The Cheese #62 🧀 - Autonomous Agents, Firetrucks, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

I went to Shoptalk with the plan in motion to launch 14 autonomous agents the Monday I got back. I had spent the few days before Shoptalk setting up a server, installing Ubuntu instead of Windows, downloading some local LLMs to the server, and working on the architecture of the agents. To be clear, I am not very technical; I was leaning heavily on Claude CoWork. 

Monday came, and I launched my first one, Eric. Only took about 20 minutes with the hours of planning I had done prior. This was gonna be easy. I was going to launch all 14 before the end of the day. At the launch of the second one, I started to find major cracks in my plan. The first two agents were unable to communicate with themselves which was a problem (Because Eric was Lafayette’s boss and needed to send hik assignments). It literally took 2 hours to troubleshoot and solve the problem. About 5-6 hours of my 10-12 hours each day this week was working on launching these agents. It’s Friday, I still only have the first 2 agents launched. In between Monday and today, the amount of learnings I have picked up is mind-blowing. At the end of Monday, I took my 14 agents down to 12 and named it Phase 1. After talking with my team, I was up to 27 agents total planned and 4 Phases. Whoops.

At the end of Tuesday, I was reworking the planned LLMs for about 80% of the agents. I had trusted that Claude CoWork had recommended the right LLMs, and it had not. It was recommending Claude’s own products, and only the expensive ones. By Wednesday, I had realized I needed to create more in-depth ‘Ingestion’ docs for each agent (think of it like their initial brain, what they are born with). By Thursday, Google announced their new set of local LLMS, so I decided to install that to the server and pull out Llama. I currently have Lafayette (my second agent, that was on Llama, now on Google Gemma 4) running a task. If it goes well, it will be the first “wow” moment of the week as far as output from the agents. I hope hope hope I am able to deploy another agent or two today.

Wow, did this newsletter just switch from the live shopping newsletter to the autonomous agent newsletter? Eeeeeek

Speaking of Live Shopping, March shattered the previous Whatnot record of $280k, with $337k. The team absolutely made it happen in March. Next week, we have a call scheduled with eBay to discuss live shopping (they reached out), and we are doing a live shopping test on TikTok (we had a call with them earlier this week). If we can show a sign of life similar to Whatnot on either of these platforms, we are going to need to figure out some major staffing additions ASAP.

Amazon crushed it in March, up 24% year over year. 

Direct Sales Wise. Membership had its challenges, but our March Madness Mystery Box Sale made up for the lost ground. March 2026 ended up continuing the trend of being our best month in company history.

BattlGames call this week, everything trending in the right direction. A few more sponsorship sales came in this week and last which is always great to see.

Let’s get into the rest!

Ambulances and Firetrucks

The results are in for the Matchbox / Hot Wheels sales experiment.

“I drink 14 cups of coffee a day” - Random CEO that wants to meet with me

Kept the Bad Sales Email posts trucking along, staying on theme for Shoptalk.

Pricey Cookies

Lhea drops knowledge with the story of Mrs. Fields and her half-a-billion-dollar empire.

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

The Cheese is Served, and It’s Time to Share the Fun! 🧀

If you enjoyed this week’s cheesy goodness, why not share the love? Forward this newsletter to someone who could use a little extra cheese in their day.

Stay cheesy, and we’ll catch you next week with more!

Queso-Love,
Team Online Queso