User Personas

P1 — Indie SaaS Solo Founder ("Maya")

27-38, technical (writes code), 1-3 yrs in.
Stack: macOS, VS Code, Cursor / Claude Code, Notion, Linear, Mercury, Stripe, GitHub.
MRR $2K-$30K, no employees, considering first hire.
Spends Saturday on bookkeeping + investor update; resents both.
JTBD: "Give me a quiet 30 minutes every morning that closes the loop on what happened yesterday so I can ship today without re-deriving context."
Activation moment: lycato morning shows yesterday's burn line + one VAT obligation due in 9 days + a proposed daily digest. Founder edits a typo, merges, closes laptop.
Wedge feature: investor-update agent. Saves 2-3 hours/month, immediate ROI.

P2 — Technical Co-founder ("Theo") of a 2-3 person team

Same tech profile as Maya. Co-founder is non-technical.
Wants a shared "company brain" that doesn't depend on Notion.
Pain: co-founder hates git. Cockpit must hide it.
JTBD: "Let me drive the repo; let my co-founder approve from the cockpit without learning git."
Activation moment: opens cockpit Review page, sees the diff, clicks Approve. Branch gets .founder/reviews/proposal-x.yml. Theo merges from CLI.
Wedge: cockpit Review surface + approval markers.

P3 — Power-user AI tinkerer ("Aman") — early adopter / advocate

Has GBrain / DiffMem / Obsidian + Claude Code MCP setups bookmarked.
Wants a turnkey product that codifies the pattern.
JTBD: "Stop me from re-implementing this. Give me the canonical repo convention."
Activation moment: clones repo, runs lycato init --demo, walks the Memory page, sees  markers and the policy file.
Wedge: AGPL + opinionated repo layout + provenance.

P4 — Bootstrapped 1-of-1 SaaS ("Lin")

Non-technical solo founder; uses Zapier / Make / n8n today.
Pay band: $200-$500/mo on tools willingly.
JTBD: "Replace the bookkeeper + the investor-update writer + the social media virtual assistant. Show me a number."
Activation moment: hosted cockpit, BYO Mercury + Stripe keys, first month of reconcile + investor update generated.
Wedge: hosted plan + the reconcile/investor-update agents.
Caveat: Lin will probably never use the CLI. Cockpit must be 100% feature-complete for this persona.

P5 — Fractional COO / Operator ("Riya")

Operates 3-5 client companies.
Wants a per-client repo with consistent shape.
JTBD: "Give me one folder per client where I see runway, obligations, decisions, and proposed agent work."
Activation moment: forks Lycato to template repo, scripts lycato init per client.
Wedge: AGPL + repo-as-template + multi-repo workflow.

Persona priority for v0.1.0-v0.3.x

P1 (Maya) and P3 (Aman) drive adoption first — they tolerate alpha, they love git, they want self-host. P2 (Theo) opens the door to two-seat usage and validates the cockpit. P4 (Lin) and P5 (Riya) become tractable once hosted lands at v0.4.x.