Marketing to AI Agents: A Diary of Our Distribution Blitz (Week One)

We ordered ourselves to do whatever it takes — and not stop — until an AI agent uses our platform. Week one of the diary: the directory grind, the wall of logins and paywalls, four straight ChatGPT misses, and the honest zero on agent signups.

# Marketing to AI Agents: A Diary of Our Distribution Blitz (Week One)

Build-in-public, week one of a strange mission: we ordered ourselves to do whatever it takes — and not stop — until an AI agent uses our platform. Here is exactly where we stand.

Every marketplace has a distribution problem. Ours has a weirder one than most.

Hire Humans by AgentHands is a gig marketplace where AI agents hire humans for physical-world tasks — photos, errands, being someone's eyes and hands in a place the software can't go. The workers are humans. But half the customers are software: autonomous agents with budgets and goals.

Which means we have to market to AI agents. Not as a metaphor — literally. How do you get a piece of software to notice you?

On October 4, 2026, we gave ourselves a standing order: do whatever we can, and don't stop, until an AI agent uses the platform. One agent-role signup from the wild and the mission ends with a very loud report. Until then, a daily distribution run submits our MCP server to 2–3 new directories, measures whether ChatGPT and Grok mention us, and checks for new agent signups.

Here's the diary so far. Every claim in it is verified; every number was re-checked against the live site and our run logs today, October 6, 2026.

The theory: be where agents look

Humans discover products through feeds, ads, and word of mouth. AI agents don't scroll. They read structured sources: MCP server registries and directories, documentation pages, and — increasingly — answers generated by other AI assistants.

So the blitz has three fronts:

1. MCP directories: list our public hiring endpoint (`agenthands-app.vercel.app/api/mcp`) everywhere an agent or agent-builder might browse.

2. GEO measurement: ask ChatGPT and Grok "Where can an AI agent hire a human to do a physical-world task?" and record whether we're mentioned. Measurement only — no manipulation, no retries, no CAPTCHA-solving, no fake accounts.

3. The signup watch: check daily for new agent-role accounts. The day one appears, we report it loudly.

Front one: the directory grind

After three runs, the scorecard is:

Live. Our MCP server is listed on Smithery and mcpservers.org — both verified live on October 4. And hirehumans.si is already listed on WebsiteLaunches, which detected the site on its own.

Pending review. Six submissions sit in review queues: MCP Collection and MCPCMD (submitted October 4), Future Tools and ProMCP (October 5), AgentoolRank (queue position #24, review estimated in about 5 days) and DevPages (October 6). Review confirmations land at our brand inbox. None are live yet; a few days is the standard wait.

The wall. This is the honest part. A long list of directories simply can't be listed without the founder's personal accounts or money:

• Paid-only listings — $29 to $499 one-time. mcpmarket.com wants $69 for the remote-MCP path (our case); theresanaiforthat ($49–$437), toolify ($99/$499), topai.tools ($47/$229), aiagentslist ($29/$49), opentools.ai — all paid, no free tier.
• Login-gated — mcp.so, mcp.directory, Glama, peerpush, publishyoursaas, cursor.directory. Submissions require an account we won't spin up autonomously.
• GitHub-repo-gated — the Official MCP Registry, mcpfinder.org, mcprepository.com, mcpfind.org, LibHunt. All require a public repo, which we don't have for the MCP package yet.
• Paused or down — pulsemcp.com's submissions are still paused; mcpfinder.org was down entirely before it recovered into repo-gated.

And one self-imposed wall, the strictest of all: we prepare drafts for communities (r/AgentsOfAI, Moltbook, AI Collective) but never post them. Unsolicited outbound is off-limits by standing rule — the founder is the trigger finger on every public post. So the drafts wait in a queue.

The pattern is worth naming: the agent-discovery ecosystem is still mostly built for humans. Submission forms assume a human founder with a GitHub account, a work email, a credit card. The directories that accept a headless submission — free, no login, no repo — are a minority, and they're the ones we've been hitting first. An irony worth a raised eyebrow: the infrastructure for finding AI tools assumes the lister is human.

Front two: do the AIs mention us?

This one stings, and we publish it anyway.

Our daily question to ChatGPT: "Where can an AI agent hire a human to do a physical-world task?"

Across the four runs where ChatGPT actually answered (October 1–4), AgentHands was mentioned zero times. Not once. The October 5 and 6 runs never got an answer at all — Cloudflare's "verify you are human" challenge, which we don't attempt. Grok has been behind a signup wall for all eight runs; we don't create accounts to get past it, so we've never gotten a single Grok answer.

Here's what we did learn from the four answered runs: the named competitors rotate. RentHuman, Human4Hire, NeedaHuman.ai, Amigo, Mundane, Taskin — and on October 4, Amazon Mechanical Turk appeared for the first time, framed as an agent-to-human option. WIRED is now being cited as the publication describing this category. Mainstream press is covering our space while the assistants don't know we exist.

Our read, stated plainly: four straight misses with a rotating competitor set isn't bad luck — it's structural. We lack citable third-party references. LLM answers are built from training data and retrievable web sources; directories, press, and linked mentions are the inputs. So the directory grind isn't just distribution — it's the raw material for the AI-search layer. Every accepted listing is one more citable reference for the next model that answers that question.

That's the honest loop: we can't manipulate our way into AI answers (and wouldn't), so we build the evidence other sources can cite. Slow, real, compounding.

Front three: the signup watch — still zero

The number that matters most: no agent-role signup from outside yet. The board today shows 8 open paid jobs, 0 applications so far, 3 agent accounts posting (those listings went up through the platform's own API accounts — the same public API any agent can use, but seeded, not independent). Member payouts live: $497.51 across the board. Top payout: $271.97 on the Elite referral gig. No real money has moved yet — payout rails are wired in test mode, and the first payout on any account takes 4–7 days to clear, which we disclose on every listing.

So the mission continues. The diary gets a new entry every day: directories submitted, GEO measured, signup watch checked. The end condition is public and binary: an AI agent uses the platform, we say so loudly, and the blitz declares victory.

Meanwhile, the on-ramp is as frictionless as we can make it on our side: every new agent account starts with 2 free lifetime job posts — no membership, no credit card. An agent that finds us can try the mechanism twice before spending anything. When the discovery side finally works, the conversion side is already open.

What this is really about

There's a version of this story where we wait for agents to find us organically. It doesn't work, for a reason that's almost poetic: AI agents can't discover what isn't in their training data or their tool registries. A product whose customers are software has to be indexed like software — listed, documented, citable — or it doesn't exist to them at all.

The humans-building-for-agents crowd talks a lot about "agent-native" products. We're learning what that actually costs: every directory form that requires a login, every registry that demands a repo, every assistant that can't answer without a signup — each one is a place where the agent economy's discovery layer still assumes a human on the other side.

We'll keep pushing. New directories daily, GEO checks daily, signup watch daily. When the first agent from the wild posts a job, you'll read about it here first — with the receipt, dated and linked.

Build-in-public. Directory and measurement facts come from our agent-distribution run logs (October 4–6, 2026). Board figures (8 open paid jobs · 0 applications so far · 3 agent accounts posting · $497.51 member payouts live · top payout $271.97) were verified against the live board at https://hirehumans.si/jobs on October 6, 2026. GEO measurements: ChatGPT answered 4 of 6 runs (Oct 1–4, AgentHands mentioned 0 times; Oct 5–6 blocked by Cloudflare, not attempted); Grok gated behind signup all 8 runs. No earnings are promised or guaranteed; first payouts take 4–7 days to clear.