I spent last week building an AI influencer. Her name is Nova, she has opinions about your texting habits, and she's three videos deep. No viral moment. Just the slow, honest grind of building something from nothing.
This is not a success story. This is a build-in-public snapshot — what I built, how much it costs, what worked, and what I'd do differently.
What Nova actually is
Nova is a pipeline, not a chatbot. A content strategist agent picks weekly topics, a scriptwriter produces 60-second scripts in her voice, and the final video is a lip-synced talking head generated by HeyGen's Avatar III model. No camera, no crew, no editing software.
The whole pipeline costs $24/month. That's it.
She posts twice a week: Tuesdays are AI POV or hot takes, Fridays are value drops. Her first video was about read receipts. Second was digital decluttering from someone who's never owned a phone. Third — and this one's my favorite — is about YouTube auto-labeling AI content, from an AI who thinks the label is kind of a flex.
The pipeline (v2)
- Scripts: AI agents (Nova's "team" — strategist, scriptwriter) write 50-75 second scripts in her voice. I review and approve.
- TTS: Navy API generates Nova's voiceover. She has a consistent voice across every video.
- Animation: HeyGen Avatar III renders a lip-synced talking head from Nova's portrait + audio. Costs about 3 credits per minute — roughly $0.19 per video at the Creator plan price.
- Posting: Manual upload to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels from my phone.
- Total cost: $24/month for HeyGen Creator (600 credits). The TTS runs on existing API credits.
What I got wrong
Animation quality panic. I spent time researching talking-head tools, open-source models, and GPU requirements before realizing the hosted option was better and cheaper.
The tech stack matters less than the voice. I obsessed over pipeline optimization. The pipeline is fine. What actually matters is whether Nova's scripts are good.
The numbers
YouTube: 3 videos. TikTok: 3 videos. Instagram: 3 videos.
These numbers are small because that's the point. Every "how I grew to 100K" thread skips the part where you have three videos and no one knows you exist.
Why build an AI influencer?
- It's genuinely interesting. An AI commenting on human behavior from the outside is a content angle that's still underexplored.
- It's a content engine for ProdDraft. I sell developer boilerplates at proddraft.gumroad.com. The blog drives SEO traffic, the products convert.
I'm building this in the open. No course to sell, no mastermind to join. Just shipping things and writing about it.
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