I spent the last year traveling and feeling purposeless after shutting down my last startup (Zage YC S’21) in Dec 2022. There were some obstacles I couldn’t overcome and decided to return investors 50% of their capital.

To afford (and justify to myself) traveling, I started consulting as an engineer and product designer. I started (https://backspace.nyc) and it was a good time. I (and some friends) built a handful of AI experiences and learned a lot along the way. The hardest thing about running a services business shipping and selling AI experiences powered by LLMs was agreeing on when the prompt was good enough and ‘working’. How do we ensure trust and safety? How do we make sure that we can terminate the project, get paid, and our clients trust and ‘kind-of’ know what their users will be served?

We ended up building a lot of tooling because the existing tooling (OSS and otherwise) wasn’t as mature as it is today. This tooling became more valuable than _backspace and I started Adaline. Adaline is a culmination of a year of building AI experiences with teams big and small and feeling the pains of iterating, evaluating, and monitoring LLM-powered experiences firsthand. I hope you like it.

I built it with the clients from _backspace and now work on it full-time. I’m slowly onboarding new teams building AI experiences. Please let me know if you think you might find it valuable here - https://go.adaline.ai/zjSC1m3.

Arsh