Introducing Synthetic Users, Customers, and Personas

A synthetic user is an LLM agent calibrated to a real reader persona that can navigate your product, read your copy, and tell you what is wrong before a real customer does. Here is how to build them, where they break, and why your feedback loop is six weeks too long.

I had over 40 CxOs review this post tonight before I shipped it. A CTO at a $4.1B financial services company. A CFO at a $380M ARR SaaS company. A CISO at a $45B regional bank. A VP of Engineering at a Series C startup. Four Chief People Officers, one at a publicly traded enterprise, one at a PE-backed manufacturer, one at a $6.8B insurance holding company with unionized claims processors, and one at an 85-person AI-native startup in Brooklyn. They read the drafts, gave me specific feedback, told me what made them want to close the tab. I revised the post four times based on their objections.