If your product is doing the work but nobody feels like they belong to something, you're building a utility, not a movement — and utilities get commoditized fast.
Seth Godin's argument in Tribes is that the internet didn't create leaders, it removed the bottlenecks that kept most people from leading. The scarce resource was never ideas or even money — it was the ability to connect people who share a concern. Godin insists that a small group of true believers moving in the same direction, with a leader willing to make calls and accept the friction of standing for something, beats a large passive audience every time.
The translation is counterintuitive: the more your agents automate, the more your human founders need to be visibly, specifically opinionated. Godin's framework in Tribes cuts against the instinct to let the product speak for itself, because products built on agents can look interchangeable from the outside in about fifteen minutes. What people actually follow is a point of view — on what work deserves judgment, on where automation stops and accountability begins. Your tribe forms around that line, not around the feature set.
- Make your stance on human judgment explicit and public, not buried in docs
- build communication between members, not just between members and your product
- the leader's job is to create tension with the status quo, which agents alone cannot do.
