Building human-centered A.I.

Unleash the power of trust and predictions by embedding intelligence in the product experience.

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Supported by one of New York's best incubators we are building MARCIE, an AI stack for long form content.

NextCorps - NextCorps startup incubation services provide valuable support to early-stage technology companies, including mentorship, education, access to investors, and resources. Source: https://nextcorps.org/incubation/
MARCIE helps writers save time and money. https://marcie.app

Explainable Intelligence

Generative AI has changed the expectations of how systems should interact with humans. However, the new methods are wildly inaccurate. If you can't rely on predictions, you can't trust the system. We mitigate these shortcomings by embedding explainable intelligence in the product itself. Three core data principles guide our development.

Trust.

We protect property rights and copyrights by making it a fundamental requirement of our product design.

Ease of use.

We minimize friction by bringing intelligence forward instead of "running reports" afterwards.

Specificity. 

We design for specific use cases. There's no one-size fits all.

Graphic created on midjourney. Edit for use. (C) Data Product Company LLC

Stories serve humanity. MARCIE serve storytellers.

Tell amazing stories and thrive in the A.I. driven economy

MARCIE is our flagship platform for fiction writers to help them write more and improve discoverability.

Freedom. 

Use your tools, email, and the native messaging app with MARCIE.

Direct input. 

Built for writers by writers.

Researched backed features. 

Creative sparks, photo inspiration, voice notes, content privacy and tracking, journaling, deep writing, collaborating, all under one roof.

Intuitiveness. 

Designed for natural interactions and familiar user experiences.

Faster Feedback. 

Speed and control over your writing journey.

Discoverability. 

Minimize mental load of self-promotions and focus on writing.

Frequently asked questions

  • What's the founder's motivation and vision for building MARCIE?

    Having cheered and supported his writer wife Karin for years, Nikhil was inspired to help writers build a platform of their own. Karin is a professional writer. She has published 10 books, which includes a 7 book series. She can be reached at: https://www.karinshah.com/

    Nikhil has observed similarity between writing code and writing a book - problem solving and creativity, design decisions/narrative arc, code refactoring/revising drafts, testing/seeking feedback, minimal viable product/advance reader copy, shipping/publishing, digital marketing, testimonials, and references. Developers use lots of tools. However, highly effective toolchains are an indisputable component of their productivity and success. Writers too have access to tools. What they don't have is their own toolchain, spanning from inspirational moments all the way to having a dedicated presence for their backlists. That is what MARCIE is.

    What Open Source software did for developers, we envision doing it for writers. Give them the power to do awesome work at incredible speed to connect with their readers.

  • What's the founder's background?

    Nikhil has deep experience in tech, cloud, and AI. He loves to read, write, be active, and prioritizes an idyllic lifestyle.

    Nikhil can be reached on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilshah/ and follow his writing journey at https://skyfire.adimahi.com

  • Is MARCIE's development funded bootstrapped?

    Yes! We built the entire stack - webapp, text-to-web AI, the M.AR.C.I.E engine, the automation, cloud infrastructure, the marciebooks data feature - for tenth of the cost of what a funded startup spends over multiple years. Engineering can be expensive for non-tech founders and product teams. We know how to be frugal and execute really well.

  • What is MARCIE?

    MARCIE started as an AI engine called M.AR.C.I.E. [Multidimensional ARray Configuration Inferred Expression]. You can ignore the technical definition. The purpose was to create an algorithmic foundation that would enable discovery through automation. This was before ChatGPT and the agentic era. It was envisioned as an AI-as-a-service at its conception.

    The minimum requirements for trustworthy AI solutions are clear - auditable and explainable. The engine was developed to read the full length novel and deconstruct it into a mathematical representation of the story. Novels were procured with writers' approval. The engine connects these novels through its mathematical structures, similar to embeddings, but is also highly readable/explainable by humans through annotations. The explainability is critical because it enables a human to answer the question - why are these pieces of long-form content similar or dissimilar? The output is analytical and not generative so it doesn't hallucinate.

    The post ChatGPT world is very different and as a result our approach has changed too.

    MARCIE, as a brand, is now much more than the AI engine. It is a culmination of all the validated features that help writers write more. Architecturally it represents three separate stacks (1) a low-code marketing-oriented frontend with lightweight CMS (https://www.marcie.app), (2) a post-login serverless app (https://studio.marcie.app) with its own secure login whose contents are not visible to search engines and AI crawlers, and (3) a public facing serverless large data container that serves as a bulk discovery engine of authors (https://books.marcie.app) by humans and AI/LLMs alike.

    The AI-as-a-service is currently not offered to publishers, readers, or authors.