For me it's kind of a weird story, haha!
Okay so back in the day, Taiwonton (the creator of the other 3 POPLOIDS) and I roleplayed a lot on Gaiaonline? And you'd need to have like pictures of your characters for the sign up sheet and the graphics and stuff, and she and I were on pixiv searching for pictures for characters. I have a really intense love for characters with facial hair, and she finds this really cute character with a goatee and so she sends it to me knowing this, and holy crap I just fell in love with him INSTANTLY. This character turned out to be the UTAU Yoshiki Roku, and so I did some investigation.
I had been vaguely aware of UTAU, because I was a Vocaloid fan and I knew about Teto and stuff, but I never really knew like, outside of that? But I researched Roku, found out he was an UTAU, and decided I'd download the program and experiment and make him sing. For a long time, I only played with UTAU voices like Roku, Rozen, LOKE and Ritsu Namine, but then finally Roku's creator had found the videos I had made with Roku and he contacted me! Now he only speaks Japanese, and at the time my Japanese was even worse than it currently is, so the language barrier was really incredible orz; But disregarding that, he was really supportive of me, and he urged me to make my own UTAU, and so I did--I made Hayari.
After Hayari was made, Roku's creator was INSANELY supportive of her--he drew a lot of art of her, he even used her right away, and I was so flattered and excited! So at that time, I roped Taiwonton and SereneHeaven (Pina Kumone's creator), who are both IRL friends of mine who lived in the same town, to record UTAU with me too. They weren't really excited about it at first, but as we continued, we got really really involved in the UTAU community...
Tai and I made twitters to talk to Roku's creator and his associate, but after a while, overseas users started following us there too, and we made a lot of friends! Here I am a bit over two years later still going strong and I'm really glad to be here <3