Arcane
AI Intelligence Agent for Decision-Makers
Built end-to-end as part of a week-long hackathon at CMU.
An AI agent that scans the internet on your behalf and delivers a single, high-signal news update daily directly to your inbox.
Context
Built end-to-end as part of a week-long hackathon at CMU named Prodhacks. Focused on user research, problem framing, product strategy, and rapid MVP execution.
The Problem
Staying informed today is cognitively expensive. Users actively struggling with information fatigue often:
- Check multiple platforms and aggregators daily.
- Open several articles on the same topic but abandon them halfway.
- Feel constant anxiety about missing something critical.
- Suffer from decision fatigue due to information abundance.
Designed and shipped a functional MVP during the hackathon.
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AI-driven source scanning workflow -
Relevance filtering and cross-source synthesis logic -
Personalized email digest delivery system
Product Approach
Agent-led, not feed-based. Designed to make decisions, not maximize engagement.
Optimized for Clarity over Clicks, and Signal over Volume.
Constraint forces quality: delivering only one update per day.
Outcomes
Shipped MVP
Built the full system independently in under a week.
Validated Demand
Confirmed problem hypothesis through user interviews.
Clear Roadmap
Defined monetization and scalable personalization strategies.
Research & Validation
The gap in the market
The pain isn't reading. The pain is filtering.
During research at Prodhacks, interviews revealed that professionals don't need more content. They need Signal, Context, and Impact. The majority of interviewed professionals indicated a strong preference for a single, reliable daily digest over continuous feeds.
Validation Data
User Journey
The broken loop before Arcane
Intent
Desire to stay informed on industry trends.
Hunt
Jump blindly across multiple sources and aggregators.
Fatigue
Scroll through filler content, mentally filtering noise, leading to fatigue.
Arcane compresses that entire journey into one structured delivery.
System Architecture
High-Level Workflow
1. Input & Pipeline
- System receives user interests via natural language prompt.
- Agentic pipeline scans trusted sources and aggregates raw data.
2. Filtering & Synthesis
- Prioritizes noise vs. signal based on explicit user profile.
- AI compresses multiple angles into one coherent briefing.
3. Impact & Delivery
- Generates reasoning on *why* this update matters to the user.
- Scheduled daily push directly to the user's email inbox.
Market & Strategy
Positioning the product for sustainable value creation over raw engagement.
Time & Confidence
Arcane does not compete on content ownership. It competes entirely on time saved, clarity delivered, and decision confidence.
Ad-Supported Growth
Establish habit loop, build user trust, and scale the distribution network via zero-friction entry.
Premium Subscription
Unlock advanced utility for power users: deep personalization, multi-topic granular tracking, and an ad-free experience.
B2B Expansion
Enterprise-level digests utilizing shared organizational context injected into team-wide intelligence reports.
Live Project
Experience Arcane
Explore the MVP live and see how a constrained daily intelligence digest looks in practice.
Constraint increases trust.
By artificially limiting output to one item during the Prodhacks build, users trusted the curation algorithm more than if it had given them five. Signal prioritization is the true product moat.