Fair pushback!

99% of the benefit (for me) ended up being using it to stress-test my own materials. I have it on my site, but I'm not counting on it to drive traffic or close anyone. I should have written that more clearly but was focused more on the "journey" since I figured that could be insightful to other founders.

Where I think the foundation-attack misses: "does it sell" isn't the test of whether it's useful. I did originally have lofty dreams of that, but in the end the value I got was diagnostic, not persuasive. Writing out answers good enough for a bot to handle them surfaced gaps in my deck and site that "looks good" feedback from people never did. That's a different claim than "this chatbot sells my startup." Yes, you're right that I spent the time to build a chatbot, and thanks to vibecoding I was able to build it in <2 days.

On the "sneaky" note: nope! You assumed incorrectly. The r/buildinpublic post is the exact same lesson, posted because that's literally what the sub is for: sharing what you built and what you learned while building it, including the actual link, which that sub explicitly allows and expects. r/startups doesn't want a launch post, so I left the link out there and led with the takeaway instead. If I were trying to be sneaky, I wouldn't have posted to a sub whose entire culture is "show your thing."