Founder · AI Product
PeakProfile
Building an AI-powered product that helps mountaineers make better decisions through structured experience data.
AI ProductTrust SystemsDecision SupportUser Research
At a glance
20
Early users
30+
Discovery interviews
3
AI prototypes tested
MVP in development
Status
Overview
PeakProfile helps mountaineers reason about route choice, conditions and personal risk profile. It is my own product — a place to practise discovery, model behaviour and AI evaluation end-to-end.
Problem
Mountaineering decisions are taken under uncertainty, with information scattered across forums, weather services and personal experience. Off-the-shelf chatbots hallucinate exactly where the cost of being wrong is highest.
Discovery
- —20+ interviews with alpinists, guides and SAR volunteers
- —Diary study of how plans change in the 48 hours before a climb
- —Mapped the decision tree from objective to turnaround time
Constraints
- —Tiny team, long iteration cycles, real-world consequences
- —Must never feel authoritative about safety
- —Cold-start data problem
Product strategy
- —Decision support, not decisions: the user is always in the loop
- —Ground every AI response in cited, structured sources
- —Invest early in evaluation so quality is measurable
Solution
01
Route briefing assistant grounded in conditions and route data
02
Personal risk profile that adapts suggestions over time
03
Post-trip reflection capture to grow the dataset
Engineering
Set up an evaluation harness before the second model change. Every prompt and retriever update is scored against a frozen set of realistic scenarios.
Lessons learned
- —Evaluation infrastructure is the real product surface for AI
- —Trust comes from restraint, not from confidence
- —Domain experts unlock orders of magnitude in quality
Reflection
"PeakProfile is where I get to be founder, PM and user at once. It keeps my thinking honest because the stakes are real."