Synthetic Relationships, FTW

Rebecca Liao spent her career advising the most powerful people in the world. Clinton's campaign. Biden's transition. The Pentagon's policy halls. And then one day she realized something brutal: she didn't want to give advice anymore. She wanted to build.Now she's running Saga AI Labs, a company quietly rewiring how brands acquire customers. Forget influencer budgets. Forget CPM. Forget cold email. Rebecca's team is training character agents (think Mario, think the Trivia Crack mascot Willie) to slide into your DMs, hold real conversations, and convert at rates that make traditional UA look like a slot machine.Willie alone is hitting 90% engagement on every comment he posts.In this episode, Rebecca breaks down why character-driven AI isn't just a gaming play. It's the next distribution model for every consumer brand on the internet. She talks about the day she realized blockchain wasn't going to solve the scale problem (AI was), the philosophical knife-edge of synthetic relationships, and why she thinks Anthropic just wrote the playbook every founder should be studying.The Synthetic Relationship FrameworkTrain agents on the lore, history, and personality of an existing IPDeploy across Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, WhatsApp, Discord, MetaUse modular personalities so individual traits can be tuned without rebuilding the whole agentMatch user energy in conversation while holding brand guardrails (no politics, no religion, no cursing)Turn one-to-many advertising into one-to-one relationships at scaleThe Saga User Acquisition PlaybookCrawl social platforms for users matching the core demographicComment on trending topics, not branded keywordsOpen a DM channel and let it warm naturallyConvert through MNP links tracked by the studioRe-engage churned users without becoming spamThe Compelling Agent TestPersonality holds even under stress-testing from usersConversations move from functional ("I'm stuck on this level") to personal ("how was your day")The agent leads users deeper into the community, not just the productPlatform algorithms reward quality, not chat-bot volumeThe Two Saga Business ModelsMonthly package covering text messages plus voice and video minutesRevenue share averaging 50% of agent-attributable saleshttps://www.saga.xyzhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-liao/⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠https://inboxalchemy.co/