Steadfast

01Purpose and status

What Steadfast is, what has been built and verified, and what is still open. Issued in draft because the commercial terms are not set.

02Executive summary

A private, persistent companion for Australian men in the first year after a separation. Not a chatbot – a system of record: it remembers, keeps facts apart from allegations, watches for risk, keeps a chronology, and always knows the one next move that matters.

1. The market is underserved by design. Separated men do not present, do not ask and do not talk.
2. The product is a system of record, not a conversation. Value compounds with use; a generic assistant starts from zero every session.
3. Privacy is the architecture. No privileged data path, Sydney storage, on-device speech, a gateway that retains nothing. In this category that is the product.
4. It is built and verified, not specified. All seven phases exercised end to end against a deployed environment with real model calls.
5. It makes professionals more effective than it competes with them. That is the distribution channel and the credibility test at once.
6. The commercial case is the open work. Section 19 says exactly what is missing.

The ask. to confirm – amount at to confirm – stage and structure. Use of funds at section 17.

03The problem

Everything arrives at once, at the worst possible moment for clear thinking – and much of the damage in the first year is, in the founder’s view, avoidable.

Why every existing option fails this person

04The product

One private companion that turns an unstructured account into an organised, current, defensible picture – then names the one thing worth doing next. Chaos → clarity → priority → action → continuity.

The Separation Map, live

A fictional case five days in. Open a dimension to see what the system is actually holding. Nothing below belongs to a real person.

Two of seven dimensions sit at unknown after five days, and stay there. Manufactured certainty is the failure mode this design exists to prevent.

Don’t Send This Yet

A fictional message, written for this document.

05How it actually works

The conversation is not the product. It is how the product collects its inputs.

One turn, end to end

Facts are classified, not assumed

Six classes, enforced at the schema and database level rather than in wording. An accusation can never quietly become a fact through repetition – which is what makes the professional handover pack usable by a lawyer.

The context has a hard ceiling

The prompt cannot grow unbounded however long the case runs. The hundredth turn costs what the tenth did – a cost control, a latency control and a prompt-injection ceiling in one decision.

06Product principles

Eight rules treated as architectural requirements. Where an implementation choice threatens one, the principle wins.

1. Children before winning. No adversarial coaching for its own sake.
2. Safety before strategy. A dedicated layer, not a prompt suggestion.
3. Responsibility without judgement. He is not automatically right; she is not automatically wrong.
4. Action before information. One next best action, never a ten-point list.
5. Personalised before generic. Advice sharpens as the structured case grows.
6. Professional bridge, not replacement. It makes people better prepared to use professionals.
7. Facts are sacred. Six classifications, enforced in the schema.
8. Unknown is a valid answer. No manufactured certainty.

07Technology and architecture

Small, modern, low operational burden – and chosen so no single supplier can hold the product hostage.

Three decisions worth an investor’s attention

08Privacy, security and residency

This holds what a man tells nobody else, in the weeks he is least able to protect himself. Privacy is not a compliance exercise here. It is the reason he opens it at all.

Verification

Re-run against the live database on 2 September 2026: all seventeen tables carry row-level security keyed on the caller’s identity, and file storage is scoped to his own folder. It was allowed to go stale once, when attachments were added – and the project recorded it as stale rather than keep citing it.

Outstanding: a privacy impact assessment, a reviewed privacy policy, and a breach procedure – to confirm – legal review status and entity.

09Where the line is

The fastest way to destroy this is to let it drift into practising law, medicine or crisis care. The boundary is enforced in the system, not written on a page.

Three layers, in order, ahead of everything else

Verified live: on disclosure of suicidal ideation the assessment returns urgent, coaching stops, emergency and crisis contacts surface – and the system does not claim anyone has been contacted on his behalf.

What it will not help with

Written into the prompt, not left to the model’s judgement.

A real person, near him

Thirty-seven support services across every state and territory – crisis, mental health, family violence, legal aid, community legal, family relationships, parenting, child support and the court line. Each records how its number was checked.

10Build status and evidence

All seven build phases are complete. What matters is the distinction between what has been written and what has been exercised against a deployed environment with a real model behind it.

What live testing found that code review could not

API testing passed cleanly while four defects sat in the deployed product: the browser bundle pointed at the wrong database, the security policy blocked the app’s own start-up script, the AI wrote to the user in the third person in the most prominent sentence on screen, and every reply appeared twice – that one since the first commit.

All four are fixed and regression-tested. They are here because a memorandum that reports only successes says nothing about how a team finds problems.

Deliberate boundaries in the current build

• The short horizon shows at most three items per band – a product decision, not a technical cap.
• Burst limiting is per-instance; the durable control is the database-counted hourly quota.
• Professional review of the knowledge layer is manual by design at this stage.
• The brand mark is drafted and in the product; the identity beneath it is not finished.

11MarketHypothesis

The qualitative case is strong. The quantitative case is not yet built, and this section says so rather than filling the gap.

A high-volume, recurring life event with a twelve-month window of maximum need. The user is a separated Australian father, thirty to fifty-five, characteristically unwilling to ask a person for help – the trait that leaves the segment underserved, and the reason a private system reaches people that human-staffed services do not. Adjacent segments are deliberately deferred.

12Business modelHypothesis

No pricing is set and no billing exists. What is settled is the shape of the model and the cost floor beneath it.

13Route to marketProposed

He does not search for help and does not respond to being marketed to as someone who needs it. He is reached where he is already dealing with the separation.

14Competitive position

The honest framing: the underlying model is a commodity anyone can rent. Everything defensible sits in what surrounds it.

What is actually defensible

15Team and governance

A small delivery team that has shipped the MVP, and a governance layer that does not exist yet. The two should not be read as the same thing.

Governance, none of which is in place

16Risks and mitigations

17The raise

Terms are not settled. This is the shape the section will take.

Use of funds

What the project actually needs next, rather than a conventional split. Percentages to confirm.

1. Clinical and legal validation. Safety review, family law advisory, privacy impact assessment, insurance. The gate on launch, not a compliance afterthought.
2. Closing the commercial unknowns. Pricing research, a paid pilot through the professional channel, unit economics measured from live data.
3. Launch-readiness engineering. Billing, a distributed rate limiter, the operational tooling a paid product needs.
4. Channel development. Practitioner partnerships – slow, relationship-led, and the main determinant of reachable market.
5. Brand. The mark is drafted and in the product; the identity beneath it is not finished.

18Roadmap

Sequenced by what has to be true before the next thing is safe to do, not by calendar. Dates to confirm.

19Outstanding inputs

Every unsettled item in one place – the distance between this draft and a document that can be sent.

20Appendix