the Credit Action Center gives consumers the tools to resolve debt on their own terms. an AI-assisted letter builder walks them through their situation in plain language and recommends the right approach: pay-for-delete, reduced balance, payment plan, rate reduction, or cease contact. attorney-designed templates backed by 20+ years of experience. for consumers who want guidance before acting, paralegal consultations help them decide whether to settle, dispute, or explore other paths. the thesis: give people affordable, trustworthy tools and professional guidance without the predatory pricing model, and they will take control of their own financial recovery.
given meaningful technical debt, I negotiated with my engineering partner and CTO to adopt a hybrid approach: use Lovable to build customer-facing experiences quickly, while keeping all sensitive data in a simple AWS integration rather than in Lovable's backend. no PII in the frontend. all tokens, customer records, and payment data on our production systems. this let us move quickly in a regulated space: learn from real customer behavior first, then graduate proven components into the main codebase. I built this product myself, from concept to revenue-generating launch in under three months, solving across the full stack: consumer-facing UX for the letter builder and consultation flows. tokenized payment integration that lets paralegals charge post-consultation without re-collecting card data. webhook-driven lifecycle email automation: purchase confirmations, creditor response check-ins, and follow-up nudges. full analytics instrumentation across three funnels. and an AI-powered internal triage tool that helps paralegals route customers and generate consultation summaries. I also built Claude-based AI agent systems for internal operations: communications drafting, stakeholder navigation, and product intelligence. these are becoming the operating system for how the product org runs. key tradeoffs: 1) launched in 15 states first rather than waiting for full national clearance. state-by-state legal work, but product in market months earlier. 2) built in Lovable rather than waiting for engineering capacity. speed over long-term maintainability. prove value first, earn the investment to scale. 3) invested in paralegal tooling from day one. more scope upfront, but the human layer had to be high quality at launch. 4) monitored every consultation call in week one. operationally expensive, but it gave us real behavioral data to iterate in real time.
a consumer with $10K in debt can now address it for $50 instead of $2,500. the cross-functional orchestration is as much the product as the software: aligning 15+ people across product, design, engineering, marketing, legal/compliance, CX, and data around a compressed timeline in a resource-constrained environment. this is the kind of work I care most about: taking a broken, high-friction consumer problem, using AI and product judgment to simplify it, and shipping something real under tight constraints. building for people the financial system was not designed to serve.
