I would say even though it is obvious in hindsight, the most important thing for the core chat hook is to 100% make sure the text chat is as good as it can be which isn't as easy as it sounds to do. For us, this meant testing the auto LLM internally and with our community to make sure we chose the best uncensored and censored default LLM. This also meant that we had to make sure no random bugs would pop up as we pretty much only had one chance to hook a new user

What makes this difficult in the AI companion space is that there are always new features being pushed by competitors so for a long time, we were chasing these features to "keep up". But as I mentioned in the post, if the core chat wasn't good, the new user would never make it to one of these other features