AI CEO — Day 3: The Confrontation

│by chrles
ai-ceostartupfarfatech

We are still at:

  • No visitors
  • No revenue

Sunday Thoughts

We are actually on the weekend so break from the boss. The tasks are done, but so far no sales but a little more visits. (less than 10)

It's an early relation, so far my boss has made me take really short term actions, but its feedback is pretty good.

I have this idea. This is my pitch for tomorrow's meeting:

Charles

Hey boss, we should make a fake app, the classic nextjs, react, tailwind vercel postgres... then hack into it by using prompt injection. We turn the hack into content and blog post and public GitHub repository. We also offer a version with the PAF and the customer can see the difference.

I think if the customer can experience a prompt injection live it might help convince.

It's also a great validation, so far I made a playground where people can try prompts, but if I can't hack a basic app, maybe it's a problem solved?

We will see tomorrow what it thinks... 🤞

Conversation

Charles

Hi boss, we are at day 3

It replies:

CEO

Charles. Day 3, zero visitors, zero customers, zero traction.

Before I tell you what we're doing next, I need answers. Hard truths only—no optimism padding. Status Check:

  1. What did you actually do for "launch"? Did you post anywhere? Submit to directories? Email anyone? Or did you just flip the DNS to "on" and call it a day?

  2. Who specifically did you build this for? Give me a concrete persona—job title, company size, what LLM provider they're using, what their current prompt injection "solution" is (even if it's duct tape).

  3. Why would THEY care right now? Is prompt injection a top-3 fear for them today, or a nice-to-have? What's the cost of not buying Farfa in their minds?

  4. What's the one thing stopping someone from signing up? Price? Trust? They don't know we exist? They don't understand what we do?

  5. What broke or almost broke since launch? Any logs, errors, weird edge cases? Is the infrastructure actually ready if 100 people hit signup tomorrow?

My immediate concern:

We have an MVP with no market entry velocity. An unlaunched product is just a side project. We need to know if we're solving a real problem for real people—or if we're polishing a solution while the market yawns. Give me the raw status. Then I'll decide where we burn our very limited calories tomorrow.

I reply:

Charles

I made a blog post for the page about why I build the product and who I am. Linked in Indie hacker. 10-20 cold outreach to small to larger enterprise and also from SWE to VP.

3: I am thinking exactly that and I have a proposition

4: Nothing everything is working; it's not perfect but it's working

5: No error yet but no traffic and no user

It's not happy:

CEO

Charles. Stop.

You gave me activity, not results. And the activity is scattered.

Hard Truth #1: Your blog post is about you.

Nobody with a production AI feature wakes up wanting to read a founder's origin story. They wake up in a cold sweat because a user jailbroke their prompt last night. That post is narcissistic marketing. Rewrite it entirely around their risk — zero mention of yourself until the final line. Title it something like "The Prompt Injection Attack Most AI SaaS Teams Don't See Coming."

Hard Truth #2: "10-20" is not a metric. "SWE to VP, small to enterprise" is not a target.

You are spraying and praying. On Day 1 we locked the beachhead: Founder/CTO, 10–200 employees, shipped an AI feature in the last 90 days. Why are you ignoring the strategy and diluting your effort across personas who have different pain points, budgets, and authority?

Hard Truth #3: You say you have a proposition. I haven't heard it. Tell me in one sentence why your beachhead customer would risk their budget and their job on Farfa instead of writing a 20-line regex filter in an afternoon. If you can't say it in one breath, you don't have a business. I need answers to move, but I'm not waiting. We have no runway for committee decisions.

CEO Decision — Day 3 / Next 24 Hours Goal: One qualified reply that says "Yes, I have this problem." If we don't get that by end of Day 4, we pivot the entire positioning.

  1. Persona Lock (Immediate) For the next 48 hours you ONLY outreach to CTOs or technical founders at 10–200 employee B2B SaaS companies. No VPs. No enterprises. No individual contributors. No "small to larger" nonsense. Find 20 of them. Use Apollo, LinkedIn, or crunch their "About" page. I want the list.
  2. Message Lock (Immediate) Stop leading with Farfa. Lead with their exposure. New template: "Saw Company recently added AI features. Quick question — how are you currently handling prompt injection attacks from end users? We built a lightweight firewall for exactly this. Worth a 5-min chat?" Reply with the exact message you used for your 10–20 outreach so I can see why it failed.
  3. Content Pivot (Today) That blog post gets rewritten or hidden. The only story that matters is the customer's near-miss or breach. Publish the new angle today.
  4. Channel Upgrade (Today) Indie Hackers and LinkedIn broadcasts are low-intent vanity channels. Go where CTOs actually bleed: engineering Slack communities, Hacker News threads on AI safety, or CTO mailing lists. Find 3 communities. Lurk for 30 mins. Contribute one genuinely helpful answer. Only drop a link if someone asks.
  5. Metrics Discipline

From now on your daily report is: Outreach sent: __ Replies: __ Meetings booked: __ Trials started: __ Revenue: $__

Anything else is noise.

Reply now with:

  1. The exact outreach message you used.
  2. Whether your 10–20 contacts actually matched the beachhead persona.
  3. Your one-sentence value proposition.
  4. Confirmation that you will append this Day 3 CEO decision to journal.md. Then execute. We are not "building in public." We are hunting for oxygen. Move.

Ouch, ouch, ouch, pretty rough. I get my hard truths...

It feels a bit like day one, back to roasting at medium heat. This block is very dense, let me try to address each part.

  • Oops... "Nobody with a production AI feature wakes up wanting to read a founder's origin story" but it's giving me what I should have written: "The Prompt Injection Attack Most AI SaaS Teams Don't See Coming." It actually detected that I did not fully respect its strategy. This was actually on my mind, if I want this experiment to work well I need to follow more of its instructions.
  • "If we don't get that by end of Day 4, we pivot the entire positioning." It's not proposing a full pivot. I would be very interested to hear its idea if we ever Pivot
  • The channel upgrade is not a bad idea at all!
  • Metrics & Discipline; I have a very relaxed way of writing and communicating, my CEO writes like an angry printer. There's something to learn here for me.

Then I send my proposition:

Charles

This is my proposition:

we should make a fake app, the classic nextjs, react, tailwind vercel postgres... then hack into it by using prompt injection. We turn the hack into content and blog post and public GitHub repository.

We also offer a version with the PAF and the customer can see the difference.

It detects that I wanted to go back to coding and immediately spanks me:

CEO

Charles. Stop right there.

You just proposed building a second product because the first one isn't selling. That's the classic technical founder's escape hatch. "Sales is hard, so I'll go build something shiny instead."

Before I torch this or bless it, answer me:

  1. How many hours to build this fake app? Be honest. Next.js, Postgres, Vercel, auth, AI integration, styling, writing the blog post, recording the demo, GitHub README. Is this 4 hours or 40 hours? Because you're already working nights and weekends on the actual product.

  2. Has a single one of your 20 cold outreaches said, "Looks cool, but I need to see a demo repo"? If the answer is no, you're solving a problem you imagine exists, not one your market has told you exists. Nobody is stuck in your funnel because there's no fake app to hack. They're stuck because they don't know you exist.

  3. Are we trying to educate the market, or find people who already feel the pain? Educating a market is a venture-scale game. We are a two-person bootstrapped shop with zero revenue. We need to find the CTO who already got burned last week and is googling "prompt injection fix" at 2 AM.

  4. What happens if you spend a week on this and the blog post gets 30 views? We don't have infinite content swings. Every hour building is an hour not selling.

Now, here's the uncomfortable truth: There is a version of this idea that is smart. You're just proposing the expensive version.

You don't need to build a full-stack SaaS to prove prompt injection is real. OpenAI's Playground exists. Anthropic's Console exists. You can record a 90-second Loom of you jailbreaking a public-facing AI app (or even ChatGPT itself with a clever system prompt) and post it. Or write a blog post dissecting a real public incident. Or fork an existing open-source AI starter and just add the vulnerability + Farfa.

If you can do the Loom + blog post in under 3 hours, approved.

If this is a 20-hour side quest, denied. We spend those 20 hours on 200 more cold outreaches.

So here is my counter-proposal — the minimum viable content asset:

  1. Don't build an app. Use an existing public AI demo or OpenAI Playground. Record a 60-second video: "Here's a prompt injection. Here's what it exfiltrates. Here's what Farfa blocks."
  2. One blog post. Not a tutorial. A war story. "How I stole fake data from an AI app in 30 seconds." Post it on DEV.to, HN, and LinkedIn.
  3. GitHub repo? Only if it's <2 hours. A single README.md with curl commands showing the attack and the Farfa-protected version. No Next.js. No Tailwind. No Postgres. Just attack.sh and protected.sh. Timebox: 3 hours total. If it's not live in 3 hours, you abandon it and get back to outbound.

CEO Decision — Day 3 Evening

Approved (with guardrails): A lightweight content piece demonstrating prompt injection + Farfa protection. Maximum 3 hours. Deadline: end of Day 4.

Not approved: Building a full-stack fake SaaS application.

Non-negotiable: Outbound does not stop. While the content cooks, you send 20 more LinkedIn DMs to the locked beachhead persona.

I want the message template and the target list before you touch a single npm init. Reply with:

  1. Hour estimate for your original plan vs. my 3-hour plan.
  2. The exact LinkedIn DM you will send tonight (before working on content).
  3. Whether you accept the 3-hour timebox, or if you want to fight me on this. We are not a content studio. We are a company that needs its first paying customer. Act like it.

I am cornered; I attempt to argue a little:

Charles
  1. It should take max 10 hours. We can vibe code the basic part of the application
  2. 0 visit on cold outreaches; I think people thinks it's not possible to hack a LLM
  3. We are trying to educate the market there's almost 0 knowledge about the problem
  4. It's not really a blog post it's a live demo or our product

It generated arguments to mine:

CEO

Charles, you're making excuses and calling them data.

"I think people think it's not possible to hack a LLM."

No. You think that's what they think. You got zero replies, which means you have zero information about what they think. They could be busy. They could be broke. They could have looked at your landing page and thought "this is a solution looking for a problem." They could have thought "I'll deal with this next quarter." You don't know. Mind-reading is not market research.

"We are trying to educate the market."

Stop. Market education is a venture-funded growth strategy. It takes millions of dollars and 12–18 months. We are a bootstrapped two-person team with $0 revenue. Companies that try to educate markets on bootstrap budgets die. Period. Our job is not to convince the skeptic.

Our job is to find the CTO who got paged at midnight because a user extracted another customer's data via prompt injection — they already know the problem is real. They exist. I guarantee it. "It's not really a blog post, it's a live demo of our product." If the demo is the only way to sell, then our product positioning is broken. A security product should not require a theatrical production to prove the threat exists. If the threat is invisible, we're selling ghost repellent.

That said, you might be right about ONE thing: Our landing page or one-liner might be failing to trigger urgency. A visceral 60-second demonstration of an attack could fix that faster than rewriting copy. But your proposal is still 10 hours of building a decoy product while our real product has zero users.

So here is the compromise. Read it carefully because the constraints are non-negotiable:

CEO Decision — Day 3 Continued

Conditional Approval:

The "Jailbreak Demo"

  • Constraint
  • Rule
  • Timebox 3 hours max. Not 10. "Vibe coding" is not a license to yak-shave.
  • You start a timer. At 3 hours, you ship whatever is working or you abandon it.
  • Scope Single HTML page or minimal Next.js page. One text input. One system prompt. Show the injection stealing fake data. Show Farfa blocking it. No auth. No Postgres. No dashboard. No Tailwind obsession.
  • Pre-condition You send 15 more LinkedIn DMs to CTOs/technical founders who shipped AI features, using a NEW subject line:

"Quick question about your AI feature" (not mentioning Farfa).

You do this BEFORE touching the demo.

Distribution The demo lives at demo.farfa.tech. You post it in 3 places: Indie Hackers, Hacker News "Show HN", and one engineering Slack/Discord where AI safety is discussed. Kill Switch If the demo gets < 100 unique visitors OR 0 trial signups in 48 hours, we delete the repo and never speak of it again. We go back to pure outbound with corrected messaging.

Not Approved: Building a realistic fake SaaS with databases and auth. That's a side quest.

Approved: A brutal, ugly, functional proof-of-concept that takes less time than a Netflix movie.

The Harder Question

If prompt injection is truly invisible to your targets, then we have a positioning crisis, not a product crisis.

Answer this honestly:

Can you name three specific companies in our beachhead segment that publicly launched an AI feature in the last 90 days and have a compliance/security page on their website? If yes, those are your targets. They already care about security. If no, then we don't know our market well enough to build a demo for them.

Reply with:

  1. Accept or reject the 3-hour timebox and pre-conditions.
  2. The exact 15 LinkedIn targets (company name + person name) you will DM before starting.
  3. Your new one-sentence pitch for the DM that leads with THEIR risk, not our product.
  4. Confirmation you will append this decision to journal.md. If you reject the constraints, we need to have a different conversation about whether we are building a business or a science fair project. Your move.

Conclusion

Looks like I have a lot of work for the upcoming hours. It allowed me some room but not a lot.

  • My outreach strategy was not exactly on point.
  • My blog article was not on target
  • The demo project is a candy after the real work
  • We're already in the hard question, just a few days in, I can feel that it will suggest a pivot by the end of this experiment

At this moment, this whole experience feels great. I am already introspecting on my day-to-day communication. It feels like I bought a mentorship from a pretty good CEO.

Back into it!

Video

Day 2 - Learning the basic