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 Framework

• Train agents on the lore, history, and personality of an existing IP
• Deploy across Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, WhatsApp, Discord, Meta
• Use modular personalities so individual traits can be tuned without rebuilding the whole agent
• Match 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 scale

The Saga User Acquisition Playbook

• Crawl social platforms for users matching the core demographic
• Comment on trending topics, not branded keywords
• Open a DM channel and let it warm naturally
• Convert through MNP links tracked by the studio
• Re-engage churned users without becoming spam

The Compelling Agent Test

• Personality holds even under stress-testing from users
• Conversations 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 product
• Platform algorithms reward quality, not chat-bot volume

The Two Saga Business Models

• Monthly package covering text messages plus voice and video minutes
• Revenue share averaging 50% of agent-attributable sales

https://www.saga.xyz

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-liao/

⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/⁠⁠

⁠⁠https://aiforfounders.co⁠⁠

https://inboxalchemy.co/