To continue from last week, I want to dig deeper into my journey finding and utilizing collaboration tools.
Recall there are four sort of “steps” toward pursuing and achieving artificial collective intelligence (ACI):
- Find the nodes
- Align incentives
- Harvest the right information
- Help the supermind collaborate on tool decisions
For today’s reflection, I’ll start with the first one: finding ACI nodes.
I asked Claude to uncover ways for me to find such nodes.
Here’s part of what it said:
Internal Nodes (Tool Champions)
Expand and activate:
The blind spots in your current stack are: AI agent infrastructure (n8n, Make, Zapier AI, Voiceflow, Bland AI), health/wellness-specific AI tooling, and privacy/compliance-adjacent AI (relevant given your CIPP/US). Add 2–3 champions in those lanes. Candidates to evaluate: Liam Ottley (AI agency building), Corbin Brown (AI automation), and Nick Saraev (n8n). Each publishes regularly and has community infrastructure you can plug into.
Efficiency move: Create a private Notion or Airtable “Tool Intelligence Log” with columns: tool name, source/champion, use case category, relevance score (1–3), and status (evaluating / active / parked). Every time a champion publishes a tool review, you log it in under 2 minutes. You don’t evaluate everything — you log everything and only act on 3-rated items.
External Nodes (Communities)
Prioritized expansion list:
Product Hunt is the highest-value addition. You already know to use it for app validation. Now layer in intelligence use: follow the “Artificial Intelligence” category, upvote selectively, and read comment threads.
Reddit is a passive intelligence mine, not a participation platform for you right now. Set up monitoring. You’re scanning for: pain points your agents already solve, competitor mentions, and product feedback on tools you use.
For niche Slack/Discord: the two highest-ROI entries for you are the Voiceflow Community (directly relevant to your voice AI agents) and Make Community (automation workflows). Both have active help channels.
Machine Nodes (AI-Powered Monitoring Agents)
Tier 1 — Set up this week:
Perplexity Pro’s “Spaces” feature lets you create a persistent AI workspace with web access that you can return to with recurring prompts. Create a Space called “Tool Intelligence” and run a weekly prompt. Time investment: 10 minutes per week.
Feedly AI (paid tier) lets you follow RSS sources and apply AI filters. Build a board with feeds from: TechCrunch AI, The Rundown AI, Ben’s Bites, VentureBeat AI, and the Product Hunt daily digest.
Tier 2 — Set up within 30 days:
A custom n8n or Make workflow that monitors Reddit (via Pushshift or Reddit API) for keyword clusters relevant to your agent use cases, and emails or Slacks you a weekly digest. This is a 2-hour build and zero ongoing cost beyond your Make subscription.
Tier 3 — Future state:
A Manus or custom GPT workflow that ingests your Feedly digest, Perplexity outputs, and Reddit digest, summarizes the week’s intelligence into a single “Weekly Signal” document, and flags items with direct product relevance.
Vendor Nodes (SaaS Roadmaps and Release Notes)
The vendors worth monitoring for SVW:
Voiceflow (your primary agent builder) — subscribe to their changelog at voiceflow.com/changelog and join their Discord. They ship frequently. New features often enable conversation patterns that weren’t previously possible. Bland AI (voice AI infrastructure) — follow their changelog. Voice AI is moving fast. Lovable ships product updates via their blog; Replit via changelog and their newsletter. Make / n8n — follow both changelogs if you’re using either for automation. New trigger types and integrations expand what your agents can do without rebuilding from scratch.
How to monitor without effort: Most SaaS products offer a changelog RSS feed or email digest. Add the 5–6 vendors above to a dedicated “Vendor Intelligence” folder in Feedly (same account as your editorial monitoring above). This costs nothing incremental. Review it once a week alongside your editorial feed.
Revenue connection: Your ability to say “I saw Voiceflow’s new feature last week and immediately updated our booking agent to use it” will be convincing.
The Integration Layer: Making It All Work Together
The four node types are only powerful if they feed a single decision-making surface. Right now, you’re collecting intelligence from multiple streams with no aggregation point. The missing piece is a simple weekly “Signal Review” ritual — 20 minutes, same day each week — where you process the outputs of your machine nodes, flag one tool to add to your Intelligence Log, identify one vendor update worth noting, and ask: does any of this change what I’m building or pitching this week?
The full system — Perplexity Space + Feedly + vendor changelogs + Reddit monitor + weekly Signal Review — takes roughly 3–4 hours to set up across two weeks, costs under $40/month total in new subscriptions (assuming you already have Perplexity), and produces compounding returns because the intelligence directly informs the products you’re building and the conversations you’re having with health/fitness business owners. That’s the earn-as-you-learn loop: every week of monitoring makes your agent pitches sharper, your product roadmap more defensible, and your content more authoritative.