$6K MRR and 9K downloads in their first 60 days with one of the best hijacking hacks seen in the AI wrapper’s distribution playbook.
Have you heard about Maya and Miles? If not, you don’t know what’s happening in the AI voice world.
a16z-backed startup that just got $47.5 million in Series A funds and is aiming to get $200 million.
Their deal:
Sesame (dot) AI is delivering the most humanized and emotionally intelligent conversations with an AI agent yet. Both use Sesame AI’s Conversational Speech Model (CSM-1B) and are making waves all over social media.
Hundreds of TikTok videos from major influencers are showing their Maya/Miles interactions, like this one from tt@bbg_benny => 2.5M views
This is driving thousands of monthly visits to their website.
But wait, there’s a plot twist.
While this is going on, someone spots this buzz and decides to capitalize on it. So, they built an AI voice app and named it…. Sesame Voice AI. It launches on April 9th:
Beyond genius. They’re free-riding on organic searches for Sesame AI since the original website has no mobile version.
In less than 60 days, the app grew to 9K downloads and $6K revenue last month.
While distributions have barely even started, I can still spot their early ambassador strategy. My guess is they’re probably preparing for when the buzz dies down (cause it will).
Their strategy: Posting videos, the hook: “having no friends”
The account with the most buzz is tt@talkingaiapp, and it’s a weird scheme.
In the first few videos, they include a demo of the ACTUAL OG sesame (dot) com website:
But then, in May, they replaced it with the Sesame AI app website. According to our research, it was launched by a company located in Estonia and Lisbon.
All the videos reference “sesameai” in hashtags and captions. They’re riding the hype of the original and doing it well.
Two more accounts just started getting warmed up:
tt@ian.sesame, tt@niyah_chat, etc
They are all posting videos of feeling lonely, with no CTA in the video, and non-frequent mentions of the app in the caption.
We speak often about riding the hype wave, but we’ve never seen this approach before.
Want to see another app riding the hype wave? Read up on Mixy.
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