The idea came from personal experience — a painful divorce and challenging co-parenting communication. Courts often tell co-parents to keep things business-like and child-focused, which sounds simple but is brutally hard in practice. I realized AI can do what humans often can’t — remove emotion from the loop. It started as a simple theory — that AI could actually prevent emotional abuse in digital communication.
I’d taken a break from tech after years at Google (I was a PM there), but eventually brushed off the dusties and decided to build it myself.
THE STACK
Google Cloud + Firebase + Gemini (with some OpenAI functionality still in place) + Twilio. Front end: FlutterFlow. I bootstrapped everything — no funding, no team at first, just persistence, a supportive partner, and late nights after my kids were asleep. One upside of co-parenting: suddenly, a lot of kid-free time to think/code.
Early on, I knew I wanted an advisor with deep expertise in abuse recovery. During my own healing, Dr. Ramani Durvasula’s YouTube videos were life-changing, so she topped my “never-going-to-happen” list. I cold-emailed her — and to my surprise, she said yes.
Yesterday, WIRED featured our story: “Divorced? With Kids? And an Impossible Ex? There’s AI for That.” Side note: in the article, our leading competitor acknowledged using users’ personal correspondence for training data — which was… surprising.
It’s surreal seeing something that began with personal pain now helping others in such a profound way. I get emails every week from customers saying the app has changed their lives. It’s incredibly gratifying.
I’m learning as I go — building in a space this sensitive has challenged me in many ways and shown just how deeply this kind of technology is needed.
I was “fortunate,” in a strange way, to have lived this pain firsthand; it helped me understand what was needed for my niche. AI has just as much potential to create harm or false information as it does to bring light to dark places — protecting victims and helping people find safety in their communication.
Happy to talk about any of these:
- Bootstrapping a consumer AI app solo
- Restarting life as an entrepreneur after kids, a divorce, and an eight-year hiatus
- Transitioning to being a full-time dad (9 years ago)
- Growing a real subscriber base in a niche without a marketing budget — leveraging AI and SEO
- Building for a legally and emotionally complex community
- Using AI to protect against abuse — designing filters that help without over-censoring
- Breaking into a quasi-regulated industry where many assume court approval is required just to operate
AMA — happy to talk about the journey, the challenges, or anything else that resonates.
