Last year in November, I began working on Ode to build a minimal publishing platform for myself without the noise of the modern internet. Over the last few months, Ode has really matured as an open-source self-hosted website generator. Today, at v1.4.5, it launches on Product Hunt.
While building a product, I ve also been trying to run content on social media to bring in more traffic. I experimented with creating AI-generated characters and producing UGC-style videos around them.
During this process, I realized something interesting: there are hundreds of tools that can generate virtual characters and UGC-style videos. But what actually makes a video engaging isn t the tool - it s the authenticity of the person creating the content.
