Ambasdr
Designing the identity layer between people and AI.
An AI-powered identity layer for professionals, creators, and founders. One place that explains who someone is, what they do, and why it matters, and can answer for them even when they're not in the room.
First principles
Modern identity has outgrown the tools built to represent it.
A person isn't just a job title, a resume, or a single profile anymore. Someone can be a designer, a founder, a photographer, an investor, and a community builder all at once, and each of those usually lives in a different place.
LinkedIn favors work history, Instagram a visual identity, TikTok personality, a portfolio a few projects, GitHub code, Calendly your calendar. There was never a shortage of information. The problem was that every platform flattened someone into a narrow slice, and none of them explained how the slices fit together. A designer who's also a founder can't show both without looking unfocused. A founder misses inbound because there's no single place that tells the whole story.
The opportunity was never to replace those platforms. It was to build a layer above them: one place that pulls the fragments together and can actually be talked to. Ambasdr sits between a person and everyone trying to understand them.
A resume documents what you have done. An Ambasdr explains why it matters.
Don't replace the places people already use to represent themselves. Create the layer that explains how those places connect.
Research & validation
Direction was shaped through 450+ conversations.
The direction came out of conversations with recruiters, creators, professionals, influencers, hiring managers, VCs, beta testers, and waitlist users, not one narrow persona. The same pattern showed up across all of them: people weren't struggling to present information, they were struggling because it was scattered across too many places.
Plenty of them juggled several resumes, portfolios, and audiences at once. Those sides of a person aren't separate in real life, but the tools made them separate online. People wanted to be understood without shrinking down to a single title.
What the research kept surfacing
Multidisciplinary people couldn't show how their work connected
They knew what they'd done. What frustrated them was how hard it was to show why it all belonged together. That pushed the product toward context instead of categories.
Everyone wanted an assistant, not just a profile
Independent work comes with overhead: intros, the same questions again and again, digging up the right link, following up. People wanted something that could stand in for them when they weren't around.
The hiring use case was too narrow
Recruiters were interested, but the stronger signal came from people who wanted to network, collaborate, build a brand, and understand how they were perceived.
Product pivots
Hiring tool → identity platform
People wanted to represent themselves across networking, collaboration, creative work, and business, not just employment.
Static profile → conversational interface
A nicer profile still left visitors to interpret everything on their own. Conversation became the main way people discovered someone.
File upload → AI teaching
Files without context make for a shallow picture. Onboarding turned into a place where users explain why each resource matters.
Voice as core → voice as enhancement
People were into voice, but a structured profile was more useful day to day. Voice became a way to show personality, not the whole interaction.
Product principles
Representation over generation
The AI shouldn't make up a plausible answer. It should represent the real person behind the profile, and admit when it doesn't know.
Context is more valuable than content
A file shows what someone did. It rarely shows what mattered. That's why the product grew from uploading files into teaching the AI what they mean.
Conversation is discovery
People get to know each other by asking questions. So questions became the interface. The profile acts less like a brochure and more like a conversation.
Users remain the source of truth
The model never owns the user's identity. The owner defines what's accurate, what matters, the tone, and what's public.
Designing an AI that represents people
The hard part wasn't answering questions. It was speaking for someone.
Most AI interfaces just answer prompts. Ambasdr had a touchier job: it was speaking for a real person, which raised the stakes on trust. Visitors had to trust the answers were useful. Owners had to trust the AI wasn't putting words in their mouth. And the product had to make clear the person always had the final say.
Every major feature traces back to four questions: Can the AI represent me accurately? Can I control what it knows? Can visitors trust the answers? Can I keep improving how I come across?
Decision log
The AI should admit uncertainty
In most AI products, an unanswered question feels like failure. For Ambasdr, a wrong answer was much worse. When it doesn't know, it says so, and nudges the owner to fill the gap in their profile.
Every file needed context
Uploading isn't where the intelligence happens. One project might show leadership, taste, technical depth, or community pull, but without context the AI can summarize a file without grasping what it means. So each resource carries a label, an intent, and a link to the person's identity.
Mobile became the authoring tool
Managing your Ambasdr should be as quick as sending a text. Mobile stopped being a companion app and became the fastest place to update information, manage resources, and tune how the AI represents you.
Plan management stayed on the web
Free, Pro, and Premium tiers were kept on the web to sidestep App Store and Play Store payment cuts. It wasn't only a pricing call. It shaped where parts of the product could live.
Teaching instead of uploading
Onboarding turned into a way to teach the AI, not just fill out a form.
Across roughly 15 versions of onboarding, tested with a community of 50 to 100 people, it became clear a setup flow wasn't enough. Ambasdr wasn't collecting information. It was learning how to represent someone.
So onboarding had to get at deeper questions: what does this person want to be known for, what topics should the AI understand, which resources matter most and why, what should it avoid saying, what tone should it strike, and what should visitors be prompted to ask. That's why Teach Your Ambasdr became one of the most important parts of the product.
Knowledge architecture
A living system, not a static page.
The toughest problem was working out how all these documents relate, and how each should shape the AI behind the scenes. Ambasdr ties together profile data, files, links, resource context, instructions, tone, visitor questions, AI responses, conversation summaries, and signals about what's missing.
A visitor asks a question. The AI answers if it has enough to go on. If it doesn't, that gap becomes feedback. The owner adds context, uploads a resource, or updates instructions, and the profile gets better the more it's used.
Those conversations run both ways. For the owner they become analytics, top questions, recurring topics, and prompts about what's missing, a read on how they're coming across and what their audience wants most.
Role & ownership
From product design into founder-level product ownership.
As a co-founder on a three-person team, I owned product and AI UX end to end, from research and information architecture through onboarding, mobile, and prompt and context design, while sharing strategy, pricing, and go-to-market with my co-founders.
On a team that small, design, business, and engineering decisions were tightly linked. The work was less about handing off screens and more about shaping the product with the team, continuously.
Outcome
Approaching launch with a validated waitlist and a product still evolving.
After about a year, Ambasdr grew from an early hiring hypothesis into a broader platform for professional and creative representation: 500 on the waitlist, around 20 beta users, 450+ research conversations, 15 onboarding iterations, a test community of 50 to 100 people, and a product spanning web, iOS, and Android.
The direction is sharper now. Ambasdr isn't about making another profile. It's about giving people a living representation of who they are, what they do, and why it matters.
Designing an AI product taught me that representation is a trust problem.
Reflection
The hardest part of Ambasdr wasn't getting the AI to respond. It was making sure each response felt accurate, controlled, and true to the person behind it. AI usually gets talked about in terms of speed and automation. But once it's speaking for someone, the real question is trust.
If Ambasdr works ten years from now, the proof won't be that everyone uses AI. It'll be that people can show up as their full professional, creative, and entrepreneurial selves in one place, instead of being boxed in by LinkedIn, Linktree, resumes, portfolios, or a pile of context-free links.