Building authentic customer connections through constructed characters

Executive overview

Authenticity at scale seems like a contradiction — real connection feels one-to-one, but businesses must reach thousands. Trevor McFedries resolved this by building Lil Miquela, a fully computer-generated influencer with 2 million Instagram followers and real brand deals.

The insight: artificial does not mean inauthentic. What matters is whether the character is grounded in genuine ideas and transparent about what it is. Miquela openly exists at the boundary of fiction and reality, and that honesty is what makes her fan base real.

Being upfront about artificiality can create deeper connection than pretending to be human.

Trevor McFedries: from DJ to virtual character creator

• Left Iowa for LA; absorbed a multicultural environment that shaped his thinking.
• Early entrepreneurial failures — a clothing import business lost $200k — taught him to iterate.
• Used a DJ career on an iPod (no vinyl crates) to learn that differentiation beats convention.
• Applied personal branding tactics from MySpace-era entrepreneurship to build his own identity.
• Opened for Katy Perry (2011); then joined Spotify as a cultural bridge between Swedish engineers and US artists.
• Studying Will & Grace convinced him that carefully constructed characters could shift public opinion at scale.

The core idea: software-style scalability for storytelling

• Traditional celebrity talent doesn't scale — language barriers, geography, finite attention.
• A computer-generated character could be localised infinitely, appear anywhere, speak to anyone.
• Inspiration came from WWE wrestling: fictional events staged in nonfiction spaces that still make audiences pause.
• Goal: create a "modern Marvel" — a universe of characters exploring race, otherness, and identity.
• The uncanny valley is the authenticity trap: trying too hard to appear human triggers repulsion. Miquela sidesteps it by being stylised, not photorealistic.
• Research from Woebot (AI therapist) confirmed the principle — users told they were speaking to AI disclosed more than users who thought they were talking to a human.

Building and pitching Brud

• Tested the idea on smart friends; most said no. Contrarian-plus-right is a signal worth pursuing.
• Heard ~40 investor rejections while trying to present as a conventional founder.
• Pitch broke through only when he dropped the act and was fully himself with Upfront Ventures' Kara Norton.
• Lesson: investors are economic co-founders — due-diligence their track record by talking directly to founders they've backed, not just reading their LinkedIn posts.
• Navigated venture capital as a young Black founder; advocates for VCs developing tools to recognise talent that doesn't present in expected ways.

Designing Miquela

• Started with a cultural white-space question: who is missing from the conversation?
• Wanted a character with ambiguous ethnicity so anyone — Filipino, Dominican, Midwestern — could see themselves.
• Core theme: otherness, drawn from Trevor's own experience as a Black kid into punk and skateboarding in Iowa.
• Character backstory, weekly narrative arcs, and ongoing team discussions keep the story coherent and evolving.
• Launched on Instagram in 2016; now 2M+ followers, millions of YouTube views, signed to talent agency CAA.

Data-informed, not data-driven

• Watch which story threads fans respond to; double down selectively.
• When Brud shipped improved animation, fans ignored the tech upgrade and asked about the character's friends and outfits.
• Story and character always outrank technology.
• Different fan cohorts engage at different depths: wiki-builders vs. casual magazine browsers. Both are valid.

Authenticity inside the company

• Trevor celebrates employees for who they are outside the job — the person who calls when things are hard, who cares for a parent — not just their work output.
• Internal culture of authentic recognition sustains the creative pressure required to maintain Miquela.

Real-world impact and wider ambition

• During Black Lives Matter, Miquela's platform amplified books, creators, and causes; young fans read dense literature and sent follow-up questions.
• Virtual interactions with a fictional character produced measurable real-world engagement.
• Long-term ambition: redistribute value away from traditional label structures toward creators; use economic scale to shape policy and public discourse.
• Characters as "a bridge to empathy" — letting audiences encounter otherness safely before applying that openness in workplaces and homes.