Dec 29, 2025 · 1h 0m · mixergy
#2290 He’s building an AI media empire
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview with Andrew Warner, Dream Stories founder Ricardo Vice Santos explains how he builds AI-powered personalized children's books and shares his vision for a future where digital media is custom-generated for individual consumption.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Andrew holds 21.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Andrew as informed peer 4.5 Guest teaching 4.8 Guest disagreement 2.2 Andrew pushing back 3.3
speaking balance: gold is Andrew, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:21 Guest rejects revenue discussion and get-rich-quick angle
Ricardo immediately shuts down Andrew's revenue question and rejects the premise of turning his startup into a get-rich-quick story, demanding they focus on the product vision.
Hardest push from Andrew ▶ 35:44 Host challenges guest on subscription pricing contradictionAndrew directly catches the tension between Ricardo's strong criticism of subscribe-and-save funnels and the fact that Dream Stories relies on one-off transactional sales.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 50:30 Guest explains synthetic data training derived from customer hacksAfter Andrew expresses skepticism that Ricardo learns anything new from support tickets, Ricardo delivers an in-depth breakdown of how customer photo workarounds revealed a synthetic data pipeline that cut input requirements to one photo.
Andrew holds their own ▶ 43:27 Host pitches complete B2B personalized coaching systemAndrew demonstrates deep operational knowledge by architecting an automated B2B executive coaching pipeline using meeting transcripts, Zapier, and core company management texts.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Andrew as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Andrew pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scaling Book Creation and Addressing Revenue Metrics | 5 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Andrew presses Ricardo immediately on revenue figures and tries to frame the company as a get-rich-quick success story, citing past metrics. Ricardo firmly rejects that framing, refusing to talk about revenue to keep the focus on long-term vision. Andrew also tests Ricardo's Spotify backstory by citing Matt Farley's handmade novelty songs. | |
| Disappointment with Children's Media and Tintin Inspiration | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Ricardo explains his motivation for founding Dream Stories, contrasting his childhood love for Tintin with modern children's media that he views as mundane lowest-common-denominator content. Andrew listens supportively with minimal pushback. | |
| Solving Image Consistency in AI Book Generation | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Andrew demonstrates familiarity with generative image tools like ChatGPT and Nano Banana, describing the character drift problem across multiple scenes. Ricardo expands with technical details on using LoRAs, Stable Diffusion, and filtering poor-quality customer inputs. | |
| Partnering with Phil and the Future of Media Generation | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Ricardo recounts teaming up with his co-founder Phil and outlines his thesis that zero marginal creation cost will unlock self-consumed bespoke media rather than just cheaper Hollywood productions. Andrew clarifies the core distinction of creating content purely for personal consumption. | |
| Buyer Psychology and the Bedtime Ritual | 4 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Ricardo uses the Gillette razor model to explain products where the purchaser is not the end consumer, justifying why he targeted parents buying bedtime books rather than direct consumer video networks. Andrew synthesizes the concept with his own Suno song experiments. | |
| Sponsor Spotlight: PR Automation Using Zapier | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Following an ad read and PR automation discussion via Zapier, Ricardo explains the compute unit economics making multi-character books viable while video remains prohibitively expensive due to high inference costs. Andrew validates the long-term vision of values-aligned storytelling. | |
| Distribution Challenges and Ad Unit Economics | 6 | 6 | 3 | 5 | Andrew directly quotes Ricardo's past interview with Nathan Latka regarding CAC, AOV, and Facebook ad buying, pressing for deeper operational insight. Ricardo reframes Andrew's points, explaining the dangers of targeting 1.0 ROAS on physical products without guaranteed repeat purchases. | |
| Rethinking Subscriptions and Developing a Push Service | 6 | 6 | 3 | 6 | Andrew highlights a paradox in Ricardo's advice: criticizing subscribe-and-save models while Dream Stories itself charges per transaction without an active subscription tier. Ricardo defends his stance by explaining that subscription is earned only when the product shifts from pull creation to push-based developmental milestones. | |
| AI Personalization Opportunities in Enterprise and Coaching | 7 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Andrew takes the lead by proposing a detailed B2B product concept: automated executive coaching distilled from meeting transcripts and leadership books via Zapier. Ricardo validates the idea, linking it to his own workflow with NotebookLM and discussing how context management rather than commodity LLMs creates defensibility. | |
| Customer Support Insights and Synthetic Data Training | 4 | 7 | 3 | 5 | Andrew challenges Ricardo to name a concrete insight from doing customer support daily, skeptically noting the business seems straightforward. Ricardo educates him on discovering synthetic data training: users uploaded previous AI outputs to avoid blurry photos, which enabled Dream Stories to reduce input requirements to a single image. | |
| Implementing Intercom's Fin and AI Agent Personas | 5 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Andrew discusses Intercom's positioning transition into an AI agent platform with Fin and requests Ricardo's internal persona guidelines. Ricardo explains why customer support AI must embody an engineered brand persona rather than mimicking the founder's voice. |
Statements from this episode (18)
Dream Stories has generated about 70,000 user characters since launch
“But we've had since we launched, we had about 70,000 characters created on the platform.”
Santos: Giving people creation tools creates novel behaviors, not linear extrapolations
“And so I think if you give people the tools to creation, they will do things that are not necessarily an extrapolation of what we do today.”
Santos: Modern children's media caters to the lowest common denominator
“To be honest, a bit more mundane and there, there's content, I think it has high production value, but it feels a sort of like, for lack of a better expression, lowest common denominator to, you know, it's kind of like something that's very agreeable, you know…”
Santos: Building consumer AI requires consistency without multiple tries
“It's an entirely different thing to build a product for other people to use it, like, you know, the, you know, with sort of some sort of symbols of quality and consistency, right? So again, you actually mentioned this, right? You go in, you do it, and eventual…”
Santos: Dream Stories used ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and LoRAs for consistency
“We use a number of things. We, at the time we used the chat to PT. We used the stable diffusion. I forget the first model we used. We used to do it. We used LORAS, which was we still do in some regards but LORAS is something that, you know, that you literally …”
Santos: Zero-cost AI will create media made entirely for self-consumption
“I'm more of a believer that there's going to be sort of new behaviors that you can't see just yet. And this is one of them, right? Which is if cost near zero, then literally everyone can do it. But if everyone can do it, then of course, you know, the, who's go…”
Santos: Women make roughly 70% of Gillette razor purchases
“There's a few products that are like this, like the one I usually tell is like, is Gillette where, you know, usually the woman in the relationship is the one that buys the Gillette. It's like, I think about 70% of the purchases of Gillette are by women. Don't,…”
Vice Santos: Dream Stories sells multiple books per customer via episodic sequences
“I told you that we sell multiple books, you know, to the same person you know, essentially because they're episodic, right? It's a sequence.”
Santos: OpenAI's Sora is reportedly burning $15 million per day
“This is why it's kind of known that, you know, Sora, you know, OpenAI Sora is literally burning, it's been said to be burning fifteen million dollars per day, right, on the app, essentially with people like playing with the video.”
Santos: AI video generation is currently too expensive to be viable
“Video is actually, It's still expensive enough that it's hard to actually come up with a, if you're not a hyperscaler, to come up with a viable business model. Arguably, it's not a business model even for them.”
Vice Santos: Multi-character consistency in generative AI is exponentially harder
“If you look at most comparable products out there usually they have one character just because the whole thing about having, if it's already hard to keep consistent with one character character, it becomes actually exponentially harder with multiple, not becau…”
Santos: AI tools make product distribution harder and more critical than execution
“Particularly in the time where you have all these tools like you know, vibe coding, lovable, so on, so forth, where everyone can create the product. You can, you know, it, it's a great time in the sense that, you know, if you ever, you know, if you were ever t…”
Santos: Dream Stories will not make ABC books due to zero repeatability
“That's why we're not doing ABC books. You know, people ask me to say, well, can I get a book about ABC? I was like, no, not interested in that, right? There's no repeatability to that.”
Santos: Subscriptions must be a feature of a service, not a discount hook
“What you want to do is you want to build like a service, something that actually is a service in which Subscription is just a feature of that service.”
Santos: A subscription-only checkout converted better than offering one-off purchases
“Do an A-B test, you know, have a funnel with subscription only and the funnel where you give both choices and then see what the conversion does. And lo and behold, the one with subscription actually increased conversion because it reduced that because again, y…”
Warner: Zapier's founder automates employee meeting feedback based on management books
“Wade, the founder, likes the, what is it, the five dysfunctions of an organization, of a team. I forget the name of the book. Anyway, he likes it so much that that, at the end of each internal meeting, Everyone's individual contribution to the meeting gets ana…”
Santos: Dream Stories trains consistent models using synthetic photo variations
“We were able to reduce the number of pictures required to literally just one, because then we're like, holy , you know, we can essentially just ask for one picture, generate the synthetic version of it, and then say, do you like this? Great. So we generate a f…”
Santos: Intercom's Fin works well only with extensive tailoring and customization
“Now it's not amazing. But you know, but it's good and but it requires a lot of customization, right? And I would say that I would still recommend it. But I think the value, you know, if you go out and try Finn, I think what you're going to be very disappointed…”