Bo Bennett On Gifting Adult Children Brilliantly

HOST: It's good to have you back, Bo. You know, last time we got into the whole pipeline of profitable books, and I've been thinking about how today's topic is completely different because this is the first product we've discussed where the customer isn't trying to make a profit at all; it's purely emotional. StarringMyKid.com is all about creating something personal. The site says we're looking at just five minutes from photo to finished book. Walk me through what's actually happening in those five minutes because turning a snapshot of a real kid into a consistent cartoon character sounds like it should take a lot longer. GUEST: It does, but thanks to modern AI technology, it doesn't. And that's the beauty of this website. It's just it's such a fun and amazing process, especially as a father, to be able to upload a picture of your kids and tell AI to create a story around that. And then you see page after page the consistency of the characters. And just jeez, just six months ago, we couldn't do this because the technology just wasn't there, but now it is there. And not only can you just tell AI just hey, hey, create a story, but what's great about this is you could actually tell it what story to create. And you don't have to write the story. You just give it like a like an anecdote. Like, uh, back when my son was in nursery school, he made a really goofy face for the pictures. And that was it. And that was like the funniest thing, but they created or they the website created an entire story around that, and it's fantastic. HOST: Character consistency is real magic trick, but what really caught my eye was the voice cloning. You've been building audiobook infrastructure for years, but the emotional pitch for that with grandparents narrating a bedtime story, that's completely different. How did you know that feature would land and, more importantly, how do you make sure a non-technical grandparent can actually set it up? GUEST: Well, it's all web-based and it's the the website is kind of cartoonish, so it's very easy. I mean, you press here, click this, talk now, and anybody can use it. Even even grandparents that that seem to have missed the internet wave. Would be able to do this with with ease. Uh yeah, and you mentioned the the emotional salience of the the grandparents actually narrating the story. And that can be a wonderful thing, especially after the grandparents are no longer here. And uh the the kids are still around or the kids want to share it with their kids or whatever someday. But it is an interesting and fun feature. HOST: Yeah, creating that kind of legacy is pretty powerful. Now, your topic angle is that this might be "perhaps the best gift to adult children that there ever was." I read that as parents giving this to their grown kids who now have children of their own. What specifically makes this better than, say, a nice hardcover from an online retailer? What's the experience you're trying to create that a physical product from a store can't replicate? GUEST: So here is the idea behind that gift. So let's say, um, which which is factually true, my my daughter is getting married soon and very soon she's going to have children of her own. Now we have, oh jeez, dozens and dozens of stories from her childhood. Which we kind of talk about now and then and it's funny and we remind her and it's just like a a very emotional part of her growing up in these these fantastic stories. So, what if we can create a series of books? That illustrate these stories. Of my daughter. So, we'll recreate these stories in like the children's book format starring my daughter when she was a little girl or whenever this these stories took place. And we print these out into professionally printed children's books. And we give it to her. Now, my daughter reads those to her kids. So, not only are they incredibly entertaining and very funny, most of them are. But they're also very emotional and it brings my daughter back to. Her childhood. Reliving that and sharing that with her kids. It's an incredible gift to give anyone. HOST: That's a really beautiful vision, preserving those memories and letting your daughter share them with her own children in such a tangible way. You mentioned printing them professionally. Is that something people can do directly through the site, or do they take the digital file and use some other service? GUEST: They do it both through our site and take the digital file through another service. We present them with all of the files ready to go. So now and then we give them the link to IngramSpark where they can just go and they could upload it there. Now, admittedly, this is an extra step. And when you mention the older grandparents, this may be a little bit confusing or technical, but for most people it should be easy enough to do. It's definitely in our plans to streamline that and keep everybody on our site and be able to do that for them and we handle all the stuff in the background. So that is that is a a future development and in fact, by the time most people hear this, that probably will already be in place. HOST: That's good to know, keeping it all under one roof would definitely simplify things. Now, shifting gears a bit, your top plan is called the "Storyteller," and it's geared toward professionals, like daycares or libraries, or maybe those grandparents with lots of grandkids. You're offering commercial use rights with that one. Are you seeing one segment pull ahead in early traction, or is that breadth intentional from the start? GUEST: I don't think any segment is pulling ahead right now. I think that it it's pretty even what users are actually using it for. But yeah, that storyteller package is there for people who are going to be doing a lot more books and not just a couple books. And the the commercial aspect of it was for anybody who sees this idea the way I do and says, I want to make a business out of this. I'm going to offer this to people in my neighborhood, in my playgroup, circles, or whatever, and be able to offer this and start like their own business creating these books. Because you could actually create it for somebody else and then just charge them whatever you want for them. So that was the idea behind the the storyteller package. HOST: That's a really interesting way to think about it, empowering others to build businesses on your platform. Now, StarringMyKid definitely uses a lot of the same underlying tech as your author tools, like AuthorVoices for the voice cloning, but the customer is completely different—it's a parent or grandparent. Is this a deliberate pivot toward consumer gifting, or was it more that the technology matured enough that building this was almost a byproduct of what you already had running? GUEST: Yeah, I think byproduct is a good way to word it, because that's pretty much what it is. It isn't quite the same audience that that we're typically going after, but it is something that our technology enables this new audience to actually use. So, that's kind of where we went with this. We We did a a little pivot more to the consumer market. Uh we do have plans to make this more of a product in line with Book Buddy, where users will create books for publication. In that sense, we wouldn't we wouldn't highlight the use your own photos of your own kids, because that uh really not appropriate for like taking their own kids and and marketing it in that way. They should be kind of generic kids in the book if if children are starring in these books. Um not somebody else's kids or their own kids. But anyways, that would be a different pivot a little bit later on down the road where we're we'd probably do that under a different website name and not directly on this site. HOST: That makes sense. Separating the personal creation from the public publishing would keep things clear. Bo, before we go—for listeners who want to follow up on what we covered, where can they find you and the work you're doing? GUEST: Well, you can go to our website. Uh which is starringmykid.com. And you could also go to our other website where we have all of our businesses linked and that's archieboy.com.You can go to our website. Which is staringmykid.com. And you can also go to our other website where we have all of our businesses linked and that's archieboy.com. HOST: Bo, thanks for coming back on. Hearing about the personal touch you're creating with StarringMyKid.com, especially that vision with your daughter, really drives home why this might be such a special gift. And thank you for spending part of your day with us. Let's get you back on soon—there's plenty more we can cover. Until next time—that's a wrap.