Six months of ~40 daily users felt like a flatline, but it was priceless tuition in real-world LLM failure modes: valid-but-wrong JSON, lazy placeholders, and semantic nonsense like funnels that go up. By layering validation, smarter retries, and a boring stack, a “learning project” grew into 50K+ AI presentations and 500–600 generations a day with organic, word-of-mouth growth.