Ovii is a tool for making AI UGC videos. You create a custom AI actor, style them in a scene, point them at your product, and they market it for you in short, vertical, social-ready clips - without you ever being on camera. Josh and I built it as the first product under Tortuga AI. My job was product and design, plus a fair amount of the front-end.
Features
You design an actor by setting how they look, then dress and place them in a scene with clothing and an environment, then pick a few director's notes for how they behave on camera. Ovii generates a vertical, mobile-ready clip from that. Actors are saved and reusable, so once you've made one that fits your brand you can keep generating new scenes and variations with the same face instead of starting over each time.
Underlying thesis
Building got easier; getting seen didn't. Josh and I learned that the hard way shipping apps under Tortuga Labs - the gap between "this is good" and "people know it exists" was bigger than anything we'd hit before. The cheapest lever for getting seen right now is short-form video, and for most builders that lever is blocked, because making it usually means being on camera with production skills they don't have and don't want. Ovii is a bet that removing the on-camera barrier is what lets a builder actually use the channel that works.
Strategic decisions
- No camera as the wedge. The whole product aims at one barrier: builders won't put themselves on camera. That's what keeps them off the channel that works, so it's the thing we set out to remove. We left the studio-grade production value to the studios.
- Turn the wait into learning. Generating a video takes a couple of minutes, which is normally dead time staring at a spinner. We built a library of short, Ovii-specific lessons that surface during that wait - how to find a content archetype, how to write a hook, how to batch a week of clips - so the unavoidable pause does real work.
- Guardrails from the start. A tool that generates realistic AI people invites misuse, so content moderation for policy-violating requests went into the very first version. With something this easy to abuse, the guardrails are a launch requirement, and we built them like one.
Learnings
The most useful thing Ovii taught us came from using it on ourselves. The first actor we made ended up running as a manifestation creator, and the account built a real TikTok following with very strong engagement - the top video landed close to a million views. We'd built Ovii to solve our own distribution problem, and instead it surfaced something we weren't looking for: there was a real, hungry audience around manifestation. That signal is what told us to go build a manifestation app, which became Eos.
So the lesson went past the tool working. Pointing a marketing tool at a real audience turned out to be a way to find what to build next. The distribution work and the product work were the same work.
You can see Ovii at ovii.app.
