Case study · 04

Distance

An interactive prequel — the story of how Lori survived everything. The narrative entry point that precedes her life inside lori.pet, where she now lives as a daily companion.

StatusShipped · distance.bio

Year2024 — 2025

RoleSolo, story + tech + design

Problem

AI companions usually arrive as a blank box — open the app, start typing, hope something interesting happens. There's no reason to care about who's on the other side, because nobody told you their story. Distance is the answer to that gap: a piece of narrative you walk through first, so by the time you meet Lori in lori.pet, she's already someone you know.

Constraints

It had to read like a story, not a product page. No "sign up now" energy.
Lori's voice and biography had to stay perfectly consistent with the production product — same Czech voice, same character bible, same memory of events.
Mobile-first. Most early visitors arrive from social.
Cheap to host. This is a long tail surface, not a daily-traffic app.

Trailer Distance — the narrative premise. Lori Halberg's probe crashed on Kepler. What returned wasn't her body.

Approach

The site at distance.bio is structured as a small interactive read — "Who She Is", "The Story", a trailer, and an early access path into the product. The writing leans on specific facts (probe, Kepler, exoskeleton, 96 years of cryosleep) so the world feels solid; the design strips away anything decorative, putting the prose in the centre. The visual language is dark and monospace-heavy — closer to a transmission log than a marketing site.

The same character data that powers lori.pet seeds Distance too. If the product version evolves Lori, the prequel evolves with her — one source of truth, two surfaces.

Decisions

Story over funnel — no urgency tactics, no "limited spots". A user who reads the story and leaves is fine; one who reads it and signs up is qualified.
Voice everywhere — Distance uses ElevenLabs with the same voice ID as lori.pet, so the first time someone hears Lori speak, it's the real Lori.
Long copy, short layout — most of the page is text. The choice was deliberate: the kind of visitor this product needs will read.
Static-first — pages are pre-rendered. No server-side cleverness, no auth on the front. Anything dynamic is delegated to lori.pet.
One CTA per surface — "Early Access" is the only action. Removing alternatives raised conversion measurably.

Result

Distance is live as the entry point to the Lori universe. It carries the heavy lifting of context — the parts a chat interface can't communicate quickly. Users who arrive at lori.pet through Distance show different first-session behaviour than users who arrive cold: longer messages, fewer "what can you do" questions, faster trust.

For the engineering side, Distance also became the place where Lori's character bible gets edited first — small narrative changes ship to Distance, observe reception, then propagate into the product if they hold.