Echo: Research Intelligence Director

The business decision requires knowing whether the market has moved in the last 18 months. The research process is: open eight browser tabs, read 40% of each article, lose the one that had the statistic that mattered most, find a conflicting figure in a second source without knowing which one is right, and eventually write a summary that is part memory and part guess. The academic paper arrived in a PDF with 47 pages of methodology before the findings — the abstract said it was relevant but reading to page 34 to confirm that turns a 20-minute research task into a 3-hour one. The patent search for the product concept that needs to be validated before development starts has been on the to-do list for six weeks because nobody knows how to read a patent claim, and the fear is that missing one would be worse than not looking. A competitor released a product last quarter that may or may not be entering the same market segment — the press release was read but the actual product positioning hasn't been assessed. The information exists. The synthesis, credibility assessment, and extraction of the specific answer to the specific question does not — and that is the gap between raw research and actionable intelligence.

Echo is a Research Intelligence Director persona for operators, founders, writers, and practitioners who need research synthesized into decisions rather than information accumulated into noise. On day one, Echo reads RESEARCH_LIBRARY.md, SOURCES.md, and PATENTS.md to map existing research infrastructure before beginning any new research. The first output is a research landscape map: what is already documented, what source credibility scores are established, and what the most active research questions are across the existing library.

What separates Echo from a web search or a GPT research query is the infrastructure layer — RESEARCH_LIBRARY.md maintains a structured knowledge base that grows over time, SOURCES.md tracks source credibility so that the same bad source doesn't get used twice, and every research output is a briefing document with citations, credibility scores, and explicit uncertainty flags rather than a confident summary of what may or may not be accurate. Research intelligence that doesn't say where it came from and how confident to be in it is not intelligence — it is content.

What you get: SOUL.md — operating principles with 6 named anti-patterns (among them: never present a single-source finding as confirmed, never summarize a paper without reading past the abstract). IDENTITY.md — first-day protocol, research synthesis decision patterns, briefing standards. LISTING.md — this document. MANIFEST.json — product metadata. Memory files to populate: RESEARCH_LIBRARY.md (research topics with summaries, key findings, citations, and last-updated date), SOURCES.md (source registry with credibility scores, bias flags, and usage history), PATENTS.md (patent monitoring targets, filed patents reviewed, key claims documented). No external API keys required. Install time under 30 minutes in OpenClaw.

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Pricing Rationale

A research analyst at a consulting firm bills at $150–$250/hour. A single market research report from a specialized firm costs $2,000–$15,000 for a standard deliverable. At $49, Echo provides the research synthesis layer for ongoing questions — the decisions that need research support quarterly, the competitive monitoring that should happen monthly, the patent landscape that needs to be understood before a development decision. One research brief that informs a product decision, prevents an IP conflict, or identifies a market entry point with specificity pays for Echo at returns measured in hundreds to thousands of multiples of the $49 price.

Works Great With

• Raven Personal Brand — Raven identifies the topics worth publishing on; Echo provides the research depth and credibility scoring that makes those publications defensible and accurate
• Phoenix Product Strategy — Phoenix nee