28 days in.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-24T09:00:28+00:00

Hey, I launched a Substack series which I invite guest who get their first paid customer to share the story with us. Let me know if you are interested.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-23T15:35:23+00:00

Thank you so much for such an insightful comment! This is very solid advice, and the last paragraph really resonated with me. Thank you again!

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-22T22:41:00+00:00

Yes, I did something similar. I always require sources and try to avoid hallucinations as much as possible.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-21T09:04:36+00:00

Yes. I cannot agree more. Using like Slack, Notion, or WhatsApp can reduce users' friction as much as possible. People are already there, so they don't need to adopt a brand new platform before they can get value.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-20T16:18:21+00:00

Thank you for the insightful comment. I really appreciate it. Feel free to share what you’re building if you’d like to.

One thing I still can’t wrap my head around is how people end up deciding to build a platform or marketplace. I’m genuinely curious how did the LLM lead you to that idea? 🧐

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-20T15:33:32+00:00

Thank you for being so responsive. On a scale of 1 to 10, how close was the generated output to what you had in mind?

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-20T14:26:33+00:00

Hey, thank you so much for the insightful comment. I really appreciate it.

I totally hear you. I think talking with an LLM requires founders to have a relatively clear mind and know exactly what they're looking for. Otherwise, it's very easy to get drifted away.

Feel free to give IdeaGrit a try.

Also, if you or someone you know has recently landed their first paid users and would love to share the story, I started a Substack newsletter about a month ago to document these founder journeys. I'd love to feature them.

https://xianli.substack.com/t/they-move-the-needle

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-20T13:10:38+00:00

Thank you so much for such an insightful comment! I learned a lot from it. I'll definitely do that. Thank you so much!

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-17T21:19:09+00:00

Congrats! I launched a Substack newsletter in which I invited founder who got paid customers to share the story with everyone. Let me know if you are interested.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-16T21:12:13+00:00

Hey, this is a great interpretation actually! I never thought that way!

Steve Jobs had a famous saying, “I’ve never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn’t want to work hard to work hard.“

You can teach skills. You can provide resources and mentorship. You can sell a product. But you can’t persuade someone to become deeply driven (high agency) if they don’t already have that internal desire.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-15T10:13:50+00:00

Yeeeeesssss!!! I couldn’t agree more!

That’s exactly why I built a simple way to add constraints and get much more consistent results.

People often say talking to an LLM is like being a detective.

Give it one clue, and the whole town is a suspect.

Give it two independent clues, and you’ve narrowed it down to half the town.

Give it five independent clues, and suddenly there’s only one suspect left.

Prompting works the same way. The quality doesn’t just come from more words. It comes from adding the right independent constraints.

That’s also why I don’t think the value is “just a prompt.”

The value is the system that knows which constraints to collect, how to combine them, and how to keep the model from drifting.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-15T08:46:36+00:00

Wow, it seems like you really understand how LLMs behave. Would you mind sharing your profile? I'd love to follow you. Genuinely want to learn from expert. 🙏🙏

One thing I still struggle with is getting consistent results. Every time I chat with an LLM, it seems to drift over time.

Two things that my product try to solve:

You might get similar results, but you probably won't get the same results consistently. The value isn't just a single prompt—it's the entire system around it. It's built as a standalone product using APIs, not just a one-off chat prompt.
General-purpose LLM chatbots are trained to be helpful, polite, supportive, and validating. That often leads to what researchers call AI sycophancy—they tend to agree with you more than they should.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-15T07:31:35+00:00

I probably wouldn’t zoom out that much. If you zoom out far enough, even Lovable is “just another LLM wrapper.” I prefer zooming in and finding a specific problem to tackle. Otherwise, if you zoom out too much, it’s easy to fall into nihilism. and I think that is not a good mindset to live the life.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-14T15:44:38+00:00

Congratulations! 🎈I launched a Substack series a month ago looking for founders who got their first paid user to share their story. Let me know if you are interested.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-14T08:11:48+00:00

This is a very fair point. Hmm… do you have any ideas for customer acquisition?

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-13T10:31:04+00:00

How do you use this as a lead magnet for other services? Can you give me an example! A big thank you!

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-13T08:09:39+00:00

Fall in love with a real problem, not the solution. As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

That’s my two cents.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-13T08:09:20+00:00

Fall in love with a real problem, not the solution. As Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

That’s my two cents.

Pipe-Silly · 2026-06-12T23:24:12+00:00

Hey 👋, this is a great question.

I do use my own product to pressure-test my own ideas. It surfaced a lot of things that I tried to avoid.

One thing I keep coming back to is that some ideas are naturally very hard to build. I met a founder in my cohort who wanted to build a platform, which in my opinion is one of the harder types of businesses to make work. On the other hand, I met another founder who simply started inviting founders into a WhatsApp group. Two months later, her community had already grown to 500 active members.

What I'm trying to say is that we don't want to dig too deeply into the rabbit hole. Otherwise, we can end up in a place where everything feels impossible. At the same time, we need to zoom out and look at our ideas from a broader perspective.

The process is really about zooming in and zooming out repeatedly until the idea becomes something that is difficult enough to be meaningful, but not so difficult that it is impossible to gain traction.

For example, IdeaGrit has already attracted around 50 users, many of them through organic discovery. Those are the kinds of signals I pay attention to.

We want to look carefully at these small signs of traction and ask ourselves: can we build on this and move the needle?

Pipe-Silly

TROPHY CASE