This Is How I Bullied ChatGPT Into Building Lean Products With Me
Today’s theme: how I argue with ChatGPT about features until one of us gives up. Spoiler: it’s never me.
I’m shipping the next version of indie10k’s main dashboard. Beta folks are moving closer to $10k MRR (🔥), but I noticed two pain points:
Some people stall and stop shipping.
Others keep clicking next without proof they actually did the thing.
That breaks the TenK 6 loop. No ship = no momentum. No evidence = no way to fine-tune later.
Step 1: Throw spaghetti
I tossed ChatGPT a list of ideas: daily hacks, weekly retros, better Arc loops, journaling small wins. Then told it: “use first principles and tell me what’s actually worth building.”
It spit back a decent analysis. But decent isn’t good enough. So I kept poking:
“Nah, too bloated.”
“That’s someone else’s product.”
“Explain it like I’m five.”
“Cut harder.”
Step 2: Trim the fat
One by one, we killed ideas:
Public feed? Backlog.
Experiment ledger? Nope, duplicate.
Header counters? Cute, but bloat.
What survived? A dead-simple private feed. Just a place on the dashboard where you log today’s progress, drop a link/metric/note, and maybe use it as a mini retro. While all feed item are TenK 6 loop data. No break of core flow. That’s it. No fluff.
Step 3: Momentum check
So far in TenK 6:
List 5 ✅
Pick 1 ✅
Ship 1 🚧 in progress
Momentum feels good. ChatGPT plays the overeager intern; I play the grumpy boss with scissors. The combo works.
Next step: ship the private feed, then move to Ask 3.
Lessons Learned
ChatGPT is great at brainstorming, but terrible at saying no. If I don’t play the grumpy boss, I end up with 10 shiny features I’ll never ship.
First principles cut deeper than feature lists. Every time I asked “does this actually help someone hit $10k MRR faster?” another feature died. And that’s good.
Plain English saves the day. Fancy words = easy to fool yourself. When I forced it to explain things simply, the real winners (and losers) showed up.
Momentum > perfection. The point wasn’t to design the “perfect dashboard.” It was to keep shipping lean slices that push indie devs forward.
At the end, what stuck was a tiny private feed. Not sexy. Not overengineered. But exactly what helps the loop stay alive.
Here’s the messy transcript if you like feature autopsies: link
Just in case you don't know what is TenK 6 Methodology.
You can even read a Pocked-size Handbook about this methodology.
