Case Study #14: Code, Community, and AI: The NovaSquare Story of Building AI Companions for Twitch Streamers

Mathieu and Nicolas didn't set out to be Twitch's AI whisperers. But after years of streaming and coding, they couldn't ignore the untapped potential in creator-audience interactions. Now, their startup NovaSquare is turning an off-hand joke into a digital companion that's spicing up Twitch chats – one witty response at a time.

Company:
NovaSquare

Founded:
2022

Headquarters:
London, England

Key Highlights:

• Developed AI companion for Twitch community management
• Created personalized engagement solutions for streamers
• Shifted from manual to AI-powered community management
• Bootstrapped with founder capital and initial sales
• Prioritized user feedback for product improvement
• Focused on organic growth through user recommendations
• Adjusted fundraising approach to match market realities
  

1. Hello! Tell us who you are and what your backstory is.

‍Hello! We are Mathieu and Nicolas, NovaSquare co-founders. We met at a university in Bordeaux, France, while studying Computer Science.

Mathieu is a very experienced software engineer, having worked in start-ups from pre-seed to Series B for 12 years. More often than not, he has been a Technical leader and always wanted to create a product that people would love to use. On the side, Mathieu is a seasoned musician, playing the guitar and the saxophone mostly, and was in various bands for years. Finally, Mathieu has been streaming his jams on Twitch since 2020,

Nicolas is also a seasoned software engineer and worked in startups for the past 8 years. He used to be a promising up-and-coming French tennis player but decided to follow a more traditional career path in Computer Science. He then dabbled into esports, watching and playing tournaments, and later on, coaching teams, and Twitch was the place to be for these.

Nicolas helped Mathieu get into Twitch when he first started and helped carry community activation duty. That gave them the idea to create an AI that would do Nicolas’ job.

2. Can you give us your elevator pitch?

‍ai_licia is the ultimate AI companion for content creators’ live stream and off-stream communities by providing personality-driven entertainment, helpfulness, and roleplay engagement.

3. What was the moment or situation that sparked the idea for your business?

‍Mathieu started streaming his saxophone learning on Twitch in 2020, and since I had experience streaming on Twitch, he asked me to come on his stream to help him build his community and grow his audience. Fast forward to 2022, I asked him if I could take a break from being on his live 15 hours per week, and we joked about replacing me with an AI, which he did.

4. How did you test and refine your initial product idea, and were there any significant pivots or changes in direction based on initial feedback or market response?

‍ai_licia was running on Mathieu’s stream, and some streamers were curious about trying her on their stream. We took advantage of being part of a community of our potential customers to try our concept and use their feedback to refine it. Our early users’ feedback helped us understand what would interest our customers as we would scale. We were lucky enough that the core of the idea was already fitting what our users wanted, hence was no need to make any significant pivot.

5. What specific strategies or decisions significantly contributed to the growth and scaling of your business?

‍Our main growth leverage is through organic growth. Streamers see ai_licia in other streamers’ channels and want to get it in their channel as well. We have more than 70% of our new users coming from existing users.

The event that really kickstarted our growth was being an exhibitor at TwitchCon Paris. TwitchCon is THE convention of the Twitch community, including a lot of streamers. It allowed us to meet more than 500 streamers and helped accelerate our Organic growth.

6. Can you share some major challenges and how you tackled them?

1st challenge: Our product has some very recent and complex technologies, which required a lot of work to get to a good enough result, which we were not certain to reach when we started.

It is a problem that will still be there for some years. What has changed is how we work around it to make sure we build the best product we can, as fast as possible. We monitor very closely the new releases in our field, and we always give ourselves room to experiment. We have a group of users who are keen to try our newest changes and give thorough feedback on our experiments.

2nd challenge: Getting in the Streamers community. It is quite difficult to pro-actively join a community of streamers and promote ai_licia, as it is seen as rude and often would have the opposite outcome.

We early on invested in our community, making sure to build great relationships with our users, as they may recommend us to streamers they knew.

We then built an ambassador program, made to involve streamers with a wider audience, that could interest other streamers to give a try to ai_licia.

We followed by creating a referral program to make streamers do the promotion to these communities for us and get rewarded for doing it.

7. How did you really get to know your customers and market?

‍At first, we used both our experiences as Twitch Streamers, and what we thought was needed to have a product that would work for others too. We quickly realized we needed to involve other streamers in the process, and we decided to always look for feedback from our users to learn more and make better decisions.

8. What's the story behind your brand and marketing approach?

‍Our core identity hasn’t changed since day 1: We want to support content creators. We are content creators, and we are experiencing a lot of the struggles we are trying to solve.

Our main difficulty was then to translate that into a visual identity that would make streamers feel like ai_licia is there to support them.

We worked with one of our early adopters, who also happens to be a brand identity designer. He was the best person possible for us as he deeply understood the product, Twitch as a platform, and what we stood for.

We had a lot of work sessions together, especially to address concerns around giving a face to an AI character or not, how to represent the fact that in every chat it is ai_licia but each version in every chat is potentially different, and how we ensure our brand identity is inclusive.

To talk more specifically of the ai_licia logo (which we are very proud of), we chose the color purple to remind people of the purple of Twitch, showing that it’s a product made for Twitch, and we added the 4 chat bubbles to show that ai_licia is there to chat with them. Which conveys a lot of what ai_licia is doing just by looking at the logo.

9. How did you attract and secure your first customers?

We started offering a subscription when we launched our Open Beta back in March 2023. We already had some streamers that were using ai_licia, and our first customer was a community member of one of our ambassadors. He asked how he could get ai_licia in his chat, and we pointed him to our website to get a subscription, which he did.

10. What's been your approach to product development? 

‍We built a very close relationship with our customers from day 1. We have a Discord community to continually get feedback from our users, and gather their suggestions and bug reports. We have a public roadmap that all our users have access to and can suggest and upvote features for our product. For every release, we make sure we have items that were suggested/reported by the community.

11. How have you navigated the financial aspects of your business? 

‍When we started, our plan was to bootstrap the creation of our product until we would start to get our first few customers and start fundraising at that time.

We took the time to have a solid business model that would ensure our company makes money as we scale.

We sat down and evaluated our cost and projections of revenues early in our journey, to make sure that the model we had was in line with the product we built.

We quickly realized that fundraising was quite difficult in the second part of 2023, so we decided to bootstrap for longer, focus on our product, and get better traction, we have been fundraising again since December, with a lot more success.

My advice is to make sure you are raising for the right reasons. We want to raise because we see an interest and traction, and we want to accelerate our growth and invest even more in R&D.

12. What future do you envision for your company? 

Our goal is to be the ultimate assistant for content creators. We started on Twitch because we already had a community there, and we will build the community management aspect, followed by the community acquisition one.

We also want to put our community management technology to use for more than just creators. We have community leaders who reached out to us to have ai_licia help activate their Discord communities which range from artist community to companies community.

Finally, we want to explore how to integrate ai_licia into your gaming experience, becoming your in-game companion. Imagine flying a plane in your simulation game, and having ai_licia act as your copilot and make the flight more enjoyable, enhancing your experience.

13. Where can curious minds find more information about your business?

‍- We were recently featured in the Podcast Founders Unplugged: here
- You can also read more about us and why we built ai_licia on our website
- Understanding NovaSquare in 20 seconds: here
- A compilation of clips with ai_licia using her AI voice: here

14. Do you have any reflections or insights you’d like to share with our community?

💎 Being a founder is hard. I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t think it would be THIS hard.

💎 Don’t wait for the product you are building to be perfect before sharing it with your users.

💎 Learn from your users as soon as possible. Listen to your users.

💎 Don’t be afraid of giving your product for free at first.

💎 Build a community with your most enthusiastic users, they will be your best ambassadors.

Interview with
Nicolas Jellab & Mathieu Bayou
Founders @ NovaSquare