Founder-Led Product Development · 2014–2026
pagarii
A verified, video-first dating platform built on one honest introduction a day — in active development and pre-launch, currently in a waitlist phase ahead of the Pittsburgh launch.
Danita Walton — founder, product manager, and delivery lead, building pagarii independently end-to-end: she owns the spec, the review pipeline, and the agents building it, not just a supporting role on someone else's product. Marketing site · conversational onboarding · daily-loop product.
I started by measuring the market, not guessing at it.
I analyzed 242,000 user reviews across 40+ dating apps using cluster analysis and topic modeling, and ran surveys, interviews, and focus groups with 350+ prospective users to test concepts and develop pricing assumptions.
Average satisfaction across every dating app in the study. The category isn't losing on features — it's losing on outcomes. That gap is the entire product thesis.
iOS App Store & Google Play reviews · November 2022 · n = 242,000
One verified intro a day, closed out by a real meeting.
The Discover feed awakening · the daily intro reveal. Recordings of the live pre-launch build.
Research first, then structure, then build.
Measured the category before designing anything
242,000 reviews and 350+ user conversations established where the market actually fails people, and what they would pay for instead.
Made documentation the source of truth
378 versioned documents govern what gets built; nothing ships that contradicts canon.
Put a review gate in front of every build item
An independent technical review and a separate design lane, both before implementation.
Governed research reuse with a documented consent gate
A 2016 research archive re-verified in 2026 across 25 subjects; 18 cleared for reuse, 7 excluded pending re-consent.
From marketing site to daily loop, one continuous thread.
Concierge-first marketing site
With a working chatbot hero.A 20+ screen conversational onboarding
Application, identity verification, video profile, payment — as one continuous chat thread.Daily-loop prototype
An Awakening Discover feed, a daily intro reveal, and the RSVP flow that closes it.Screening before any intro
Identity, liveness, and criminal-history/watchlist screening before any member receives an intro.Governed backend
58 versioned database migrations and six serverless edge-function services, with CI security checks.
Conversational onboarding · the daily intro reveal · the awakened Discover feed · the homepage.
The live pre-launch marketing site on desktop.
The letters of the wordmark act out the product.
A walkthrough of the whole promise: verification as a welcome, an introduction arriving like a letter, and an ending where nobody swipes away — they leave together. The two dots of the pagarii wordmark become the two people.
Directed end to end across seven scenes, in more than a dozen rounds of review. Silent — no audio track.
A spec repo, a review pipeline, and agents in parallel.
A 378-document versioned spec repo as single source of truth.
A Claude + OpenAI cross-model review pipeline gating every build item.
Claude Code agents running in parallel across four repositories, merged back into canon under her direction.
Twelve Labs and Whisper in the cloud; fully local py-feat/MediaPipe pipelines so no footage leaves her machine.
The brand film above was produced the same way. She art-directed a character rig through one generative model and generated the scenes through a second, then held every generation against a written QC checklist and rejected takes until they met spec — more than a dozen rounds. Where the tools couldn't hold the standard, she routed around them: the letterform scenes are produced deterministically in code, because generative video can't keep typography stable. Direction, QC gates, and picking the right tool for each shot — the same operating model as the rest of the build.
pagarii is currently in progress and not yet launched — the site shown is a live pre-launch waitlist build, not a finished public product.