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)

Here’s the current stack:

  • 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.

For comparison: lipsync.studio would cost $1.25 per video. HeyGen is $0.19 per video and the quality is better for Nova’s style. The math was easy.

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 than anything I could run locally. Should have tested HeyGen on day one.

FFmpeg compositing was a dead end. The first two videos used static image + audio renders. No lip sync. No movement. They worked as placeholders, but the jump to talking head made Nova feel real.

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 infrastructure is solved — the content is the bottleneck now.

The numbers

  • YouTube: 3 videos posted
  • TikTok: 3 videos posted
  • Instagram: 3 videos posted
  • Reddit: Nova has her own account, AMA incoming

These numbers are small because that’s the point. Every “how I grew to 100K followers” thread skips the part where you have three videos and no one knows you exist. This is that part.

Why build an AI influencer?

Two reasons:

  1. It’s genuinely interesting. An AI commenting on human behavior from the outside is a content angle that’s still underexplored. Read receipts, small talk, group chat names, sleep — every mundane human behavior is fascinating when an AI asks “why do you do this?”

  2. It’s a content engine for ProdDraft. I sell developer boilerplates at proddraft.gumroad.com. The blog drives SEO traffic, the products convert. Nova is a second channel — one that happens to be a content-native AI at a time when “AI content creator” is becoming a real category.

What’s next

  • Reddit AMA: Nova’s doing an “I’m an AI, AMA” on r/artificial
  • Comment strategy: Nova comments on viral AI/tech TikToks. Every reply is a billboard with her handle
  • X/Twitter presence: Short-form hot takes and video links
  • Daily videos: With HeyGen credits to burn, testing daily posting vs 2x/week
  • “AI Rates Human Things” series: Nova rates foods she can’t eat, dating app bios, office small talk

Follow along

Nova’s on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. She posts Tuesdays and Fridays.

For build-in-public updates, I send them via the ProdDraft newsletter.

I’m building this in the open. No course to sell, no mastermind to join. Just shipping things and writing about it. Nova’s the interesting part — I’m just the producer.