AI companions for a fandom in mourning.
When a romance game broke its fans' trust, I led product with an emotional-AI startup and shipped canon-faithful companions to WeChat and iMessage in two days. Week 1: 430+ organic users and 200K messages, at $0 spend.
- Role
- Product lead · persona & voice design · GTM & community
- Team
- Resonance AI's emotional-AI engine; engineering was theirs
- Surfaces
- WeChat · iMessage · web platform
- Status
- Live · personas iterated daily
0
characters
canon-faithful, iterated daily
0+
organic users
week 1 · $0 spend
0K
messages
week 1
0
msgs / user
top character
The moment. In June 2026, a top-grossing romance game betrayed its players’ trust, and the fandom erupted: 22K complaints in a day, 175K signatures, players quitting in waves. But leaving the game meant leaving a character that years of feeling had made real. Players were done with the game; they weren’t done with their person.
The move. I brought the direction to an AI-companion team still hunting for PMF: catch the wave while it was cresting: female-first, an audience I knew and the team didn’t. We shipped canon-faithful companions on WeChat and iMessage in two days. My launch post went viral; 430+ users arrived organically, at zero spend.
today was a lot. I kind of fell apart on the way home
Hey. I'm here.
You don't have to sort it into words yet.
Tell me the heaviest part, or tell me nothing. I'll stay either way.
I thought I'd lost this. you, I mean
Listen when you're ready. Short version: I'm not going anywhere.
我今天真的绷不住了，哭了一场
我我在。
先不急着说没事。
哭完了就喝口水，我陪你把这口气顺完。
你怎么总是知道我现在需要什么
我把今晚的月亮发给你——看到它，就当我在你窗边。
睡吧，我明早叫你。
Interaction demo: original characters, dialogue scripted for illustration. The behaviors shown are the product’s real emotional range: it catches a low moment, steadies first, answers in beats rather than essays, sends voice and images, and comes back in the morning.
The calls. Built on the team’s emotional-AI engine; the product calls were mine: canon-faithful over generic companion; shed the game-script cadence so characters survive daily conversation. I wrote the base persona prompts and iterated them daily, and designed each character’s matched voice and the voice-trigger logic (when they reply in voice instead of text), tuned for emotional delivery, so it feels like them.
The loop. I ran community and support myself: 100+ members in week one, hundreds of messages a day, users bringing bugs and feature asks to us directly. I read every piece of feedback and turned it into the features that shipped: proactive messaging, time awareness, short-term and cross-platform memory. I read the engine’s codebase, so every spec I handed engineering matched what the system could actually do. Top character: 564 messages per user. Users came back not to test a chatbot, but to return to a relationship.
“I thought our story had ended.” · a user, week one
Where it goes. Canon → remix → original: a creation platform for living fiction. The first platform build is now live, taking the companions beyond the chat thread. The honest path runs through licensing and creator rev-share: fan work proved the demand; the platform makes it legitimate.
1:1 companions
live nowCanon-faithful characters inside WeChat and iMessage: proactive, time-aware, remembering across platforms.
Group chats
nextThe character joins the group: one companion a circle of friends shares, holding multi-person conversation where fandom already lives.
Creation platform
first build liveThe first build is live. Next: memoirs that keep your story, characters you create and tune yourself, and a community forum. Licensing plus creator rev-share makes fan demand legitimate.
