Front Door

Project Title & Tagline Front Door Tell us your separation date. We tell you what's coming, what's next, and put a real accredited advocate behind it.
Project Description The problem A veteran leaving the military is entitled to benefits that are already appropriated. The government wants to pay them. And yet claiming them is the single most confusing administrative event of their life, arriving in the worst possible window: separating, moving, job hunting, and figuring out who they are outside the uniform. Roughly 70% of claimants file through a VSO, a free accredited advocate. But finding an experienced, responsive one is luck or who you know. VA.gov lists representatives without telling you what any of them actually do, so a veteran can pick someone who does not handle their situation and never hear back. Special operators have an inside guy. Everyone else waits. The consequences are measurable. About 85% of veterans abandon the claims process. The gap between what veterans are owed and how hard it is to claim it created a multi-billion dollar industry of unaccredited claims sharks charging veterans for help that is free by law. What we heard over and over in interviews is that veterans paying for that help are not buying better outcomes. They are buying an experience: responsiveness, a clear next step, never being in the dark. One sailor in a Georgia TAP cohort found out in mid-June that he was separating September 30, after planning on four more years to retirement. He had weeks to understand a system that takes months to learn. How it works The only required input is a separation date. From there it tells the veteran what is coming and what the single next thing is. No dashboard to learn, no forms handed over cold. The veteran tells their story in their own words by text or voice and uploads what they already have. For pre-discharge veterans we ingest the Separation Health Assessment they have already completed instead of asking them to repeat themselves. Agents mine the records, surface conditions, and compile a filing packet. Nothing reaches the VA without an accredited human. A real VSO reviews, corrects, and submits under their own accreditation. The veteran, the VSO, and the assistant all live in one thread, so the veteran is never in the dark and the VSO never has to chase paperwork. What veteran input changed Over 200 interviews with veterans, VSOs, VA leadership, Hill staff, and law firms shaped this, and the sharpest corrections came in the last two weeks. Our first VSO in production, a Georgia DVS officer at a submarine base, rewrote the entire interface with one spec: show what the veteran is trying to accomplish in plain language, tell me whether the ball is in my court, and put the exact next action one click away. Everything else is noise. Veterans killed our original design outright. We had built the claim as a linear sequence of modules. Testing showed nobody experiences it that way. It is not a wizard, it is "what can I do right now." We also learned to deliver value before asking for anything, because a signup form at the top of the funnel is exactly where that 85% walks away. What's next Live pilot with the Georgia Department of Veterans Services, real TAP-cohort veterans in the queue, and a VSO working claims in the product today. Next: VA Lighthouse API integration for direct submission and status, a paid pilot with a disability law firm, and expansion to additional state VSO offices, with a Veterans Day launch as the forcing function. The long-term goal is simple. A veteran should not have to navigate the system. They should go to one place, and the system should come to them.
Demo Video [link]
Public Code Repository [link] README What it does Front Door turns a veteran's separation date and their own words into a reviewed, submission-ready VA claim packet. It has two front ends joined by a shared thread: a veteran-facing intake and guidance agent, and a case workbench for the accredited VSO who reviews and submits the claim. Tech stack [fill in] What is fully functional Onboarding from a separation date, with a personalized timeline and deadline awareness Story capture by text and voice Document upload and parsing, including Separation Health Assessment ingestion for pre-discharge veterans Record mining and automatic condition surfacing VSO dashboard with plain-language task rows and next-action flags Three-way messaging between veteran, VSO, and assistant Claim packet compilation What is mocked or manual VA submission. The compiled packet is handed to the VSO, who submits it through the state's existing system. Direct submission through the VA Lighthouse API is pending production access. Power of attorney detection. The VSO checks the VA's system manually today. This is deliberate, not a shortcut. Under 38 U.S.C. 5901 only an accredited representative may prepare and submit a claim on a veteran's behalf, so the human review gate is the legal architecture of the product, not a gap in it. Setup [fill in]
Live Prototype [link]
Team Info Michael Kappaz — Product and veteran research. Navy submarine officer, seven years. Set the problem, ran the discovery interviews, owns the VSO and VA relationships, and drove the design corrections that came out of live VSO and veteran testing. Jeremyah Flowers — Front end. Built the veteran-facing mobile experience and the VSO dashboard views, including the plain-language task rows and next-action surfacing. Shaurya Khurana — Agentic conversation flow. Built the intake and guidance agent: story capture by text and voice, state-aware prompting, and the logic that decides what to ask a veteran next. Oluwagbotemi Joseph Ogunbadewa — Backend integrations. Document ingestion and parsing, record mining and condition extraction, and the service plumbing behind the shared veteran, VSO, and assistant thread.