After 15 years as a designer at large companies, Aaron Kettl noticed a recurring challenge. “As companies scale, teams become more siloed.” Whether in product design, sales, or marketing, each team interprets the customer differently—through user pain points, buyer profiles, or personas. This fragmentation inspired Aaron to found Quikest.com, an AI-powered collaborative writing platform designed to unify teams around a shared, living understanding of the customer.

Quikest allows users to generate dynamic, AI-powered personas (or what Aaron calls “a living, breathing, digital representation of your customer”) that teams can chat with and use to drive strategy, planning, and content creation.

The Challenge

Traditional persona-building was static and disconnected from daily workflows. “The old way is creating persona artifacts—static documents that live in Google Drive and in Figma,” Aaron explained. “It’s very hard to understand how to integrate them into your daily writing and planning workflows.”

Quikest needed a flexible and scalable infrastructure to support complex AI workflows like persona generation, image synthesis, and real-time document collaboration. All without requiring extensive dev time from their lean five-person team.

Why DigitalOcean

Initially recommended by his engineers, Aaron discovered it could support both technical and creative needs. “Platforms like DigitalOcean allow me to be able to easily set up all of my agents and then be able to integrate into my product with very little code,” shared Aaron.

Quikest’s infrastructure relies on:

• Gradient GPU Droplets: Powering real-time collaboration, document chat, and AI inference.

• Gradient Platform: Running persona-generating agents, enabling model comparisons, and orchestrating tasks, like using a web scraping agent on the GradientAI platform to fetch the markdown content and summarize it. And using Llama through an agent in the GradientAI platform to generate recommended persons, which becomes the seed to generate the full persona profile.

DigitalOcean stood out not only for its technical capabilities but also for its simplicity. Aaron shared that, “One thing I love about DigitalOcean is it’s very simple in its pricing. It’s all based on usage, it’ll grow with me, and I can trust that DigitalOcean is a stable platform with high quality uptime.”

Results & Benefits

With DigitalOcean, Quikest has been able to:

• Launch a product that automates persona generation and aligns go-to-market teams.

• Run a fully AI-native company with minimal headcount.

• Continuously iterate and swap out AI models through Gradient with ease: “I can easily upgrade and switch models. My product gets better every single time a new model rolls out,” Aaron shared.

Aaron’s vision for Quikest is ambitious: “I want you to feel like you’re able to bring on a fleet of your ideal target customer, and they’re working alongside your teams to help automate and streamline all of your planning tasks.” Future plans include building customer-specific knowledge bases using DigitalOcean tools so clients can train agents on their internal research and workflows.