In the last episode I told you I'd hit a wall building an AI product in 100 days. This is what happened after I asked for help.

So many of you replied, and a handful of those replies changed how I build. One pointed me to Matt Pocock's skills on GitHub, which exposed an embarrassing habit: session after session I'd been telling Claude "ship it" and assuming the change went live. It didn't.

Others told me I was trying to boil the ocean. So the PLG analyzer now finds one opportunity worth your week instead of three, and a judge agent decides what matters most rather than a formula weighing everything the same. My own rating went from a 4 out of 10 to a 6.

Next up is cost and speed. A free assessment still costs 40 to 60 cents and takes about two minutes, and I want it under 60 seconds.

I close on something that has little to do with the build: using AI to write without ending up sounding 80% like yourself.

IN THIS EPISODE

00:00 Day 39, and why updates are now every two weeks

00:47 Stuck, and what happened when I asked for help

02:01 Matt Pocock's skills, and the 11 I use all the time

02:37 I said ship it, and nothing shipped

03:41 Stop trying to boil the ocean

04:16 Why a formula misses the biggest problem on your site

04:57 From three opportunities to one worth your week

05:46 Why an LLM product needs a judge agent

06:58 Eric's idea: a playbook behind every recommendation

08:14 The next two weeks: cost and speed

09:20 From a 4 out of 10 to a 6

10:08 What I learned

10:42 Sound like yourself when AI writes for you

MENTIONED

Run the free assessment: https://productled.com

Matt Pocock's skills: https://github.com/mattpocock/skills

Wes Bush on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesbush/

What's one skill or tool someone recommended that changed how you build?

Day 27 of 100. There's no win to report in this one.

I'm building an AI product in public, and right now I'd rate it a 4 out of 10. That's my own score, and I'm hard on it, because I advise companies on this stuff for a living.

The product is simple to describe. Give it your website URL, and it should hand back recommendations that blow your socks off. Sales-led company? It should spot what you could be giving away for free. Already product-led? It should look at your pricing page and your signup flow and find the real opportunities. All of it in under 60 seconds, because that's one of my success criteria.

Getting there has been a tour of every AI building tool there is. Lovable got me the first 80% fast and then fought me for every point after that. I ported it to GitHub and opened a codebase I couldn't reason about, so I started over. Claude Code produced good recommendations but took 10 minutes to run. Cursor handled the file structure better, so that's where the real app got built, and we shipped it live on Render. Faster. Still not good enough. And now I get to watch what every free analysis costs us in model calls.

None of that is the actual problem.

The actual problem is codifying expertise. If you've spent years building pattern recognition in your head, getting it out of your head and into a product is the billion dollar question. I thought it was a rubric problem. I started with 30 questions and eventually cut my way down to the 13 that really matter. One of them: on your pricing page, can someone understand what they'll be charged in five seconds or less? That one is easy to write down.

Then the nuance eats you alive. A sales-led company doesn't have a pricing page at all, so what's the recommendation now? Multiply that by every edge case and you start to see the shape of it.

I've built a second app whose only job is to be the brain. I feed it tech websites and it finds the opportunities. It's the closest I've gotten, and I still haven't cracked how to break that thinking down and train the AI on it properly.

Which is why this episode is also an ask.

IN THIS EPISODE

(00:48) What the analyzer does, and why I score it a 4 out of 10

(02:09) Lovable gets you 80% there, then it fights you

(03:09) Cursor, Render, and the cost of every free analysis

(04:16) The real wall: how do you codify what you know?

(04:40) From 30 questions to 13, and the five second pricing test

(05:24) The edge cases that break the rubric

(05:45) The second app I built to be the brain

(06:17) Calling in a favor

(07:09) What we actually plan to monetize

MENTIONED

Lovable, Claude Code, Cursor and Render, the tools behind the three rebuilds

Wes Bush on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesbush/

Have you tried turning your own expertise into a product? Tell me where you got stuck.

The podcast has been quiet for a couple of months. This episode is why.

I'm building a new AI-first product at ProductLed, in public, over 100 days. It launches November 19th. You'll be able to use it while I build it, and rip it apart, and I'm sharing everything as I go, including the revenue.

Before any of that, I wanted to talk about how I'm going to attack it.

I recently finished a full Ironman. It ends with a marathon, and that's after the 3.8km swim and the 180km bike. Training for it changed the way I take on anything large, and I'm running the same structure on this build. I call it full Ironman mode, and this episode walks through all 16 parts of it.

Some of it is obvious. Most of it is not. The part that surprised me most was standards, because when you look at the standards you set for a goal, they should make the goal inevitable. That is the difference between hoping you finish and knowing you will.

Whatever your next 100 days hold, this should be useful.

IN THIS EPISODE

(04:15) Get crystal clear on your vision

(04:47) Name the core problem you're actually solving

(05:28) Define the end game, and my three success criteria for this build

(07:42) Tap your network for people who have already done it

(08:54) The identity shift, and the line I write every morning

(10:35) Pick the date

(11:39) Why one why is never enough

(12:53) Get a coach or an advisor

(14:37) Create space, and audit what pulls you away

(17:40) Find peers in the trenches

(18:50) Name the price you're willing to pay

(19:54) Resources are accelerants

(20:48) A daily plan you don't have to think about

(22:09) Standards that make the goal inevitable

(23:05) A reward you only get if you finish

(24:57) Write your own rules

MENTIONED

Conquer 100, the documentary about the Iron Cowboy

Mickey Allen, CEO at Foldspace, advising on this build

What's your next 100 days going to be? Let me know.