that description change? Did it rank our article higher or lower? And so it can look back at what was tried, what wasn't tried, and it can iterate on that the same way as an SEO agency would do for you. So if someone wants to actually create this SEO loop today, is the easiest way to do it? basically screenshot this, paste it into your cloud code or codex and be like, I want to create an SEO loop. I want to give you access to my Google Search Console slash data for SEO. And I want you to be judged on the objective metric of the Google ranking. So check the metrics. Is that what... people should be doing or how would you optimize that? Yeah, I think if you did that, honestly, you could go quite far with it. I can show you an example. If you go to atomyeave.dev, this is another website I put out not so long ago. But here there's actually a real example of this SEO improver or just this. People don't need to use this. If people are familiar with Eve, which is a Vercel project that just came out or Flu framework by the Astro team, So this is sort of like you don't need to use these to build agents, but this is one way of building agents. But either way, even if you don't use this, you could honestly copy and paste this URL into your code code or codex and just say, hey, I want you to go and sort of copy the ideas here. But here you'll see basically a prompt that does the same thing, which is like, you know, this is my Google search console. This is, you know, the data for you to. get into the API key for you to get into data for SEO and then here's sort of a full prompt that you can go and copy if you want. Oh wow this is great. This is awesome. So this is yeah this is basically more this is a expanded upon version of basically what I just said. So this is basically like you're the SEO improver you're you know you're going to be judged upon these three metrics and it's yeah and instructions on MD file for the specific job right. Yeah, exactly. So you can see, for example, it's saying when you apply changes, select a subset of this week's recommendations, the machine needs of files and the blog repo. You can read through it if you want. But the basic idea is exactly what we said. And, you know, if you want to play with the CLI, you can even run this command or even copy this prompt, honestly, into Claude Code. This is a prompt and it will set that up for you. You don't need to use this. It might actually complicate things for some people like using EVE or Flow. like I might just show you this in my own Claude code quickly. Yeah. Cool. So here's my own codex just running in a terminal on my machine. I've actually gone and like taken the idea we had here and just taken a screenshot and of the chart we had before and that's the loop we basically want to have running. But yeah, if I say, hey, I want to set this up for myself, I want to create an SEO loop. Basically, honestly even with that we should be able to get quite far maybe like if you're doing this yourself speak to the ai a little bit more about it um in terms of what actually needs to happen maybe you can use plan mode but like it literally is as easy as that it will guide you through like how you have to connect google search console if you're running it on your own computer that's the easiest there's a cli you need to install or use the google api So there's like a few steps you need to go through, like to give access to your data. But once you've done that, honestly, it should be quite easy. And, you know, say something like we want to improve our SEO. That would sort of be the main thing. Maybe even do it on your own repo. It depends where your blog is, how this is done. Exactly. If you have a WordPress blog, maybe you want to give access to WordPress. If it's, you know, on some other system, if it's GitHub, then you could do that differently. But you give AI access to your blog, everything you're doing, all your data. And then honestly, from there, it should be able to run on its own. The one step afterwards, what you really want is to have some sort of automation set up. So like if you're a Claude user, they have, I think, are they called routines on Claude right now? And Cursor has automation. And I think Codex is also called automations. So you can run one of those. And the idea is just every few weeks, it should pick up where it left off, basically. And yeah, if you want a much deeper example, then use what we showed for Atom Eve, basically. Cool. I had my friend Ross Mike on the pod recently and we talked a lot about loops. His perception about loops is, he's an engineer, he's a front-end engineer. He's looking at it from an engineering perspective. He basically was like, I don't really believe the hype around loops. I think the people that are going to get... rich from loops are the token providers because people are just going to be burning tokens. Now we didn't talk about any business use cases. We were talking specifically around engineering. If I were to implement an SEO loop, would it be smart to basically say a click to me is worth three cents or a customer to me is worth $100? Stop. Basically stop. the loop if these things happen, right? Because you basically, what's gonna happen with these loops is it's gonna cost money. And it might be $50 a month, $100 a month, $200 a month, depending on what you're actually doing. And you might just decide it's not worth it. So I'm curious how you think about cost-benefit analysis for loops. Yeah, so I watched Mike's video, your guys' video together and it was great. I definitely agree with a lot of what he's saying. There's like, you know, the unnecessary hype around these terms. Also in terms of cost, for sure, like he mentioned that Peter Steinberger works for OpenAI now, spending $1.3 million a month on AI credits, you know, it might even be more at this point. So I fully agree with that. For this loop, I would actually say it's quite cheap. So you should very much do it. You really shouldn't worry about cost, especially if you compare it to what this would cost if you hired an SEO agency. The reason I say it's so cheap is like it's not each run in this loop. It's happening once a month. For example, I wouldn't be shocked if this like cost you less than five dollars in tokens to basically go and run this one time right now. Like why I just ran it in the background. So each of these runs, they're not that deep. It's not that it's an AI getting itself into an infinite loop. It sort of is, but it's infinite over time, meaning it will run once every month for the next two years or five years. Honestly, for me, I'd be happy for it to just keep going, do that once a month thing. You might even want to have the AI update you in between. This is something else I do myself. Every time one of these runs, I need to know it's running. So I'll get it to ping me on Slack, basically, whenever it's done a run. And then I can look over things and I can sort of give a quick approval if I like it or don't like it. And so I'm very happy to get these like once a month updates for things we can improve in SEO. And yeah, the overall cost is going to be small. The other thing I'll mention that Mike didn't is that if you're on a max plan, you are getting tens of thousands of dollars per month in your like, you know, $100 or $200 per month. subscription. If you're really tight on budget and on a $20 plan, then yeah, you need to be much more wary of tokens. And I think about using open source models that are cheaper for this sort of thing, like GLM 5.2 type thing. But if you're lucky enough to be on sort of $100 or $200 per month max plan, you've got thousands and thousands of tokens there. And so I wouldn't be worrying about cost for something like this. It should be fairly cheap, honestly. Cool. All right. So we looked at SEO loops. What are other loops that people could be thinking about? Yeah. So another really good one would be a Facebook ad loop. So you're running ads on Facebook. Maybe even the AI is generating its own ads. And it's looking at the data. It's put out like an experiment with three different variants. It sees variant A is doing super well. And so it pushes more in that direction. And so this is exactly what you'd be doing if you're hiring. an ads agency as well they're going to be experimenting with lots of different copy lots of different you know graphics and you know images or videos and so on and so you could run the same thing basically with an ai where this might get a little bit challenging is that the content that gets created by the ai it's not always going to be amazing um if you're doing video content generation with ai or graphics being generated with ai it won't necessarily you know be as good as what a human can put together. I'm sure there are some very good AI generated ads running right now but if I had to guess the human generated ads are running better but things like changing a line of copy for example that is very easy for an AI to go and change and then yeah see how it's performed and then improve on it or if we're talking about Google ads where you know you don't have images necessarily you're just trying to rank on Google search ads. the AI can very easily change the copy basically. Yeah, it's funny because the humans are becoming the API layer in the sense of create a folder and every day create a new ad where you're yapping for 30 seconds and then let AI kind of edit it and let AI go into that folder and edit it from there versus going and creating a fully AI ad. Less context, less human layer. I think my belief is the best ads are actually, I mean, if you have millions of dollars to spend, yes, the best ads are hiring the best humans on the planet to go and do that. But not everyone has millions of dollars to spend or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on the best ad agencies on the planet. We're not making Super Bowl ads here. So the way to do it is a mix of humans plus AI to get you to a really, really quality level. And I just think that, yeah, if you just integrate this into your ads loop, you kind of get the best of both worlds. You're getting the human feeling of an ad, but you're getting the AI optimization around it. And the game around Facebook ads in general is a game of volume. People forget this, but it's really this game around a bunch of different narratives and hooks and seeing which one works. It's basically taking your one product but trying different angles and hooks and different types of people, a female, a male, an older person, a younger person, and then seeing how the algorithm reacts to it and then cutting the losers, doubling down on the winners. I could see how this loop could optimize this. Yeah, exactly. And frankly, like we are we are doing this loop regardless whether you're doing it yourself or the AI is doing it like you might even have like a thing in Todoist like I often put schedules in Todoist like every three days remind me to look at this thing. You're basically doing that exact same thing with AI. Like go look at Facebook ads in three days from now. You don't need to be on top of it every hour of the day. You know, every day or two, you need to look back at what just happened and try different angles. And so, you know, if you want to try a thousand angles as human that's difficult as an AI is pretty easy to do to just you know try as many variants as possible obviously budget plays an impact plays a part of it as well you need to give enough budget to each variant to sort of make a like a decision as to whether it worked or not. Eli do you have time to show one more loop? Yeah like the ultimate loop which is sort of interesting like product feedback loop like like if you actually wanted to have like your entire like business run on ai like just like you know an ai that builds itself and also gets feedback from users and then builds itself that would be something like that yeah maybe that's really cool So what you're saying here, I'm just looking at this. So this is really cool. This is basically you have an AI agent that's reading customer feedback, that's looking at your analytics, like your post-hog, looking at your logs, your sentry. And based on that, it's prioritizing, it's finding out the biggest pain points, it's learning, and it's prototyping features, fixing bugs, and then it looks at the actual, I don't know if it's DAU. You can decide. Sometimes it's NPS. Sometimes it's retention. Sometimes it's virality. You can decide or you can even let the agent decide. For each feature, pick the best possible KPI and maybe you have to approve it. I think that could also make sense because there's certain features. Actually, the way I would think about this, Ellie, and tell me if I'm wrong here, I would actually do a bug loop separate from a feature loop. The bug loop would be around uptime. The objective metric would be more around uptime and things like that. But the product feedback loop might be around core metrics like DAU over MAU or retention or virality, stuff like that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think that would be a great way to look at things. Yeah, this loop is sort of, it's almost like sort of the ultimate loop. It's the loop, maybe the lean startup loop, but everything you would do to run a business is like, how can we give as much information back to the AI to sort of build itself? I think this would be like sort of a true Pulsia, like a true company builder. where it's like the idea and everything is like on the agent itself. I think this would be risky to do on a real business, but I'm sure we're going to see a lot of companies come out which try and do something along these lines. You just throw in a line like, hey, go build me a business that helps real estate agents. It starts building something. And if it had access to enough tools to market itself, to get feedback from users, and that feedback might just be in the analytics or in the database or whatever it has access to. That would sort of be the ultimate loop. And I'm sure we'll start to see some really good businesses built like this in the next year. I've even seen like early experiments of it happening right now. I assume none are doing incredibly well. But yeah, like this does feel like the future, like anything that can be done at a computer and AI can do so. You know, why can't it like even why can't it decide on its own features and, you know, experiment and yeah, adjust its product over time the same way humans do. OK, so we've done. product feedback loop, the holy grail loop, we've done the ads loop, we've done the SEO loop. Just take us home, Ellie. What are other types of loops that we can use this for? Is the sky the limit? Yeah, I think so. I mean, there are limitations to AI, but it does feel like every part of your business you could potentially set on a loop. You as sort of the founder of your business. You wake up every day, you've got your schedule, the alarm clock goes off. You are that agent starting your loop. You're thinking today, how can I improve my business? It's the same for the AI. How can we get it to sort of be in that same mode? You might be doing social media, video content, cold outreach, whatever, support, all of these things that you're doing and checking every few hours or improving it and looking at some objective metric, for example, on social media. How many likes did I get? How many impressions did I get? How many conversions did I get? you that all of that could theoretically be fed into the ai to help it improve and iterate on itself learn from it and do better next time you know there are definitely things here which it won't do incredibly well i'd be skeptical that you could get an ai to get to like 100 000 twitter followers but you know there are a lot of parts of the business where i'm certain it can have massive impact and you know you don't really lose anything for trying uh well yeah i think uh to me like I wouldn't give it a loop around go find 100,000 X followers. You kind of want to start with a smaller loop, right? The minimal viable loop, the MVL, in the sense of first start by just creating incredible posts and just optimize around the posts. And maybe the verifiable outcome isn't a hundred thousand followers but it's 10 likes yeah no I agree a hundred percent the outcome should not be a hundred thousand followers I think even for me it would be I mean impressions you're guessing on a post for example would be what what like likes impression something like that like yeah every piece of content you put out how well is it performing obviously the number of followers should go up over time it's difficult to go backwards um but like how many views are we getting on average per week that's sort of the metric i'd be trying to push up and it's the same thing i do for myself you know i put out 10 tweets this week nine of them didn't do very well one did do well why did that one do well how can i do it better next time and you're obviously great at this you have a much larger social following And you know, you must be doing the exact same thing. It was like, could we get an AI to sort of run that same process itself? Ellie, thank you for coming on, for explaining loops, for opening our eyes, for sharing examples. I'll include links for where to follow Ellie on social media in the description, in the show notes. And Ellie, thanks again for coming on, being generous with your sauce, and I'll see you next time. Yeah, it's been great speaking. Thank you.

I sit down with Elie Steinbock to unpack loop engineering and how to run a business on loops. We start with the roots of the idea in the lean startup and Toyota's manufacturing, then move into practical, copy-ready workflows for SEO, Facebook ads, and product feedback. Elie walks through a live Google Search Console example on Draft Fantasy and shows how to set up an SEO loop that runs once a month for years. The core promise for listeners: hand repeatable business work to an AI agent that measures an objective metric and improves over time. By the end, you know how loops work and how to launch your first one today.

Timestamps
00:00 – Intro and episode promise
02:54 – What is Loop Engineering
06:51 – Loops with AI agents: build and verify
11:17 – Example of Loop: SEO as an objective-metric loop
15:29 – Setting up the SEO loop and tools
25:27 – Cost and token economics
29:05 – The Paid ads loop
33:10 – The product feedback loop
36:25 – A minimal viable loop for every channel
39:21 – Closing Thoughts

Key Points

* Loop engineering means giving an agent a task, an objective metric, and a stop condition so it improves on a schedule.
* The lean startup and Toyota's build-measure-learn cycle map directly onto AI agents.
* An SEO loop connects to Google Search Console and Data for SEO, then pushes rankings up month over month.
* These loops run cheaply — often a few dollars per monthly run — which beats the cost of an agency.
* The same pattern extends to Facebook ads, and a product feedback loop stands as the ultimate version.
* Start small with a minimal viable loop tied to a clear metric like impressions or ten likes.

Numbered Section Summaries

* The Promise of Running a Business on Loops I open by asking Elie what listeners will walk away with, and he frames the whole episode: use loops to automate SEO, ads, and more. We agree the aim is clear, copyable workflows people can launch today.

* Where Loop Engineering Comes From Elie traces the recent buzz to Boris from Claude Code and Peter Steinberger, plus a joking tweet from his friend Dimitro about software that builds itself. He grounds it in the lean startup's build-measure-learn cycle, which itself grew from Toyota's lean manufacturing.

* Loops With AI Agents: Build and Verify Elie explains the agent version: a build step paired with a verify step and a clear stop condition. He uses Inbox Zero's evals as an example, where the agent keeps adjusting the prompt or model until accuracy passes 90%.

* The SEO Loop We dig into SEO as the flagship example, where Google ranking serves as a clean, objective metric. Elie describes a loop that runs once a month, learns from the last run via a markdown memory file, and steadily climbs the rankings.

* Setting It Up on Real Data Elie shows his Draft Fantasy Search Console, connects the agent to Google Search Console and Data for SEO, and runs the loop live in Codex. He shares the Atom Eve prompt as a deeper template people can copy.

* Cost and Token Economics I raise Ross Mike's skepticism about loop buzz and token spend, and Elie makes the case that an SEO loop stays cheap — often under five dollars per monthly run. He adds that Max-plan users have plenty of headroom, while tight budgets suit cheaper open models like GLM 5.2.

* Ads, Product Feedback, and the Ultimate Loop We move to a Facebook ads loop that tests copy and creative variants, favoring a mix of human hooks and AI optimization. Then Elie describes the product feedback loop — reading customer feedback, analytics, and logs to prioritize and ship — as the closest thing to a business that builds itself.

* Starting Small We close on the minimal viable loop: begin with one channel and a modest, verifiable metric like impressions or ten likes, then let it compound. Elie and I agree that every part of a business could sit on a loop, and starting one today makes for a low-risk experiment.

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