North star: “This solution creates the value.”
A prototype — a hypothesis made clickable.
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.
“This solution creates the value.”
The problem validated — Loop 1's bar behind you.
A disposable prototype — real on the one risky thing, fake everywhere else, fate pre-committed in writing. Disposable is what buys this loop its speed: you iterate fearlessly on a thing you've already agreed to throw away.
Earns: Solution validated. All five exit bars →
Everything in this loop follows from that line.
What separates the two is, by design, the boring part — accounts and access, data that survives, safety against accident and malice, graceful handling of inputs nobody imagined, and the machinery that reports failure. A demo needs none of it; a product is all of it.
A prototype should be exactly as real as its question requires: a clickable mock answers understanding questions, a working prototype answers workflow questions, and only a naked test answers capability questions. More fidelity than the question needs is buying furniture for a stage set.
This loop's cost collapsed — what took a freelancer a month now takes a founder a weekend. That made prototyping-by-founder the default, and made the loop's exit question (“what is this thing, really?”) the most misjudged decision of the decade.
The invisible 80%. AI tools build stage sets at miraculous speed; they do not make stage sets livable.
Build it yourself — budgeted, disposable.
Anyone — tool vendor or agency — telling you the weekend demo is, or can never be, a product. Both answers are for sale.
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.
Free, ungated plain-text files you hand to Claude or ChatGPT. All skills →