The Product Vision — What Are We Actually Building?

Right now, iris-courses is a personal AI-powered email course delivery system. Iris generates curriculum, sends daily emails, tracks progress, and maintains a static browsable site at iris-courses.pages.dev. That's actually a complete product kernel — most SaaS products start with far less. What you have: • Content generation engine (AI-produced curricula) • Email delivery infrastructure (Gmail API with OAuth) • A browsable course catalogue (Next.js static site) • User management foundations (iris-users.json + admin dashboard) • Scheduling system (NanoClaw) The gap between this and a commercial product is surprisingly small: authentication, payments, a proper backend, and distribution.

Before writing a line of product code, you need to be precise about what you're building. There are at least 3 distinct products here: PRODUCT A — THE NEWSLETTER COURSE PLATFORM: Users sign up, pick a course, get daily emails. Think 'Morning Brew meets Coursera'. Monetised via subscription ($9–29/month) or per-course ($19–49 one-time). PRODUCT B — THE B2B TRAINING TOOL: Companies buy access to run courses for their teams. AI generates custom curricula for onboarding, compliance, upskilling. $99–499/month per team. This is where Dark Ice Interactive's AI expertise becomes a moat. PRODUCT C — THE COURSE BUILDER PLATFORM: Sell access to the infrastructure itself — let others create and distribute email courses. Think 'ConvertKit + Kajabi but simpler and AI-native'. Of these, Product A is fastest to validate. Product B has the highest revenue potential for Dark Ice. Product C is the platform play. For this course, we focus on getting Product A to market and building toward B.