"John Gpt" is what the founders called John manually pretending to be the AI for their first customer. There was "no actual product" — "we only built the front end" with "no actual like AI or anything." John read thousands of documents by hand at "blitz breakneck speed," and "it solved the pain point, that's all that matters."
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This is their clearest do-things-that-don't-scale story. John describes it bluntly: "the AI is just us, the AI is just me." The customer would hand over thousands of documents and John would "skim read them to like absolute blitz breakneck speed," with "the AI like flagging stuff" but "barely working." They showed slides — "I'm pretty good at making decks" — and told the customer "AI worked great." John calls it "John Gpt... aka me as like the validator." The deeper point: "we would never have stumbled into this path unless we had known that somebody was going to pay for this." Only after a month of John reading "so much garbage" and the customer signing did it become "fully time to build," and they kept iterating until "the AI was basically doing all of it."