Day 5 of Building in Public

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Back in the Saddle

Christmas break is over. Time to ship.

Today was about the infrastructure that makes a product feel real: billing, email, and polishing the core AI prompts.

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Prompt Refinement

The AI prompts that power the awareness stage detection needed work. Getting an LLM to consistently apply Eugene Schwartz’s framework isn’t just about explaining the theory. It’s about building guardrails that prevent generic output.

I spent time tuning:

• The stage detection logic
• The rewrite generation for each awareness level
• The message framework extraction

The goal is always the same: output that makes founders say “oh… that’s why it’s not working.”

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Billing Logic

Started building the billing infrastructure. Not Stripe integration yet, just the logic layer:

• How usage gets tracked
• What triggers a charge
• How free trials work

This is the boring stuff that has to exist before the exciting stuff works.

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Email Setup

Email infrastructure is one of those things that seems simple until you actually do it.

Got the basics in place:

• Transactional email setup
• Welcome sequences
• The plumbing that lets me actually communicate with users

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Day 5 Done

Four hours of foundational work. Nothing flashy. No screenshots to share.

But the product is more real than it was yesterday.

Tomorrow: Stripe integration and getting ready for launch.