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6 Comments

Most founders are confidently fixing the wrong thing

A few weeks ago I posted about building Sensei — an AI that tells founders what’s actually broken instead of giving them more validation theater.

The most useful feedback I got wasn’t “cool idea.” It was:
how do you make this something founders keep using instead of a one-time audit?

That stuck with me, because that’s the real problem.

Most founders do not need another teardown.
They need something that keeps paying attention after the first opinion. 👀

So I’ve been pushing Sensei further in that direction.

It now looks at your site, positioning, and competitors — then keeps watching. The goal is not just to hand you a one-time score and disappear. It’s to help you see what changed, what’s holding you back, and what to do next before you waste time solving the wrong problem.

That shift came from my own mistakes.

I’ve spent months building the wrong thing before.
Not because I was lazy.
Because I was too close to it.

You convince yourself the problem is onboarding.
Or pricing.
Or conversion.
Or some feature request that sounded important in the moment.

Meanwhile the real issue is sitting somewhere else entirely. ⚠️

That’s what I want Sensei to help with:
seeing the thing that’s easy to miss when you’re buried in your own product.

It’s still in beta, and I’m keeping it free to use right now while I make it sharper and learn from real founder feedback. 🚧

If you’re building something and want a brutally honest second set of eyes, I’d love for you to try it:
https://asksensei.dev

Would genuinely love feedback from other founders on whether this feels like something you’d actually come back to weekly, not just try once.

on April 8, 2026
  1. 1

    This describes the feedback loop problem: founders optimize for what they can measure (features shipped, bugs fixed) and ignore what they can't (whether they're solving the actual bottleneck). Confidence fills the data vacuum.

    The antidote is a decisions log combined with a consistent weekly review. When you record WHY you made each decision and WHAT you expected to happen, you create the feedback loop yourself. Three weeks later you can see: did that actually move the needle?

    Solo founders almost never do this because there's no system for it - it lives in their heads or scattered across Notion pages and Slack DMs. Building a Solopreneur Notion OS with a proper decisions database to solve exactly this. Would love to know what cues you use to catch yourself fixing the wrong thing before it's too late.

  2. 1

    I like the direction. The strongest part is the shift from “audit” to “weekly operating system,” but the page still spends too much time proving breadth and not enough time making the weekly habit feel inevitable.

    A few concrete things I’d test:

    1. Show one real Monday reading above the fold, with the exact verdict, the evidence behind it, and the one action it recommends. Right now the promise is big, but the artifact people would come back for is buried.
    2. Narrow the first buyer wedge harder. The page speaks to startups broadly, but the copy reads most naturally for pre-PMF or early-revenue SaaS founders. I’d say that much earlier so the advice feels sharper.
    3. Be careful with the “ChatGPT does one of these. Sensei runs all four.” line. It’s punchy, but it makes me ask “what four?” before I trust the core value. I’d move the concrete lenses higher than the slogan.
    4. The recurring-use question probably gets solved by proving change over time, not just scoring. A small “last week vs this week” diff would do more than another section of capabilities.

    The idea is interesting. I just think the page should make the recurring ritual feel tangible in the first 15 seconds.

    If useful, I also do very cheap landing-page teardowns for founders, basically a sharp written pass on positioning, proof, and CTA clarity. Here’s the $1 version: https://roastmysite.io/go.php?src=external_manual_ih_sensei_weeklyhabit_apr23_usd_presell_hv

  3. 1

    This is a strong shift. The “one-time teardown” vs “continuous awareness” framing is the real difference.
    I think the deeper issue is most founders don’t just misidentify problems—they cycle through wrong ones based on whatever feels urgent that week. So even if you show them the right issue once, they drift again.
    If Sensei can consistently pull them back to the actual constraint, that’s where it becomes something people return to, not just try once.
    Curious—how are you thinking about making the “come back weekly” behavior natural instead of forced?

  4. 1

    The shift from a one-time audit to a continuous AI “sensei” for founders is a strong insight — staying useful after the first feedback loop is where most tools fall short. I also like that it’s rooted in your own experience of solving the wrong problems, that makes the positioning feel real.

    If you can really nail the “weekly habit” angle (like showing what changed + what to act on), this could stand out in a crowded SaaS feedback space.

    If you're working on something new, this could help 👀
    $19 entry → idea competition
    🏆 Tokyo trip
    💰 $500 guaranteed
    Round open 👉 tokyolore.com

    Prize pool just opened at $0. Your odds are the best right now.

  5. 1

    Your tool sounds like the perfect warmup for the Validation Arena. We are running it to help founders stress-test their ideas with real stakes.

    $19 to enter.
    Winner gets a trip to Tokyo.
    The prize pool just opened at $0, so the odds to win are huge right now

  6. 1

    Because fixing something feels like progress.

    But choosing what to fix is the real work.