The infrastructure
of human hindsight.
We built The Regret Index because the most important decisions in life - the ones that define careers, relationships, finances, and identity - are made with almost no real data. Anecdotes from friends. Gut feelings. Generic advice articles. We thought: what if you could search what actually happened?
Every year, millions of people face the same pivotal decisions. Should I leave my job for a startup? Should I relocate for a relationship? Should I drop out and go independent? Should I take the safe path or the risky one?
The answers exist. They live in the heads of the thousands of people who already made those choices - and lived with the consequences for years. Until now, that collective wisdom was invisible.
The Regret Index changes that. We collect structured, anonymised outcome data from people who have already walked the path you're considering. We surface patterns, track outcomes longitudinally, and give you real evidence - not opinions.
"The best time to have this data was before the decision. The second best time is now."
The people
behind the archive.
A lean, cross-disciplinary team combining product strategy, engineering, and behavioural research - built from the ground up to serve one mission.
Serial entrepreneur with a background in product strategy and data systems. Founded The Regret Index to solve a problem he experienced firsthand - making major life decisions with almost no real evidence. Previously built and exited two SaaS products in the productivity space.
Full-stack engineer with 8+ years building data-intensive platforms at scale. Responsible for the semantic search engine, AI synthesis pipeline, and longitudinal tracking infrastructure that powers The Regret Index.
Behavioural researcher with a focus on longitudinal outcome studies. Designed the 14-field submission schema, the regret-scoring model, and the follow-up cadence that makes our dataset structurally rigorous - not just large.
The Regret Index is a bootstrapped, founder-led startup established in 2026. We are currently a small core team supplemented by part-time research and engineering advisors. We are actively building - the platform is live and growing organically.
A platform,
not a product.
The Regret Index is a digital-native platform - entirely cloud-based, accessible globally, and designed from day one to scale. No physical product. No offline component. Built on Next.js, MongoDB, and a custom AI pipeline.
Semantic search across thousands of real human decisions. Users describe their situation in plain language and surface structurally similar past outcomes - not keyword matches. Powered by a hybrid vector + BM25 retrieval pipeline.
On-demand AI synthesis reports grounded exclusively in our database - zero hallucination. The AI reads across 30–100 matched real outcomes and surfaces no-regret patterns, risk factors, and statistically consistent insights. 3 free reports per week.
Our signature longitudinal visualisation. Shows how regret changes across 1, 3, 5, and 10+ year timeframes for any decision category. Built from real follow-up data - the only tool of its kind tracking decisions over time.
A growing structured database of 1,000+ anonymised human decisions with full outcome data. Every entry follows a 14-field schema - comparable, queryable, and aggregatable across 8 core life categories and 30+ countries.
Opt-in email reminders that contact contributors at year one, three, and five to reassess their regret. This transforms a static database into a living, compounding dataset - the core differentiator no competitor can replicate without time.
Structured access to anonymised outcome data for researchers, financial advisors, career coaches, and HR platforms. We are in early access conversations with several institutional partners.
We collect outcomes as people lived them - including regret, failure, and ambiguity. No spin. No survivorship bias. The full picture.
A decision evaluated at 6 months looks different at 5 years. We follow up. The data compounds. The picture gets clearer over time.
Every submission is anonymised before it touches our database. You share the decision - not your identity. That trust is the foundation of the whole thing.