Rooost: Building an AI Design Research Product from Zero

Product teams spend thousands of dollars on research that sits in slides nobody reads. Insights get lost. Decisions revert to hunches. I knew AI could bridge this gap—I just had to prove I could build it.

Product Development Timeline

Month 1: Validate Problem Space

Over 20 product manager, designer, and researcher interviews

Month 2–3: POC & System Architecture

Next.js, Pinecone, OpenAI, MongoDB

Month 4: Brand Development & MVP

Marketing site, content, 60-second persona creation

Month 5: Launch & Promote

Beta program live, customer acquisition

Rooost Product Demo

Visit the live product at rooost.co

Create a persona in under 60 seconds

Upload your research content

Natural conversation interface

Persona answers cited & linked

Technical Architecture

Research Upload
Quality Assessment
(GPT-4o-mini)
Vector DB
LLM
Cited Responses
Next.js
TypeScript
MongoDB
Pinecone
OpenAI

Intelligent Persona Scoring Algorithm

Building user trust through transparent quality assessment. Every persona receives a 0-100 score based on three components:

25
points

Profile Completion

Basic persona data fields manually completed

65
points

Research Validation

Quality-gated research analysis with data decay

10
points

Growth Momentum

Research recency + profile maintenance

Key Technical Features:

  • OpenAI Integration: GPT-4o-mini semantic analysis of research quality
  • Data Decay System: Research loses value over time (0.6x-1.0x multipliers)
  • Quality Gating: Poor research gets 10% of points, high quality gets 100%
  • Research Type Weighting: Interviews (1.0x) > Surveys (0.9x) > Analytics (0.7x)
  • Automated PII Protection: Scans and redacts sensitive information from uploaded research

Engineered a seamless persona data transfer system from marketing site to user accounts—prospects can try before signing up, boosting conversion.

Business Impact

1 Person
Solo execution
5 Months
Concept to launch
Full Stack
Product, design, dev, marketing
60 Seconds
To persona insights

The AI Partnership

This web application is a case study in the Product Pairs methodology. Using Claude Code as my development partner, I delivered what traditionally requires a 5-person team—writing 19,000 lines of production code across product, backend, and infrastructure.

One human + AI partner = an entire product team.

Lessons Learned

The tech isn't the hard part anymore—AI makes building possible for anyone willing to learn. If you think it, you can create it. The real challenges are understanding what's worth building and cutting through market noise. When everyone can build, deep understanding of user needs and markets become the core differentiators. Breaking through the noise as a solo designer/developer to get your product noticed becomes the biggest challenge.