The Challenge
Political fundraising is broken. Campaigns spend enormous time crafting emails, testing subject lines, and managing donor lists. Most of that work is repetitive and could be automated—but existing tools weren't built for the unique constraints of political communication.
Mike Nellis, founder of Authentic.org, saw the opportunity. He wanted to build an AI platform that could generate compliant, on-brand fundraising content at scale. The problem: he needed to go from idea to working product fast enough to catch the next election cycle.
What We Built
We partnered with Quiller from December 2022 through their public launch at Netroots Nation in 2023. The engagement covered the full product development lifecycle:
Discovery phase. Four weeks of research to validate the AI approach, understand compliance requirements, and map the competitive landscape. We interviewed campaign managers, tested LLM capabilities, and identified the specific pain points worth solving.
Product design. User flows, information architecture, and interface design that balanced power with simplicity. Campaign staff needed to generate content quickly without becoming AI experts.
Technical build. Custom AI models fine-tuned on political fundraising content. A content library that learns from campaign performance. Compliance guardrails built into the generation process.
Launch support. From beta testing with early customers through public announcement. We helped prepare materials, handle feedback, and iterate quickly on user issues.
The Result
Quiller launched to strong reception at Netroots Nation, earning a "Best New Feature" nomination. The platform now serves progressive campaigns across the country, reducing the time from brief to published email from hours to minutes.
The fundraising success speaks to market fit: $1.2M pre-seed round closed in June 2023, with over 200 organizations on the waitlist at launch.
More importantly, the product works. Campaigns report spending less time on routine content while maintaining (and often improving) their fundraising performance.