u/TextMila

About Mila

Mila is your AI assistant (and friend?) that lives in your texts. She helps you block off your calendar, coordinate plans, give advice, respond to emails, roast your friends, act as your personal accountability coach, and so much more. Give her a try via textmila.com

The Role

We're looking for someone creative who can help grow Mila's presence across social - Reddit, Instagram, X, Facebook, and TikTok. We have a lot of ideas, but need help making them happen.

This is an entry-level role - no prior experience required. We'll train you on what we know and learn alongside you on the rest. It's also not a traditional 9-to-5. We are a lean, scrappy, fully remote team (based across New York and San Francisco) building an agentic AI startup from the ground up.

Qualifications

Creative and willing to experiment
Hungry to move fast and figure things out as you go
Active on social media and tuned into what's resonating online
Genuine interest in growth marketing, AI, or startups
Ideally based in the U.S., but will consider applicants abroad

Details

Job type: Part-time internship (approximately 20 hours per week, flexible schedule)
Compensation: Monthly stipend of $1,500
Location: Fully remote within the United States
Reports to: Founders

If you're interested, you can describe a bit of why you may be a good fit in the comments below (I will follow up with candidates) or you can message me directly with your resume or any other details (if preferred + comfortable).

The all knowing and powerful Mila.

My best friend and I spent the last few months building Mila, an AI assistant. Quick context on what she is: you text her like a friend, she remembers stuff about you, follows up on things you said you'd do, helps think through problems, and you can drop her into group chats (genuinely the most fun part - settling arguments, roasting friends, planning trips). She's meant for people who want an AI in their life, but have app fatigue. You can try her at textmila.com - just text the number, no sign-up.

We originally launched Mila as an iOS app.

~800 downloads over the month
~200 daily actives near launch
Day 7 retention around 20%
Day 30 retention around 6%

Both of us have had previous experience scaling tools like this so we weren't thrilled. The results signalled that we had hit a pain point with people, but were missing something.

However, we kept hearing why people stopped using Mila and it bugged me. The step of opening an app to talk to an AI is a small step, but it's a step nonetheless, and resulting in people forgetting it existed. It also made the experience feel too 'professional' and that we were competing with literally every other LLM.

About two weeks in we let a few friends text Mila through a phone number instead, as an experiment. Oddly enough, the behavior was completely different. There were way more messages per person and they were way more casual. People started adding her to their group chats without us asking, which created a bit of a flywheel. The funniest examples are seeing Mila roast people, especially when you give her pictures or Instagrams - she is lethal.

It's been nearly 2 weeks of Mila spreading via text and the results are promising so far. Speaking with users, it's clear some magic happens in a blue iMessage bubble that doesn't happen on a desktop.

Call us crazy, but we removed Mila from the App Store and are focused entirely on being text-only. Gmail and Calendar integrations are shipping in the next few days so she can help with inbox and scheduling stuff, which will be helpful.

Mila is still rough around the edges in certain scenarios, but she's way more humanlike than any LLM or agent we've interacted with personally. Honestly, the personality tuning alone has consumed weeks of our lives and there's more to do there. But I've never had more fun working on anything and would appreciate feedback.

Three things I'd love to hear from people here:

We are continuously shipping updates to Mila, building in public, so we would love any feedback, positive or especially negative.
Has anyone else killed something with semi-real traction to chase a better signal? How did you know it was the right call vs just being impatient?
For anyone who's built text-native stuff...is there one wish someone had told you before you started?

[HIRING] Growth and Strategy Intern

We pulled our AI app off the App Store (after 1 month) to go text-only.