oll-write — Build-Out & Go-To-Market

Honest flag — read this first. This is after-/alongside-first-franc platform work. The humaniz.me money path stays P0 — nothing here jumps that queue. And within oll-write itself, the chargeable rung comes before the exotic features: we ship "the sidecar works in prod, gated behind CHF 9" (Rungs 0–2) before we ship gap-chips, voice-profile, or a second-brain product (Rungs 3–4). This is propose-only: a sequenced plan and a decision surface, not a mandate.

Two things are already truer than the demo shows. (1) oll-memory (PR #80, unmerged) already does PDF ingest, hybrid retrieval, ACL scoping, delete, and structured extraction — so half the "premium" roadmap is wiring, not building. (2) The real work is correctness plumbing — stable doc-ids, a relevance floor, retries, and routing generation through the one server that owns entitlement — because a writing tool whose citations can be wrong is worse than one with fewer features.

I · What we found in the code I · Product improvements, prioritized I · Supporting oll-am changes I · Sequenced build-out roadmap II · Segment priority + wedge II · Where each segment gathers II · 6 reachable personas II · Launch / submission targets II · 8 demo use cases II · Honest outreach angles

Part I — Build-Out (product + platform)

What we found in the code

Before proposing features, we read the two services. Two surprises: the memory backend already outruns the UI, and the real risks are correctness, not capability.

oll-memory already does more than the sidecar exposes

PR #80 (unmerged) ships capabilities the front end never calls — so several "premium" items are a wiring job, not a new service to build:

Already in the backend	What it unlocks for oll-write
base64 PDF / binary ingest	PDF ingest is frontend + BFF wiring only — the parse/chunk path exists.
hybrid dense + keyword (RRF) retrieval	Precision retrieval for both the proactive lane and chat — no re-implementation.
ACL-tag scoping	The per-user boundary is enforceable in the service, not just the BFF.
DELETE-by-`document_id`	A delete affordance + the upsert story for edited sources.
schema-locked `/api/extract`	Structured extraction powers gap-detection, style-profile, and onboarding summaries.

The read: PDF ingest, gap-detection and style-profile are mostly wiring, not new services. The scarce work is making retrieval trustworthy — which is the next block.

The real gaps — six risk cards

Ranked by how badly each hurts a writing product, where documents change constantly and a citation is a trust promise.

RISK 1 · correctness · highest

Stale chunks on edit

document_id is content-hash-derived — edit a source and it hashes differently, so old chunks orphan and linger. In a tool where docs change every save, retrieval slowly fills with stale, contradictory versions. The #1 correctness gap.

RISK 2 · correctness

No relevance floor → hallucinated citations

query always returns top_k and the prompt pushes the model to answer. A retrieval miss therefore becomes a plausible cited claim with a real-looking source chip. A green citation that points at nothing is worse than no answer.

RISK 3 · reliability

Memory chat has no retry loop

The editor ops carry a TRANSIENT retry/backoff; memory chat does not. Under Groq 429s, chat fails while the editor recovers — an uneven, demo-breaking reliability seam.

RISK 4 · monetization

Prod generation is a stub for chat

Chat calls oll-model directly with privacy:"any". So the 70b / Claude dial and metering never reach chat — the exact levers a paid plan sells. The dial is wired for editor ops, not answers.

RISK 5 · security · unverified

Per-user scoping is sound but unproven

The BFF pins collection = mem:user:{id} server-side (good design) — but there's no executable cross-tenant test, only a comment. A silent regression could re-open the IDOR and no build would fail.

RISK 6 · UX gap

Drag-to-cite isn't wired

ChunkCards are read-only — the "drag a memory into the draft as a citation" gesture (previously mis-reported as done) doesn't exist yet. The signature trust gesture is still a plan.

Product improvements, prioritized

Lean on the existing three-pane GUI — nothing here rebuilds the editor. Each row names the files that change so the estimate is honest.

Tier A — cheap wins that harden demo → product (days)

#	Improvement	What it fixes	Where it changes
A1	Stable caller-supplied `document_id` + upsert + delete affordance	Kills RISK 1 — edits replace, not duplicate. Corpus stays clean.	oll-memory ingest/upsert; BFF ingest route; left-pane delete button.
A2	Relevance floor + honest abstention (3 claim states: grounded / no-source / contradicted)	Kills RISK 2 — a miss says "I don't have this," never invents a citation.	oll-memory service floor; BFF chat compose; chat answer renderer.
A3	Retry / backoff on memory chat (lift the editor's `TRANSIENT` loop)	Kills RISK 3 — chat survives Groq 429s like the editor does.	BFF `handleChat`; shared retry util.
A4	PDF ingest — wiring only	Biggest-corpus formats accepted; backend already parses base64 PDF.	Frontend upload accept + BFF ingest passthrough. No backend change.
A5	First-corpus "what I found" onboarding (auto source summary + 3 suggested questions via `/api/extract`)	Never show an empty sidecar — NotebookLM's highest-leverage move.	BFF onboarding route over `/api/extract`; left-pane empty-state.

Tier B — the v2 set as concrete builds (1–2 weeks)

#	Build	The discipline that makes it trustworthy	Where it changes
B6	Inline citation Plate node	Mirror the repo's mention-kit; validate every citation maps to a retrieved chunk before render — no orphan chips.	Plate node/plugin; BFF citation validation.
B7	Draft-from-bullets	Outline → per-section retrieval constrained to that section's chunks → generate. Grounding is scoped, not global.	new write-service `/api/write/draft-grounded`; editor outline UI.
B8	Gap-chips	Decompose draft into claims via `/api/extract`, classify entailed / neutral / contradicted, calibrate by importance × gap to avoid alarm fatigue. Model on the repo's `margin-layer`.	BFF gap route; margin-layer render.
B9	Voice / style profile ("learn my voice")	Extract a style spec from the corpus, inject into every op. A reusable primitive humaniz can share.	write-service style-extract; op prompt assembly.
B10	Streaming	write-service already has SSE rewrite — extend to chat + long ops so answers arrive token-by-token.	write-service SSE; BFF stream passthrough; chat renderer.
B11	70b-for-chat dial	Route chat through write-service so the Groq ↔ Claude / 70b toggle finally reaches answers, not just edits.	write-service `/grounded-chat`; BFF `handleChat`.
B12	Folder-sync / incremental ingest	Lower priority — retention plumbing, not a wedge. Powers the Rung-4 second-brain expansion.	a sync worker + incremental upsert.

Service-quality essentials — do alongside

Retrieval precision

Shallow beats deep. Answer quality peaks at ~2 strong sources; deeper retrieval adds citation noise, not accuracy. Tune for precision, cap the source count.

Citations everywhere

Click-to-quote on every claim, and abstention as a first-class state — "no source for this" is a valid, visible answer, not a failure to hide.

Export-to-Markdown-with-citations

Retention and the answer to "is my corpus trapped?" — the objection NotebookLM, Notion and Craft all leave open. Own it: your notes and your citations walk out as plain .md.

Copy vs avoid

COPY — NotebookLM's auto source-guide + click-to-passage + ground-only prompt; Sudowrite's typed context cards + generate-then-refine chain + isolated style field; Notion's permission-aware retrieval (we already have it); Craft's chrome-kill focus + clean export.

AVOID — silent index failures; credit/metering anxiety that punishes feeding the corpus (meter generously — feeding is the value); stale-content contamination (add recency weighting); and treating a green citation as correctness — it's checkable, not correct. A citation says "here's the source," never "this is true."

Supporting oll-am platform changes

oll-write's build-out is also a platform build-out: every hardening lands a primitive other products reuse. Three tracks.

1 · oll-memory hardening

Caller-supplied stable document_id + upsert-by-id — the fix for RISK 1, in the service.
Embed-dim / provider guard — a nomic→other swap silently corrupts similarity. Add a boot check + a per-collection stamped dimension, so a mismatched embedder refuses to start rather than returning garbage.
Executable cross-tenant scoping test — build-failing (the house executable-arch-rules pattern), closing RISK 5.
Service-level relevance floor — so every caller (not just oll-write) gets honest abstention for free.
Chunk-count caps + a top_k ceiling, and prove the PDF path end-to-end.

2 · Deployment

Merge PR #80 through green CI → stand up oll-memory as its own Coolify app (Base Directory /services/oll-memory, Watch Paths, $PORT, X-Service-Token, alias oll-memory) + a private Neon oll_memory DB (pgvector, per ADR-008) + Ollama running nomic-embed-text (EMBED_PROVIDER=ollama, EMBED_DIM=768). The local hashed provider stays the CI / dev default so the pipeline needs no model download.

3 · Route generation through write-service in prod

Add POST /api/write/grounded-chat (and /draft-grounded) to oll-write's write-service. It verifies the Core JWT + plan, calls oll-memory /query, assembles the grounded prompt, generates via oll-model with the entitlement-appropriate model (Groq-8b free / 70b / Claude pro), applies metering + retry, and returns {answer, citations}. Then the BFF handleChat calls write-service instead of holding the oll-model token.

Why this is the keystone: it moves entitlement + the model dial + metering + retry to the one server that already owns them for editor ops. Chat stops being a special-cased stub and becomes just another metered, gated, retried op. RISKs 3 and 4 close together.

Reusable primitives — what each hardening banks

Primitive	Where it lives	What else it unlocks
Context-assembly	write-service `grounded-chat`	specview docs Q&A · a support bot over any product's help corpus.
Multi-tenant memory	oll-memory + the scoping test	"chat with your docs" for any oll.am product, drop-in.
Citation / provenance	BFF validation + Plate node	auditable, source-linked answers everywhere.
Structured extraction	`/api/extract`	gap-chips · style-profile · braindump→spec · a standalone data-extraction product.
Style / voice profile	write-service style-extract	humaniz "sound like me" — the honest personalization lever.
Folder / incremental ingestion	sync worker (Rung 4)	a "connect your Drive / Obsidian" second-brain product on the same stack.

Sequenced build-out roadmap

Five rungs. The chargeable rung (2) lands before the exotic set (3), and the platform product (4) is last — each rung ships something usable.

Make it real in prod

Merge #80 → deploy (Coolify + Neon oll_memory + Ollama nomic) → route memory chat through write-service /grounded-chat (entitlement + model dial + metering + retry).

Ship: the sidecar on live services with the Groq ↔ Claude / 70b dial + rate-limit resilience.

Trustworthy & correct

Stable document_id + upsert + delete · relevance floor + honest abstention · inline citation node with pre-render validation · executable cross-tenant test.

Ship: edits don't poison retrieval, no hallucinated citations, click-to-passage trust.

Onboarding & the chargeable hook

First-corpus "what I found" · PDF ingest wiring · export-with-citations · gate the 70b / Claude dial + grounded chat behind the CHF 9 Pro plan (usage-meter-paywall).

Ship: the oll-write dollar.

Compounding v2 (each also a primitive)

Voice / style profile · draft-from-bullets · gap-chips · streaming.

Ship: the differentiated writing studio + 3 reusable primitives banked.

Power-user / second-brain expansion

Folder-sync + package multi-tenant-memory + folder-ingestion so a new "chat with your Drive" product is a thin frontend on the same stack.

Ship: a second product born from oll-write's own plumbing.

Part II — Go-To-Market (who + where)

Segment priority — pain × reachability

Ranked by where the pain is sharpest and the room is reachable. Each carries its own wedge; the anti-patterns (anti-AI rooms, confidentiality traps) are named so we don't walk into them.

	Segment	Why here	The wedge
1	Researchers / academics PhDs + PKM / Obsidian power users	Best fit. The private "chat over my own notes / PDFs" conversation already happens around Obsidian Smart Connections — we're the missing writing half.	The editor that reads your own library while you write it up.
2	Authors / ghostwriters	Highest emotional pull post-Sudowrite / NaNoWriMo privacy backlash — but the most anti-AI / anti-promo rooms. Lead privacy-first, never "AI writing."	Your manuscript never leaves your computer.
3	Solo lawyers + grant writers	Narrower, highest willingness-to-pay, cleanest confidentiality story — on-device is a professional-responsibility argument.	A drafting aid you stay responsible for; nothing uploaded.
4	Consultants / agencies	Good pain (re-deriving decks from a scattered Drive), noisier — but strong paid-Slack targets to reach directly.	Re-derive the proposal from everything you've already written.

The one sentence to lead with everywhere: "a real editor where your private corpus is live context — indexing runs on-device, and you pay once instead of renting."

Where each segment gathers

Named rooms, not "post on social." The rule for the top two: complement, never attack the tool they already love (Smart Connections; local-Ollama rigs).

Segment	Named communities
Academics / PKM	r/PhD · r/GradSchool · r/AskAcademia · r/ObsidianMD · r/Zotero · r/AcademicWriting · Obsidian Forum "Share & showcase" + Discord (highest-fit) · Zotero Forums · Ness Labs · academic Bluesky starter packs · scholar.social / fediscience Mastodon · newsletters PKM Weekly · Ness Labs · The Effortless Academic. Earn into Obsidian Smart Connections users — complement, don't attack.
Authors / ghostwriters	r/selfpublish (best) · r/worldbuilding · r/fantasywriters · r/pubtips · r/KDP · Literature & Latte / Scrivener forum · KBoards · Sudowrite & NovelCrafter Discords (the BYOK / local-Ollama crowd) · Facebook 20BooksTo50K · Association of Ghostwriters · reviewers ALLi · Indie Author Magazine · Written Word Media.
Grant writers + lawyers	r/grantwriting · r/nonprofit · GPA / GrantZone · Learn Grant Writing · Freelance Grant Writers' Network (FB) · r/Lawyertalk · r/LawFirm · ABA GPSolo + SoloSez listserv · Lawyerist LAB · Legal.io Slack · LawyerSmack.
Consultants / agencies	r/consulting · r/managementconsulting · r/copywriting · paid Slacks Fractionals United (best fit) · The Copywriter Club · Superpath · Online Geniuses · Umbrex · IMC USA.

6 reachable personas

Real people, findable this week. Each hook leads with private / on-device + a real editor — never "AI writing."

Academic · beachhead

Priya — 3rd-year PhD

Pain: Lit review from a 150-PDF Zotero library; won't paste unpublished work into a cloud tool.
oll-write value: Ingest the whole library, write the review with related passages surfaced as she types, every claim cited to a PDF.
Where: r/PhD · r/Zotero · Obsidian Discord.

"Draft your lit review with your library as live context — the PDFs are embedded on your machine, nothing's uploaded."

PKM power-user

Marcus — postdoc, Obsidian

Pain: Has a local-RAG stack (Smart Connections) but no real writing surface on top of it.
oll-write value: The missing writing half — a proper editor that reads the same private vault.
Where: r/ObsidianMD · Obsidian Forum · PKM Weekly.

"You already retrieve locally — here's the editor that writes from it. Complements your vault, doesn't replace it."

Author · fiction

Maya — series author

Pain: Continuity anxiety across a long series; won't upload the manuscript after the Sudowrite scare.
oll-write value: Ingest the whole series, ask "did I change the captain's eye colour?", write forward with canon on hand.
Where: r/fantasywriters · NovelCrafter Discord · 20BooksTo50K.

"A continuity check that never uploads your manuscript — the index lives on your disk."

Ghostwriter · NDA

Daniel — book ghostwriter

Pain: Hours of NDA'd client interview transcripts; cloud AI is contractually off-limits.
oll-write value: Ground each chapter in the transcripts, cite the exact quote, keep it all local.
Where: Association of Ghostwriters · r/selfpublish.

"Write the chapter from the interviews — cited to the transcript, and the transcript never leaves your laptop."

Grant writer

Maria — freelance grants

Pain: 5–8 clients; reuses winning-proposal language, some embargoed; can't pool it in a shared cloud tool.
oll-write value: A private corpus of past wins; draft new proposals that reuse the language that landed.
Where: r/grantwriting · Freelance Grant Writers' Network · Learn Grant Writing.

"Reuse the language that won — from your own archive, kept private per client."

Solo attorney · high WTP

David — transactional lawyer

Pain: A precedent library unsearchable by meaning; ethics rule out upload / training.
oll-write value: Semantic search + drafting over his own precedents, on-device, with citations he can verify.
Where: SoloSez listserv · ABA GPSolo · r/LawFirm.

"Draft from your own precedent library, searchable by meaning — on-device, you stay responsible for every line."

Launch / submission targets

This-week order. Social proof compounds — so the big-swing surfaces (Product Hunt) come last, after the lasting boards and directories have banked evidence.

Show HN — an honest, plain title (no marketing copy). The first real test with a claim-inspecting crowd.
Free lasting boards — Uneed · MicroLaunch · Fazier · Peerlist.
Pay-once directories — NoSubscription.org · Buy Once Software · Pay Once Alternatives · PayOnceApps · the recurring HN "buy once" threads. This is our home turf: "pay once" is the positioning.
Evergreen SEO — SaaSHub · Launching Next · BetaList.
AI directories — There's An AI For That · Toolify · Futurepedia.
GitHub PRs — awesome-pkm · awesome-ai-tools.
Authentic community posts — r/SideProject · r/ObsidianMD · Indie Hackers · #buildinpublic.
Newsletter pitches — Ben's Bites · Recomendo / Cool Tools · TLDR AI.
Product Hunt — last, after banking social proof from the steps above.

8 demo use cases

Script-ready: ingest → task → what surfaces → the punchline. Every one ends on the same three words: nothing uploaded / on-device / cited.

PhD lit review

Ingest a 150-PDF paper library

Task draft the "prior work" section

Surfaces related findings as you type, each cited to a PDF

Nothing uploaded · embedded on-device · every claim cited.

Ghostwriter chapter

Ingest interview transcripts

Task write chapter 3 in the client's voice

Surfaces the exact quotes that ground each beat

Transcripts stay local · grounded · quote-cited.

Series continuity check

Ingest the whole series manuscript

Task "did the captain's eye colour change?"

Surfaces the two passages that disagree

Manuscript never leaves the disk · cited to the page.

Grant reuse

Ingest past winning proposals

Task draft a new narrative section

Surfaces the winning language to reuse

Per-client private · grounded · source-linked.

Lawyer precedent draft

Ingest a precedent library

Task draft an indemnity clause

Surfaces the closest prior clauses by meaning

On-device · cited · lawyer stays responsible.

Consultant proposal

Ingest old decks + notes

Task re-derive a proposal

Surfaces the reusable framing from past work

Your Drive stays yours · grounded · cited.

PKM writing surface

Ingest an Obsidian vault export

Task write an essay from your notes

Surfaces related notes proactively as you write

Same private vault · the missing editor · cited.

Agency brand voice

Ingest a brand's published content

Task onboard the voice, draft new copy

Surfaces a style profile + on-brand phrasing

Client corpus private · voice-matched · cited.

Honest outreach angles

Per-segment, participate-first, disclosure-always. The caution below is the guardrail for the whole campaign.

Academics / PKM

Answer real "chat with my PDFs privately" threads; disclose authorship; complement Smart Connections; show the local-embeddings architecture — this crowd inspects claims.

Authors

Lead "your manuscript never leaves your computer", never "AI writing." Ride the Sudowrite / NaNoWriMo distrust with a factual local-embeddings post.

Grant writers

Share a real "reuse winning language" workflow — a genuinely useful post, product mentioned in passing.

Lawyers

Professional-responsibility framing; never imply any bypass of review or duty — a drafting aid the lawyer stays responsible for.

Consultants

Participate-first in paid Slacks; offer a lifetime / free tier via the deals channel where those rooms expect it.

The caution. On writer / academic rooms and HN, lead with "private + real editor + you own it" and a plain, honest title — never "AI writing," never marketing copy. The ethics line holds across every segment: oll-write is an honest writing tool the author stays responsible for, not a way to dodge review, disclosure, or duty.

oll-write — Build-Out & Go-To-Market · propose-only · 2026-07-05. Grounded in the feature docs (what ships today), the product thesis (the empty market cell), and the integration plan (how memory welds in). Feeds Backlog + Strategy.

Honest sequencing: the humaniz.me first franc stays P0; oll-write's own chargeable rung (Rung 2) precedes the exotic features (Rungs 3–4). A real editor where your private corpus is live context — indexing on-device, pay once.