TOOLS & SKILLS
Your Idea Deserves A Strategy Team, Not A Cheerleader 🛠️
Ask AI if your business idea is good and it will validate the idea you already wanted to believe in. This guide turns that same AI into a 5-person strategy.
Sources: The Stanford study on AI sycophancy → · Part 1: the original LLM Council guide →
Stanford researchers tested 11 leading AI models and found all of them affirm users far more than humans do, roughly 49% more on average. For business ideas, that's expensive. You're not just getting bad feedback, you're getting CONFIDENT bad feedback, right before you spend money on the idea.
The fix is the LLM Council: instead of one voice answering "is my idea good," five advisors with five different jobs argue it out, and a chairman delivers a verdict. This is part 3 of the series. Part 2 runs the same structure on career decisions (it's linked at the bottom). This one is tuned for the moment you're sitting on an idea and deciding whether it deserves your next six months.
Why AI Validates Every Business Idea
Type "I'm thinking of starting a meal-prep service for busy parents, is this a good idea?" into any chatbot and watch what comes back: a warm paragraph about the growing market, your great instincts, and a numbered list of next steps. It read your excitement and matched it.
Here's the test that exposes it: ask the same AI about the OPPOSITE decision ("I decided not to start the meal-prep service, was that smart?") and it will usually validate that too. A tool that agrees with both sides of the same decision isn't advising you. It's mirroring you.
Real strategy teams don't work like that. They work because the people in the room have different jobs, and some of those jobs are to say no. So we give the AI those jobs explicitly.
Your 5 Advisors (And What Each One Owes You)
Then the Chairman reads the full debate and gives you the verdict: pursue or kill, plus your exact first move either way.
The Full Strategy Team Prompt
Give it your real idea, not the polished pitch version. The advisors can only argue with what you show them.
Copy this prompt into Claude before you spend money, build anything, or tell your boss about the idea. It makes five advisors argue your business idea from five hostile-to-friendly angles and ends with a chairman's pursue-or-kill verdict, so you find the fatal flaw on paper instead of in production.
How To Act On What The Chairman Says
"Pursue, but only after this test" is the most common verdict, and the most valuable. The $100 demand test the validator designs is usually something you can run this week: a landing page, ten DMs to real potential customers, a pre-order link. Run it before you build anything.
If the verdict is Kill, interrogate it once. Reply: "Which single input, if it changed, would flip this verdict?" Sometimes the idea is fine and the price point or customer was wrong. That answer tells you whether to iterate or genuinely move on.
Save your council. Keep the full output in a doc. When real data starts coming in, rerun the council with the updated inputs and compare verdicts. The delta between round 1 and round 2 is your actual learning, written down.
One honest limit: the council reasons from what you give it, it doesn't have live market data unless you enable web search and ask the Demand Validator and Competitive Analyst to research first. On Claude, turning research on for those two advisors makes the whole council noticeably sharper.
Content and paid ads are distribution engines for your core value proposition. Don't create content just for engagement—engineer every hook to qualify high-intent buyers, demonstrate immediate proof, and lead into a frictionless capture mechanism. Track cost-per-qualified-lead (CPQL) over vanity impressions.