Show Notes
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.
Frameworks from This Episode
These frameworks have been added to the AI for Founders Frameworks Library. Filter by Rebecca Liao to find them.
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
Founder Experiment: Build Your Own Brand Agent in a Weekend
Pick the character or mascot most associated with your brand (or invent one). Use Claude or Cursor to vibe-code a small agent that lives in a single DM channel (start with a Telegram bot or Instagram comment listener). Feed it a personality file: 200 words on backstory, 50 words on voice, 20 hard rules on what it won't say. Wire it to GPT-4 or Claude with a system prompt that enforces the modular personality. Then run a 7-day test: have the agent comment on 30 niche-relevant posts per day in your category. Track engagement rate, DM open rate, and conversion to your landing page.
The goal isn't perfection. The goal is to feel what Rebecca's team feels every day: a synthetic personality that warms leads while you sleep.
Glossary
Company from This Episode
Saga AI Labs
Builds character AI agents trained on existing IP from gaming, film, sports, and consumer brands. Agents handle user acquisition, retention, and community engagement across major social platforms via modular personalities and brand-safe guardrails.
Q&A
What does Saga AI Labs do?
Saga AI Labs builds character AI agents trained on existing IP from gaming, film, sports, and consumer brands. The agents handle user acquisition, retention, and community engagement across major social platforms.
How are character agents different from chatbots?
Character agents have nuanced, modular personalities tied to a specific IP. Chatbots typically have monolithic LLM personalities. Platforms like Meta and TikTok ban most chatbots but engage with character agents because users actually interact with them.
What engagement rates do character agents achieve?
Saga's Willie agent for Trivia Crack achieves 90% peak engagement on its commenting activity.
How does Saga make money?
Two models: monthly packages covering messaging volume, or revenue share averaging 50% on agent-attributable sales.
Is Saga venture-backed?
Saga has raised approximately $13.5 million across seed rounds and launched a token on Binance in early 2024.
Who is Rebecca Liao?
Rebecca Liao is co-founder and CEO of Saga AI Labs. Stanford undergrad, former corporate attorney, advisor to the Clinton and Biden campaigns, and previously co-founder and COO of Skuchain, which she scaled to $5 billion in annual volume.
