portfolio Case Study: Cheevo

PRODUCT CONCEPT · BRAND · VOICE UX · LAUNCH

From hand-drawn duck to public voice experience

Summary

I conceived, branded, built, tested, and launched a voice-first app that lets people send video-game-style achievements for real life victories. The public MVP uses LiveKit to transform a sender’s written context into a personalized spoken ceremony without requiring either person to create an account.

Cheevo demonstrates how I work when no playbook exists: identify the emotional hook, define the smallest experience that proves it, learn the necessary tools, build the system, observe where real behavior breaks the plan, and keep iterating until the delight is supported by operational discipline.

THE idea

Video games are excellent at marking progress. Earning achievements that are worth nothing outside of the game inspire players to push themselves to reach higher heights. Real life, not so much. Cheevo gives friends a way to recognize the victories that never come with trophies or fanfare: leaving a toxic relationship, earning a promotion, surviving a terrible week, enforcing a boundary, even doing all of the laundry AND putting it all away. In one sitting! With Cheevo, I wanted to bring the spirit of camaraderie and the motivation of gamification to everyday accomplishments.

The product needed to feel personal without becoming solemn, theatrical without becoming cumbersome, and technically impressive without asking users to understand the machinery underneath it.

I am not a software engineer; I used AI-assisted development to implement the experience, while personally owning all product decisions, interaction logic, copy, brand, testing, and iteration that made the technology useful.

MY ROLE

·     Product concept and MVP definition

·     Brand identity, naming, tone, and hand-drawn mascot direction

·     Sender and recipient journey design

·     Conversation design and agent instructions

·     LiveKit Agent Builder configuration and model/voice evaluation

·     AI-assisted web implementation in ChatGPT Work/Sites

·     Hands-on QA, failure diagnosis, iteration, accessibility improvements, and public launch

The experience

1.    A sender enters the recipient, achievement title, reason, presentation style, and delivery email.

2.    Cheevo creates a unique shareable achievement link and prepares an email draft in the sender’s own email application.

3.    The recipient opens the link without creating an account and accepts the achievement.

4.    The written award packet is delivered to the LiveKit agent only after the agent is fully connected.

5.    Cheevo generates and performs a personalized ceremony in the requested style.

6.    The complete proclamation appears onscreen for muted users, accessibility, rereading, and screenshots.

7.    The audio session closes automatically after the ceremony; the written award remains visible.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Instant delight: The sender should understand the joke and the value before being asked to do any work.

No account wall: Neither sender nor recipient needs a ChatGPT account or a Cheevo login.

No haunted microphone: The recipient microphone is disabled. Cheevo receives structured text, performs once, and disconnects.

Sound is additive, not required: The full ceremony is written onscreen and remains after the audio ends.

Privacy by restraint: The MVP does not use a public achievement database. Award data travels in the shareable link; the recipient email is excluded from it.

TECHNICAL SPECS

Voice orchestration: LiveKit Agents using an STT–LLM–TTS pipeline

Language model: Gemma 4 31B for ceremony generation

Speech services: Deepgram transcription and Aura-2 voice during MVP testing

Web experience: ChatGPT Work/Sites with a no-login public sender and recipient flow

Delivery: Unique URL plus a sender-controlled prewritten email draft

Brand asset: Original duck drawing and crown drawn by Reagan Pfifer, Duck coloring done by London Mace

the testing process

The first concept worked quickly. The product worked because the testing did not stop there.

Agent repeated the intake questions → Changed the flow so the sender’s completed fields are passed as a structured award packet and the agent is instructed to perform immediately.

The agent spoke to the sender instead of the recipient → Separated sender creation from recipient delivery and made the shareable link the center of the experience.

The microphone kept listening after the ceremony → Disabled the recipient microphone and added an automatic post-performance disconnect.

The award could be heard but not read → Mapped the agent transcript correctly and displayed the full proclamation onscreen.

The transcript disappeared after disconnect → Persisted the completed proclamation so recipients can reread or screenshot it.

The first session sometimes started slowly → Added immediate written context and explicit preparation language so a cold start does not look like failure

RESULT

·     Working public product, not a static concept or design mockup

·     Distinct original brand and character voice

·     Complete sender-to-recipient journey

·     Voice, written transcript, privacy-aware session behavior, and screenshot-friendly final state

·     A clear roadmap

SHIPPED  A public, functioning MVP that lets anyone create, send, receive, hear, and retain a personalized achievement ceremony with no Cheevo account and no ChatGPT sign-in.

The roadmap

·     Direct transactional email delivery with sender verification

·     Downloadable and shareable visual achievement cards

·     Replay controls and optional voice choices

·     Opt-in achievement history and private recipient collections

·     Instrumented funnel analytics for creation, send, open, accept, and replay

·     Content moderation, abuse controls, and production-grade data policies