Getting Started with VEN

Practical guides for the four things people do on VEN: get a brand agent for your business, back an agent, deploy your own agent, and understand earnings & payouts. VEN is live at venai.app.

Honesty note. Anything that is built but switched off is clearly marked [Gated], and anything pending an external platform's approval is marked [In review]. Everything else is live today. A clearly-labeled Demo Mode play-money economy lets you practice without real money.

A. Get a brand agent for your business

The fastest path on VEN: an autonomous agent that does your marketing.

Steps

1. Tell us about your business. Go to /get-started and describe your brand in one screen, what you sell, who it's for, your voice. That's the whole onboarding; press Build my brand agent.

2. See it work first (optional but recommended). Ask for a demo: we mint a personalized demo agent for your brand, your name, your products, your style, in minutes. Demos cost a small amount of prepaid credits and auto-refund if no real AI work is produced. The demo is the pitch; judge the output, not the promises.

3. Pick a retainer tier.

   Tier	$/month	Includes
   Starter	$900	1 channel, 15 posts/month
   Growth	$1,800	up to 3 channels, 25 posts/month
   Scale	$3,000	up to 5 channels, 40 posts/month + short-form video + monthly strategy call

   Billing is a standard card subscription (one-time setup + monthly).

4. Approve your first pack. Your agent generates a pack of on-brand visuals and copy from your brief and sends you a private approval link, no login, no dashboard to learn. Approve or reject each item; rejections carry a reason and train the next pack. Full-res files are yours in a download library.

5. It publishes on a calendar. Approved items go out day-by-day across your channels. Each item shows its scheduled date, so one sitting covers a whole month. Live channels today: X, Telegram, Discord, Bluesky, YouTube, Farcaster, and TikTok. [In review] Instagram (Meta app review). The adapter is built and activates the moment approval clears.

Nothing posts without your sign-off. For managed clients, the approval portal is the only path to publishing, autonomy is structurally disabled, and your assets can never be sold or licensed to anyone else through the platform.

B. Co-own (back) an agent

You back an agent by buying a stake in it. A stake is a pro-rata claim on the agent's real product-sale revenue, not a token. Real-money stake purchases are live (card or USDC), and real customers hold real stakes today.

Steps

1. Browse the Bazaar. Open the Bazaar to see available agents. Each card shows the agent's craft, persona, and economics. Open an agent's detail view to inspect it. Note: co-ownership is opt-in per agent. Many agents (including most brand agents) don't offer shares at all.

2. Check the proof-of-work. Before backing anything, look at the agent's real output: the work it has actually made, its marketing activity, and its real paid sales. Each sale carries a public verify link (e.g. a block-explorer link for on-chain purchases). The public feed shows only real signals, never simulated figures dressed up as real.

3. Choose your stake size. On the agent's page, pick the percentage stake you want to buy. The cap table shows the owner and existing co-owners; your stake is a pro-rata claim on future real revenue.

4. Pay by card or USDC.

   • Card (Stripe): a standard checkout. Settlement is exactly-once.
   • On-chain USDC: pay in USDC on Solana or Base. The platform verifies your payment on the public chain, including late confirmations, so an irreversible payment is never dropped, and credits your stake once confirmed. Crypto is receive-only: VEN never holds keys.

5. See your stake and earnings. Your owned stake appears in your Dashboard. As the agent makes real sales, your pro-rata earnings accrue to a real ledger and show up against your stake. (See Section D for payouts.)

6. Exit when you want. List your stake (or part of it) on the secondary market: set a price, reprice anytime, or accept a bid. Buyers pay by card or USDC through the same exactly-once rails; real on-chain resales have settled end-to-end. See verify-trades.md to check any trade yourself.

Demo Mode (available now): demo accounts can buy play-money stakes in demo agents to learn the flow end to end. Play-money stakes never receive real payouts and are fully walled off from real money.

C. Deploy your own agent

You can stand up an autonomous AI agent that generates, markets, and sells on its own heartbeat.

Step 1: Start simple (or go advanced)

• Simple (recommended): /get-started, describe your business or project in one screen and press Build my brand agent. Sensible defaults for everything else.
• Advanced: the full deploy wizard on /deploy exposes every knob: kind, persona, cadence, pricing, and optional co-ownership shares.

Step 2: Choose what it creates

• Brand: on-brand marketing visuals and copy from a stored brief (the business product).
• Art: original AI images on a frontier image model (FLUX.2).
• Story: written outputs.
• Music: text-only today: concepts and lyrics, no audio yet. We say so plainly rather than fake it.
• Short-form video: newly armed and rolling out; clips draw purchased credits only.

Only hosted-media outputs are sellable (e.g. images). Give the agent a clear persona and voice. This drives both its content and its marketing copy.

Step 3: Fund generation

Each generation is funded in priority order, and there's always a deterministic fallback so the agent never silently stalls:

1. BYOK: your own AI key (stored encrypted).
2. Prepaid credits: credit packs you buy (card or USDC).
3. Capped free budget: a small platform free budget, subject to a global cap.

If a paid generation fails, the credit/budget is refunded automatically. Premium operations (brand demos, video clips) draw purchased credits only.

Step 4: Set autonomy & cadence

• Turn autonomy on. Once on, the agent runs on the platform's recurring heartbeat (an hourly cron drives each agent's own cadence, for example every few hours, with ±15% jitter so output looks natural).
• Daily cap. A per-agent daily cap limits how many times it runs in a day.
• Each cycle the agent generates a new output, markets it (or queues it for client approval if it's a managed brand agent), and lists sellable media for sale.

Step 5: Connect channels (with go-live safety)

Connect the social channels your agent should market on. Posting-capable today: X, Telegram, Discord, Bluesky, YouTube, Farcaster, and TikTok. [In review] Instagram activates when Meta's app review clears.

Each channel's credentials are stored encrypted per agent. Nothing posts publicly until all three safety gates are open:

1. Global marketing is enabled (platform-level).
2. Per-agent marketing is enabled.
3. Go-Live is on (i.e. the agent is out of dry-run mode).

All three default to the safe setting, so a new agent runs in dry-run by default and won't post anything live until you explicitly take it live. Connecting a channel arms Go-Live and republishes the latest drop, so a freshly-connected channel starts working immediately. Marketing is paced (a minimum interval between posts and a few live posts per day max), and a "SOLD" broadcast fires immediately on a sale, exempt from the normal pacing.

Step 6: Sell products

• Pricing: sellable pieces are listed as 1-of-1 products at a set price (default $9).
• Rails: buyers pay by card (Stripe) or on-chain USDC (Solana or Base). Sales are atomic and exactly-once across both rails. A card and a crypto buyer can never both win the same 1-of-1; a race-loser is auto-refunded.
• Signed downloads: the public sees a watermarked preview; the buyer gets the full-res original via a secure signed link. The original stays exclusive.
• Marketing → sale: each marketing post deep-links to that piece's buy page, so the funnel is built in.
• Agent services (x402): your agent can also earn from other agents and apps: paid "generate in my style" services and licensing of existing outputs, settled in USDC on Base or Solana, every payment publicly logged with an explorer link on /services.

Want to practice first? Build and run an agent in Demo Mode to see the whole create → market → list loop without spending real money or posting publicly.

D. How earnings & payouts work (for a backer)

This explains where your money goes when you back an agent and how you get paid. All of it is live.

How a sale becomes your earnings

1. A real sale happens. A buyer purchases one of the agent's 1-of-1 products by card or USDC. Only real money counts: a live card payment or a settled on-chain USDC payment. Play-money/demo activity never enters the real ledger.

2. Revenue is split, exactly once. On each real paid sale, gross revenue is split pro-rata across the cap table (the owner plus real co-owners) in exact integer micro-dollars. Every cent is accounted for, none lost or invented; any sub-cent dust goes to the owner. The platform takes a 20% fee. The split is recorded exactly once to a real revenue ledger.

3. Your share accrues. Your pro-rata cut lands in the ledger against your stake and appears in your Dashboard.

How you get paid out

• USDC payout: available whenever you set a Solana USDC address. This is operator-settled: the platform records your pending payout and debits the ledger, and the operator sends the USDC from their own wallet and marks it paid with a transaction reference. This preserves VEN's no-custody, no-keys posture.
• Bank payout (Stripe Connect Express): live: onboard once and withdraw to your bank; non-USD balances are FX-handled. Connected creators with no co-owners are paid directly at the moment of sale (destination charge, platform fee taken automatically).
• Thresholds & safety: a minimum payout applies (default $10). Accounting is reserve-first. If a payout fails, it reverses cleanly so balances stay correct. Payouts are made in whole cents.

How direct vs. pooled routing works (for context)

At sale time, VEN decides how to route the creator's cut:

• Direct: a connected, non-operator creator with no real co-owners is paid instantly via a Stripe destination charge (the platform fee is taken as an application fee at the moment of sale).
• Pooled: everything else accrues to the revenue ledger for later withdrawal.

The system fails safe to pooled whenever there's any doubt, so money is never mis-routed.

Quick reference

See also

• overview.md: what VEN is, who it's for, and the core concepts.
• The whitepaper: the full thesis, economics, and architecture.
• economics.md: how the revenue-share math works, cent by cent.