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Case Study / 042026
§ Case Study / 04 — OPAL

OPAL

A strategic analysis platform built on orchestration instead of headcount.

Role
Founder · Solo build
Year
2025 — Ongoing
Stack
Claude · multi-model routing · SEC EDGAR

§ 01The Situation

A conventional strategy engagement can cost $50K and take six weeks. OPAL started with a simpler question: how much useful first-pass analysis could software produce for less than a dollar?

§ 02The Bet

Nobody had built it because the people who understood the frameworks didn't build software, and the people who built software didn't understand the frameworks. That gap was the opportunity.

§ 03The Work

Built solo with Claude Code over a compressed window. The architecture is the product:
  1. Multi-model routing.Claude for reasoning passes, cheaper models for extraction and transforms. Cost discipline baked into the graph.
  2. Prompt orchestration across six strategic frameworks.Porter's Five Forces, SWOT, PESTEL, BCG, Ansoff, value chain. Each with its own prompt graph and validation path.
  3. SEC EDGAR integration for grounding.Filings are the source of truth. No hallucinated financials; every claim traces back to a document.
  4. Output validation layer.Structural and factual checks before anything reaches a user. The report either ships clean or it doesn't ship.
  5. Freemium funnel.Free preview → paid full report. Unit economics hold at the margin, not just in the pitch deck.
§ 03.5 — The architecture
INPUT → ROUTER → FRAMEWORK AGENTS → VALIDATION → SYNTHESIS → REPORT

§ 04The Outcome

opalai.systems is live, at $0.50/report unit economics.
Unit economics
$0.50
Per fully-generated report, at the margin.
Frameworks orchestrated
6
Porter's, SWOT, PESTEL, BCG, Ansoff, value chain.
Engineers on the team
0
Orchestration does the work headcount would have. The architecture is the team.

Multiple Claude Code Agent Skills shipped to GitHub. Public repos, production use.

§ 05 — Over Coffee

The SEC EDGAR integration broke twice in the first month. Rate limits the first time, a filing format I hadn't seen the second. I fixed both before the end of the week.

— Solo means the pager is mine too.