Scaling Open Source AI Image Platforms at Scale | Bobo Zhou from MyShell AI

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By adding Pathmonk to your website in seconds by letting the AI do all the work and increase conversions while you keep the marketing as usual. Check us out on Pathmonk.com. Hey everybody. Welcome to today’s episode of Pathmonk Presents. Today we are joined by Bobo is the co-founder of My shell.ai. Bobo, welcome to the show.

Bobo Zhou: Yeah. Thanks for you having me here. Thanks, Rick.

Rick: Of course. Absolutely. I’m excited to speak to you, Bobo. We were talking about MyShell AI a little bit offline, and it sounds like a super interesting project, but in your own words, Bobo, what’s the heart of what your company does and how would you describe it to someone new?

Bobo Zhou: Okay, we are focused on the AI image and the video entertainment parts. And we hire a bunch of developer in the world. So we ask them to upload their workflow or their models to our platform, and they can develop their own works or their own products to our platform, and we publish them to the world.

We basically do the marketing stuff to introduce their agents and to show people how this agent works and how this is gonna work. And it’s gonna be a popular agents or the popular product. We’re gonna share the money with the developers and also we have our own Web3 system. We have our crypto and bin, so we share our own crypto with the developers.

So we are combining the Web3 crypto system and the AI image videos entertainment part. So we’re like the first company which is doing that. So far, we are doing so good. So that’s basically the simple introduction for our company.

Rick: That’s pretty sweet and it does sound pretty unique actually. But I’m curious, how do these devs actually find out about you? What are your top marketing or acquisition channels at the moment? Is it word of mouth, the website, how does that work?

Bobo Zhou: Okay, in last year or the last year of the last year, we developed our own TTS model, the sales model. So we put on the open source and it gonna be viral for a while. And OpenAI also are using our TTS model for now.

So we kind of contribute our technique source to the open source world, and we develop our own platform. Our platform already has 20,000 followers on Twitter. So you can check us, just MyShell. You can check on our Twitter, you can see a bunch of news—what we are doing, what we are going to publish to the world.

And after, six months later, we transformed to focus on the image part. The reason is we found out character agents are not going to give us too many users long-term. Users use it a couple days or weeks and then they are gone. But the image part, people always use it and they always need it.

The image will follow what is trending on the internet. So there’s always demand for people who want to use AI to produce image stuff—like influencers, YouTubers, anyone who wants to show off lifestyle or content. So we found this market is big and users need products that are easy to use, one click, and they can have their own image.

Meanwhile Stable Diffusion went viral. And there’s an open source project named UI, they already found money recently. They have a big community and a lot of developers. The developers give a lot of technology to the company UI, but they didn’t get any money because it’s open source and none of them got business part.

So we provide a business project here because we share our project: you can use your workflow and open source part on our platform. If you upload it, we will do the marketing stuff. If we do it well and your agents are used more, you get more money.

A lot of open source developers came to us in three months, so we became viral. Now we already have 8,000 developers globally, and we also have 26 million users in Europe and North America. So for now we’re doing like that.

Rick: That’s pretty impressive. 26 million users is no joke. It sounds like an exciting time for you guys. Bobo, I want to switch gears and talk about you as a leader. What’s a day in the life of Bobo like? On a typical day, what are the main things you focus on?

Bobo Zhou: Oh, just ask a question first. Is it gonna be a casual lifestyle question, or a business working style question?

Rick: More what you do in the business.

Bobo Zhou: Oh, okay. So our office is based in Los Angeles, but we have 16 people among the global. I have colleagues in Singapore, Hong Kong, and New York. We are remote, working on our own time zones.

So I get up like 9:00 AM, and it’s late for many people. I don’t need to travel to office, so I just get up and go to the computer. The first thing I look at is news on open source. Because we are focused on image and video, recently Google published their new model, Nano Banana. And there are companies in China that published open source models, like Z image, Queen, Flag 2 from Black Forest.

We look at how these models are published and how community contributes. In open source, people contribute for free and for fun. Some creators like the creator of ControlNet—ControlNet is basic for Stable Diffusion and helps control body and face. That guy got no money, but developers see him as a god.

So I need to check what is important stuff, contact with them, see how technology helps our image or video product, and try to get it fast into our platform. We also share benefit with creators.

This takes like one and a half or two hours in the morning. Then I spend half hour checking our website, bugs, upload new agents.

In the afternoon, from like 1 PM, I start white coding stuff because we have 26 million users and need to keep platform convenient. Need to look at data: when user upload first image, how agent produces first image, how many times they use, workflow issues, face or no face, many bugs. I create systems to monetize agents, see which agents going well, and fix bugs.

Morning I do marketing and open source scouting. Afternoon I do platform and agents technology debugging. So I’m between technology and marketing.

At 6 PM or night, I do casual paperwork—like opportunities, co-branding, advertising. That’s my daily work.

Rick: That’s impressive. You’re kind of a hybrid—developer plus marketing. Knowing the technical side helps a lot with messaging. Now we have an interesting segment called rapid fire questions. Ready for it?

Bobo Zhou: Yeah, it’s okay.

Rick: When it comes to consuming content, do you prefer watching, reading, or listening?

Bobo Zhou: I like more seeing the video, so watching. I like video stuff.

Rick: What’s the latest piece of content you watched, and did anything stick with you?

Bobo Zhou: The latest content I watched is a tutorial. People taught me how to use Nano Banana more flexible or more usable. There are a lot of product engineer stuff and keyword from image generation. So I watch prompt engineer videos and tutorials. Something technical.

Rick: If you had a magic wand and could fix one frustrating thing in your marketing life with tech, what would it be?

Bobo Zhou: It is gonna be communicating stuff. I want every marketing colleagues to have the power to coding. Definitely it gonna be great because LLMs are going so fast and coding is accelerating.

But marketing colleagues, they just do marketing stuff. They don’t use tools to accelerate their work—advertising stuff or SEO training stuff—they do old-fashioned way. I hate that. So magic wand I use on that.

Rick: That’s a good one. Bobo, I want to thank you for being on the show today. If someone forgets everything about the interview, what’s the one thing they should remember about your company and the work you’re doing?

Bobo Zhou: Just keep revamping. We are providing an easy to use AI image generation product. Just that.

Rick: Easy. If people want to check you guys out, where can they go?

Bobo Zhou: They can go Twitter or Google or any social media platform. Just type in MyShell AI. They can find us.

Rick: Perfect. Bobo, thank you again. This was more technical than usual, and I’m sure many people will appreciate it. I wish you a wonderful day.

Bobo Zhou: Yeah, I wish you too. Thank you, Rick. Thank you for having me.

Rick: Of course. See you next time. Bye everyone.

Bobo Zhou: Bye.