Meet Hailey, my new Storyteller. The AI content experiment that blew my mind

I want to share with you a content experiment I did in the last few days and it's quite blowing my mind.

The goal

A week ago I decided to try and build a professional content channel that would bring excellent content to a very specific target audience, in a new way that produces higher engagement. My target audience - a professional WhatApp community of 25-35 years-old bootstrap founders and entrepreneurs.

Step 1 - Defining a persona

I decided that instead of creating a standard content channel that's based on standard written blog-post-like articles, it might be interesting to create a consistent character that shows the content from her point of view. Storytelling and it...

For the sake of it I created Hailey Peters and built her story. Haley is an entrepreneur who sold 3 startups she founded without raising investment. This story connects with the target audience I want to address. If she was real they would be happy to follow her and learn from her.

The next step was to create such a character in Midjourney, who would fit the story, be realistic enough (there is still much to improve), and be able to hold the story. A few basic descriptions brought the face I was looking for.

Step 2 - Finding Hailey's voice

The choice of the name Haley was not accidental. Her voice is the voice I wanted to use in Summurai's Avatars (Summurai is an AI-based audio playlist builder). Hailey's voice is friendly, young, enthusiastic enough to share excitement and professional enough to allow long listening and deep content dives.

Step 3 - Initial content creation and editing

For the first item I created I used Perplexity. I asked him to locate me on Twitter and Reddit interesting conversations and content sources about entrepreneurship and startups. I came to an interesting tweet and from there I flowed to the article.

After finding the article source, I wanted Hailey to present it. I moved to ChatGPT (although I could stay on Perplexity for that) and asked to create a script for Hailey to tell about her reading experience and insights from the referred article. This way the source article gets credit and reference to the writer and present it from Hailey's point of view. This required some editing but came out really good.

Step 5 - First recording and creating audio personality

Now that I have my source content, it was time to turn this into audio. I used Summurai to convert the script into audio. In order to turn written content into a friendly audio script, Summurai offers an automatic AI-editing process that makes written items, such as blog posts into a script for narration. This process removes sub titles, breaks numerators and bullet points, fixes some content to prevent narration problems. All of this takes just a few seconds. Then I used Hailey's avatar and got the item recorded.

I went back to Midjourney to create a selfie of Hailey from the office and added that to my recorded Summy (this is how Summurai refers to short audio items).

Step 6 - Something is still missing...

While the audio outcome came out great, I felt that something is missing. The audio piece I got is lacking "personality". If Hailey submits content regularly, she needs a story and something cyclical. Like branded podcasts.

I decided that the following items she would start with "Hey Bootstrappers!", and end with "As always, stay strong, stay Bootstrapping!" - which is a reinforcing and accurate message that each and every one of them should hear over and over again, so as not to get discouraged along the way.

I added these to Hailey's script, remade the audio, and there we go. This totally works now!

Step 7 - Content creation on Steroids...

The second post and the craziest content I've created!

Now that I have a baseline of who Hailey is and what type of content I'd like to make, I thought that if Haley is the one who updates what's interesting and relevant, she should really bring real added value. So I went on and asked Perplexity to search for a recent startup-relevant conference, then search the web for feedback and information people had posted about the conference talks and their insights, and pack in a story from Haley's perspective. I want her to tell me about what happened at the conference and share her experiences.

It took just a minute and I got an almost perfect piece of content. Now all I had to do is go back to Midjourney and ask for a Selfie of Hailey standing within the crowd in the conference hall.

Looking back at this Summy, I think this Summy came out more emotional than professional. This was more of a storytelling about the excitement of being at the conference than sharing valuable insights from the conference talks. This is something that can absolutely be engineered more precisely, but the result could become an item that really manages to create a balance between the FOMO of people who missed the conference and a sense of value from key insights and lessons learned.

Step 8 - The surprising feedback I got from the community

That's it. I have a new channel and I was ready to share that. I went to the WhatsApp group and shared "Awesome post on SaaS pricing by Hailey Peters" and added a link.

Wow. I didn't expect what came back at me. They hated it! No, not the Summy. they hated the fact that I talked about Hailey like she's a known persona, while she was an AI-based avatar. This really made some of them write some nasty stuff to me. Although I was really insulted, it was a great way to learn a lesson. Hailey needs to be presented properly. They should know that she's a fictive avatar that represents a group of professionals sharing valuable content and we're not trying to deceive anyone.

I learned my lesson and went on to post this on a different group and track stats. Summurai gives me the tools to see what's working for me. The numbers are super interesting and it seems like while people visit to see "what's this new thing", they actually stay and consume the content and move to the next one.

I put a secret test. In one of the Summies I added a CTA and let Hailey invite people to her WhatsApp group. It was awesome to some new people waiting for approval to join Hailey's WhatsApp channel.

Step 9 - Woohoo! I have a new content channel!

I feel really comfortable writing. I published two books and I write detailed professional posts on social media. However, I was never able to consistently maintain an ongoing content channel such as a blog. This time it feels different. This is exciting for me and creating the story for Hailey feels much easier to me. I actually plan to create a few personas for different categories, and use that to promote a few different products, as well as offer the service of creating "Hailey"-like personas for others.

This morning it took me less than half an hour to add a new Summy.

Step 10 - back to the angry group...

This process was mind blowing. I learned so much and I have new tools to create a new type of content experience. One thing kept me feeling uncomfortable. The group of people who were angry at me. This time I asked Hailey to help. I went back to that WhatsApp group, shared the fact that posting that item was a test. I apologized and shared my insights and asked Hailey to join me with an apologizing visual.

Summarizing

So we had Perplexity and ChatGPT for the content, Midjourney for the visuals and Summurai for the audio and playlist.

I'm not sure how to define the outcome. It's a combination of Content marketing meets podcasts meets Influencers meets Storytelling. A crazy opportunity to use all of the buzzwords together!

I feel that this opens the door for so many new content opportunities, supporting sales, marketing, customer journeys, user onboarding, product marketing, internal communications and so much more.

What do you think Would you like to receive AI updates from Jessica Altman (cousin of...)?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. If you want to hear a little about Haley's experiences and insights from the Startup grind conference in Redwood from two weeks ago - you know where he is...

If you'd like to visit Hailey's new channel, I'm sure she'd appreciate that.

https://summur.ai/cE2Jw

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