A thread through the archive
5 articles filed under this tag.
AI Town made me realize an AI character did not have to exist only inside an empty chat window. That idea eventually led to Omni Companion: one companion, one living room, and a different way to think about presence.
I built an Omni experiment where sending an Instagram DM bootstrapped a guest account and started conversational onboarding. Removing signup friction was easy. Losing control of conversation boundaries was the interesting part.
The story of my first startup, Shopmatey, the lessons learned, and how it led to what I'm building now with Omni.
Publishing an announcement that your startup is joining another platform is easy. The real engineering work is ensuring legacy store links, user identities, and creator content don't break when the old servers wind down.
Letting go of an early brand is hard when you have spent years building it. On April 2, 2025, I announced that Shopmatey was joining Omni. Here is why absorbing what worked into a new product was better than keeping two alive.