North star: “A market exists — customers arrive.”
A live product with your first cohorts in it — traction, read raw.
What you hold is the tool of discovery — every loop's input, never its output. The name tells you what you're hunting; your hands tell you where you're standing.
“A market exists — customers arrive.”
The product validated — strangers can use it; unknown whether a market will.
An observable product — proven by reads, not installs: the dashboard that has answered a market question, the alarm that has fired for a real failure. Kept just reliable enough that the evidence stays clean.
If the first market didn't come, this loop's work was iterating to the adjacent one. The exit opens on the market found, never on the quarter elapsed.
Earns: Market validated. All five exit bars →
A service that watches your product and messages you when it stops working. Launching without it is launching deaf.
It breaks → how long until you know → how long until it's fixed. The first gap is closed by the smoke alarm, the second by a plan — and both are chosen, not discovered.
Each additional “nine” of reliability costs multiples of the last — which is why knowing your real hourly cost of downtime is armor against fear-priced Ferraris.
An event is a recorded fact that a user did a specific thing. Instrumentation is telling your builder which facts to record.
If your product has an AI layer, launch math gains a line — cost per customer action, which scales with usage rather than users; one enthusiastic customer can cost fifty times another. And AI features fail politely — a wrong answer looks like an answer — so the dashboard, not the inbox, is where their failures surface.
Demand is still validated by strangers succeeding without you, pilots still convert or become purgatory, and no model release launches your product for you.
AI-drafted onboarding, docs and support replies — reviewed at the “drafts” notch.
Reliability vocabulary sold at AI-era premiums; the smoke alarm still costs almost nothing.
Guide in progress — in the book, and in the newsletter when it ships.
Guide in progress — in the book, and in the newsletter when it ships.
Guide in progress — in the book, and in the newsletter when it ships.
Guide in progress — in the book, and in the newsletter when it ships.
Decisions explicitly deferred while you're in this loop. Not wrong questions — early ones. Written down, and set down.
Skills for this loop's decisions are in progress.
Free, ungated plain-text files you hand to Claude or ChatGPT. All skills →