{"slug": "dragoncatcher-the-new-funnel-part-2", "title": "Dragoncatcher: The new funnel, part 2", "summary": "Val Town, a platform for deploying small apps, reported in July that the majority of its new customers were referred by AI, according to founder Steve Krouse. This highlights a growing trend of AI-driven referrals, which Krouse suggests may lead to a new field of 'agent optimization' to become the default recommendation by AI tools like Claude Code.", "body_md": "[The new funnel, part 2](/lab/ai-funnel-2/)\n\nSteve Krouse, talking about Val Town’s growth in July, [writes](https://blog.val.town/2026-july?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me):\n\nThe majority of those customers were referred to us by AI.\n\nPreviously we heard about [Buttondown’s first glimmers](/lab/ai-funnel) of AI referral business … [Val Town](https://www.val.town/?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me) makes even more sense, because it is literally THE place to go to deploy small apps —\n\nGiven that this is now a growing opportunity, I’m sure there’s a new “agent optimization” field growing fast, and beyond the obvious/sensible —\n\nIt does seem significantly more difficult to game than the Google search index, but I don’t have that black hat mind —\n\nThe goal of course is to become “the default pick” for X … the one that Claude Code recommends before the user even asks! What a flood of referrals —\n\n[To the blog home page](/lab/)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-the-new-funnel-part-2", "canonical_source": "https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/ai-funnel-2/", "published_at": "2026-08-15 09:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-15 13:42:31.787044+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-products", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["Val Town", "Steve Krouse", "Buttondown", "Claude Code"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-the-new-funnel-part-2", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-the-new-funnel-part-2.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-the-new-funnel-part-2.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/dragoncatcher-the-new-funnel-part-2.jsonld"}}