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I have several friends who have shipped like AI companionship apps.
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0:01
Just look at paid apps in the App Store by charting and some of these people are generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves.
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It's not because they're deep AI people.
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When you say companion, you mean like uh a digital girlfriend? Or boyfriend.
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I think people think that is skewed toward girlfriend in a way that's not necessarily true.
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You know, you can have your own ethical points of view about like whether or not that's good for people, but it's a pretty basic human need and guess what?
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People want all sorts of different things in terms of niche companionship and how you might distribute that.
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Aren't these quietly very huge?
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Like can we do some like ballpark, you know, give people a sense of the size and scale that these have gotten to?
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So there's there's Replika.
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I think that's probably the most well-known one, which is a digital boyfriend or girlfriend.
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They kind of try to say friend, but I think the use case is a little bit more in the in the relationship side of things.
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And I don't I don't remember their exact numbers, but I don't think I would be crazy for saying they're doing like 50 million a year in revenue.
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And I believe she had bootstrapped it for a while at least or raised very little money to get there. Is that right? Tell me if I'm off base.
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I might be wrong on some of that.
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Yeah, Eugenia has built a very cash-efficient business.
1:10
Okay, is that like code for something?
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Are you an investor in Replika? no. I'm I'm not an investor.
1:14
Dude, you just said everything without saying a thing.
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It was basically like you're friends with her, you know the number, and they're killing it.
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Are are they killing it from your perspective?
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I think they are making a lot more revenue than most startups.
1:27
Okay, what are the other ones that are interesting?
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So there's Character AI that has like some absurd amount of traffic, but I've also heard some things about like I don't know if this is all legit traffic or what, but there's Character AI.
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What are the other ones that are interesting or what do you what do you I want to touch on Character for a second because I I think like the thing that is really interesting to me about Character or the companion apps that work really well is like people spend hours with them.
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How many products do you spend hours with every day?
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Not a a Like social media?
1:57
Sean, that's like my product that I spend hours a day with. Yeah.
2:01
Um You were at Greylock, I think, when they invested in Discord.
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I I I think the timing is there, and Discord is one of those things that was probably overlooked cuz it was like mostly teenagers who play video games that were using this thing, and it would kind of look like a chat room, but you're like, "Oh, well, how's it going to make money?
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It's not like Slack where you can charge the company."
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But, the stat was people were spending like 7 hours a day or something on Discord, something ridiculous like that. Just living in Discord.
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It was their social life.
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And so, you're like, "Well, there's there's definitely something there."
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And they were able to make a ton of money just even selling emojis at that point because if you have that much engagement, you can't fake that. Yes.
2:35
By the way, I just went to Character AI, and there's a option to chat with Elon Musk, and the the preloaded question, "Why did you buy Twitter?" So, I click it.
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So, it starts a chat with Elon Musk as a character, and then it the first response literally goes, "You're wasting my time.
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I literally rule the world."
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Okay, so by the way, on according to SimilarWeb, which is like you multiply by two or three, and then you divide by two or three, and that's the huge range.
2:59
But, according to SimilarWeb, it says that Character AI has 310 million monthly uniques. Are you kidding me?
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I mean, that's more than the Wall Street Journal.
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It's more than like a bunch of really popular websites.
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Is this company really that big?
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I think people want companions.
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This is what I'm saying that the the like engagement characteristics around this stuff is real.
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And so, for anybody like starting a new business, you know, one-person company shipping AI companion up to a niche, like generating a million dollars of cash flow for themselves, like that's real.
3:34
Do you know how these things grow?
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So, I mean, 300 million monthly visits is no joke.
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What is What's the growth channel for something like this?
3:42
Well, I think that's going to be like an advantage in the future.
3:44
I do think one of the weird things about these AI capabilities is they are so novel and unique that they do drive word of mouth.
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For example, with character you can make new characters and people share them, right?
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So there's inbuilt virality there.
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But like maybe I'll give you like two other examples of just like when I say that the capabilities are just really new and they're powerful and people want to talk about them.
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Like I don't think you can engineer that, but it's just characteristic of these companies.
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Okay, so one example is I am an investor in a company called HeyGen.
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You can make a video avatar of yourself.
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You cannot tell the difference and you know it's reaching that bar of quality is new as of this past year and like people create content that is unbelievable and they share it and so like now HeyGen is in tens of millions of revenue. Great.
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They've never spent a dollar on like paid marketing.
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