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RAG-Powered Creative Research Assistant: Instant Expertise for Every Project

Creatives waste 40% of billable time researching industries they're unfamiliar with—analyzing competitors, understanding client markets, gathering visual references. Each new project (fintech app, sustainable fashion brand, medical device) requires hours of Google/Pinterest rabbit holes before design begins. What if AI could deliver expert-level research in minutes?

App Concept

  • Input a creative brief or client description: "Design a website for a luxury EV charging startup"
  • AI research assistant uses RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to pull live data from competitor sites, trend reports, industry blogs
  • Generates comprehensive creative brief: market positioning, visual references, tone of voice, technical constraints
  • Diversified inspiration: Pyversity algorithm (from HN) ensures references aren't echo chambers—pulls from adjacent industries
  • Automated moodboards: Curates images, color palettes, typography from researched sources
  • Exports to Notion, Milanote, or PDF with citations for client presentations
  • Continuous learning: Saves research to personal knowledge base for future similar projects

Core Mechanism

  • Client brief parsing: Extracts industry, target audience, project type (web, brand, video, etc.)
  • Multi-source RAG pipeline: Scrapes competitor sites, Google Trends, Behance, Dribbble, industry publications
  • Semantic search: Finds non-obvious inspiration (e.g., medical device → Swiss watch precision aesthetics)
  • Result diversification (inspired by HN's Pyversity): Prevents homogeneous Pinterest-style outputs
  • AI summarization: Condenses 100+ sources into actionable insights (3-5 pages)
  • Visual reference clustering: Groups images by style, color, layout patterns
  • Competitive gap analysis: "All competitors use blue/tech aesthetics—consider warmth differentiation"
  • Integration with Figma, Adobe XD to import moodboards directly

Monetization Strategy

  • Freemium: 3 research briefs/month, basic sources (Google, Behance)
  • Pro tier ($49/month): Unlimited briefs, premium sources (trend reports, paywalled journals), API access
  • Agency tier ($199/month): Team workspaces, client white-label reports, custom knowledge bases
  • Enterprise: Industry-specific models (healthcare, finance, automotive), compliance screening
  • Per-report sales: $29 one-time for non-subscribers

Viral Growth Angle

  • Time-lapse videos: "48 hours of research condensed to 4 minutes with AI"
  • Before/after: "My Pinterest moodboard vs. AI's diversified research" comparison posts
  • Free tier produces such impressive briefs that creatives share with clients (branding the tool)
  • "Research roulette": Users share surprising cross-industry insights AI discovered
  • Agencies post client case studies: "Won the pitch because our research was 10x deeper"
  • Meme format: "Designer googling [industry] stock photos" vs "RAG assistant delivering expert brief"

Existing projects

  • Notion AI - General AI writing, not specialized creative research
  • Miro AI - Brainstorming tools, not automated research ingestion
  • Perplexity - AI search, not creative brief generation
  • Beautiful.ai - Presentation design, not research automation
  • Crayon - Competitive intelligence for marketing, not creative workflows

Evaluation Criteria

  • Emotional Trigger: Be prescient (impress clients with depth), limit risk (avoid design clichés), be first (outresearch competitors)
  • Idea Quality: Rank: 9/10 - HN's Pyversity validation shows demand for diversified RAG; time-savings ROI is obvious; creative research is painful
  • Need Category: Growth & Mastery Needs (faster learning curves), Recognition & Respect Needs (impress clients with expertise), Stability & Opportunity Needs (win more pitches)
  • Market Size: 30M+ creatives doing client work globally, average 10-20 projects/year = 300M+ potential research briefs annually
  • Build Complexity: Medium-high - Requires RAG pipeline, web scraping, vision models for image clustering, diversification algorithms
  • Time to MVP: 4-5 months with AI agents (basic RAG + brief template + Behance/Google scraping + PDF export)
  • Key Differentiator: First RAG platform purpose-built for creative research with diversification algorithms, not generic AI search