business
Market & Personas
Who feels the pain hardest, and what their day looks like with Manifoldone.
Three personas
We are not building for everyone. We are building for three distinct people who feel the same pain — invisible parallelism — for different reasons.
Persona 1 · Director of a small AI-native team (3–10 people)
Today she is shipping at 3x the speed of her previous team because everyone uses Claude Code. She also notices that her team is solving the same problems three times because nobody can see anyone else’s prompts. She wants the speed without the duplication. She is the buyer of the early Phase 1 product and the most likely champion of Phase 2.
Persona 2 · Tech Director at a 50-person game studio
He runs Perforce. His team is in office because Perforce-on-VPN is unusably slow. He has been told he can’t hire the best people because they want remote. He sees Manifoldone as a way to keep the source on-prem (which his security team requires) while letting senior people work from anywhere. He is the entry into the game studio segment in Phase 2.
Persona 3 · Distributed startup founder
Her team is in three time zones. The cofounder in Berlin can’t run a useful build of the iOS app because the build environment lives on a Mac mini in San Francisco. She wants that Mac mini to be reachable. Latency-free remote dev — the moat we don’t lead with — is exactly her problem.
What they have in common
All three are trying to do something that would be impossible without AI agents and is degraded by the agents being privately scoped. The wedge is the same; the marketing varies.
What they don’t have in common
| Persona 1 | Persona 2 | Persona 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| VCS | Git | Perforce | Git |
| Buying authority | Self | Team budget | Self |
| Sensitivity to security | Medium | Very high | Medium |
| Team size | 3–10 | 20–500 | 5–20 |
| Phase fit | 1 → 2 | 2 | 1 → 2 |
Why we lead with persona 1
Persona 1 ships fastest, has the lowest sales cycle, and tells other people about tools they like. Phase 1 is built for them. Personas 2 and 3 unlock Phase 2.