While it is a little outside my traditional purview, I was excited to speak with Maggie Sin, the CEO of MyCompanions.ai, a creator platform that allows creators to communicate with their fans in their voice using AI. Given the recent news with Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI and Wired’s recent piece on the people who drive the creator economy, I was excited to speak with one of the pioneers in the ethical use of AI with creators and how users currently interact with them. Thanks for checking out Venturing in Work AI’s Podcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The transcript is below: Joshua Schoen: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Joshua Schoen and I'm here with Maggie Sin who is the CEO and founder of my companion's ai. An AI enabled creator economy company makes tools for creators to automate their businesses and help them maximize engagement in monetization with their fans. Really excited to have you here, Maggie. to discuss the future of work, what you're doing and what this means for our world and economy and everything in between. Maggie Sin: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me as well. Super excited. Joshua Schoen: Yeah. I'd love to learn more about kind of your story, your narrative, how you got here and what made you come up with Mycompanions. Maggie Sin: Yeah, all so I personally have been a social media influencer for about 10 years now. I took breaks here and there. And I first hand saw how hard it is to engage with my [00:01:00] fans. So I get a lot of inbox requests, a lot of messages and comments, and I just don't have the capacity to go through each and one of them. And I would like sometimes find pretty good messages like a year later or so if when I finally like support through it if I ever do and so I realized there's definitely something we can do about this. And I was talking to my co founders one who is like an AI genius with a PhD from Cambridge and another one who is an investor entrepreneur. And we decided to start Mycompanions together to target these issues that these creators can face. So we launched our beta for our first product in November last year. And which is a telegram bot that uses AI to mimic the influencer's personality and can communicate with the fans 24/7 via text the influencer's voice and photos and videos. And that has really helped creators engage with their fans automatically with less effort and also keep the fans happy as they're able to like finally talk to this person who they've followed and they want to be able to learn more about this [00:02:00] person and get precise messages. So we have over 20 influencers and tens of thousands of users. And our influencers have been making like passive recurring revenue off our platform And engage and they're and they see their fans just more engaged than ever and seeing the early success here where we have a beta product now that is More on self service like bot creation. And so then more influencers can use our service and also integrations with other creator platforms. Joshua Schoen: So what were, obviously not all influencers are, actually talking with their fans. But this was but there, we didn't always have generative AI to capture people's voices. What what were they doing beforehand? Maggie Sin: Yeah. All right. Yeah. So beforehand, a lot of creators would just manually, so there's Different things creators can do. So some creators would just like manually like message people or not and just have to manually look at all the [00:03:00] comments like messages see track their views and like data to see like what will resonate more with their audience or or the fans just keep messaging them and never get a response back. Some other creators will leverage work with agencies that will take over much of the work. So negotiate with brands, I'm talking to like some of their fans combating back to these fans on their posts and that actually increases engagement and pushes the Instagram algorithm to show these posts more. They also hire like outsourced labor to help service these like manual requests coming in from these fans. Yeah. So that's why we see that our software and our AI technology really helps these creators because we basically mimic the influencers. We give them like 100x leverage in the conversations they can have. The creators can zoom in and zoom out of the conversations they want and the fans Are able to learn more about the creator, see exclusive content and the AI provides better than that than any agency or outsourced labor can. So we [00:04:00] increase in quality and also like the costs are lower than hiring outsourced labor. And so we enable creators to have a business that they can choose to be hands on or hands off and also like start getting that money that they put so much time into. And to go into a bit more into that so basically that means that all these creators on Instagram or even TikTok or just any social media platform in general they post all this content. They get a bunch of users on because they're like these users and fans who want to see more of the content and Instagram doesn't pay them for like pushing more content out. In fact, like Instagram gets paid for ads. On their platform. And so the creator, just pushes content and doesn't get any of those ad kind of revenue, they get money from sponsorships partnerships and like other like brand part like things but not really from Instagram platform itself. And the only time I would say it's been like. Instagram will be like here's some money to put something. It's like when they like launch like [00:05:00] stories or like reels, like they were offering like money to creators to post more. And if you just post in a certain amount of cadence, then like you'll get some like cash from them. But it's generally like a lot of the content that these creators produce, like they don't see the money. That they should be getting. And so my business helps enable that. Joshua Schoen: Yeah. So it means that, so you're saying what the creators are more able to communicate with their fans on a more intimate basis than they would be otherwise, while they're creating the top of funnel to get them into the conversation, and so what would you say, what would you say is the Delta? What do the creators get out of what they've, when they start using Mycompanions versus what they were using on other platforms? Maggie Sin: Yeah, that's a good question. And so I just so I really ask about our influencers, like how much they make on other platforms, but I will [00:06:00] say that all our creators are very happy being on our platform. And for some of our creators who we started with they they They made this is like the most they've ever made. And for some it's they've made like thousands on other platforms, but they see like this as a, it's given the amount of effort and work they need to put into because it does it for them, like they, they also get like a big chunk of money from here. So for some, it's this is like their only like venture, like business venture that they get money from it. And for others, it's this is like a supplement to it. But either way there's only upside for the creator. And yeah and the demand we're seeing from these users and their fans I think every creator is pretty shocked to see how much demand people have to talk to them. So that's like a good thing. And it just depends on every influencer and what they currently use like what kind of platforms that they're using agency. And we work with the creators of all sorts. So yeah, it's variable. Joshua Schoen: Yeah, so you have creators of all sorts. Oh, people talking about health and [00:07:00] lifestyle. Probably in positive encouragement. Tell me how that engagement works on that level. And how has that been for those kinds of creators? Maggie Sin: Yeah, so yeah, engagement depends on a few things. So number of followers, they have number engaged followers, they have. So it's like reach, engage, reach, and also how much times they promote this bot. So are like their Telegram bot. And so they can promote it on their story, their posts, a real on their LinkedIn bio, or like even other social media platforms. But we technically we mostly work with Instagram models. Or like craters, Instagram craters. So yeah, in terms of engagement, like we see it adhere to all types of different people. Like it's more about it's more about like how much they, like how much engagement they have. So we also we get a lot of visibility on our website as well too. So like people come on our website and be try out different bots to see what fits for them. And [00:08:00] what's great about it is that if. They don't like a bot or they are like they want to try something else. We have like different ones that you can try with like different voices, different media, different styles, personalities. We also have this thing called role play. So it's like an AI role play. So for example, you can talk, like talk through a story, like getting dinner with one of your, one of our creators, you can get wine recs from like my bot, for example, you can get food recs from another, like creator. And yeah. And yeah, and I, for example I really, I'm really passionate about wine and I'm also WSAT 2 certified, and so people like to talk to my bot and we just, and the AI just feels in that It's basically like a whole like wine book behind the scenes and you can just always get that information in my voice. So yeah, it just depends on like different people's use cases. We definitely see like people, some people who just want to talk to somebody. We see people who want like more like a professional like education from these these bots delivered in their voice of their [00:09:00] favorite influencer. Yeah. And some people just asking more about the influencer or creator themselves oh, like, where are you from? What do you like to eat? What are your favorite brands? And all and this AI, we pu
