product type: AI Image Generator

Nick Berns launched Hairstyle AI in November, 2022. He challenged himself to build and launch an MVP in 24 hours after being inspired by Danny Postma and Pieter Levels. He initially charged $5 to validate purchases.

Sales

He made 23 sales within 16 hours of launching. It was validated. After 2 days, he’d passed 37 customers.

He reached 50 customers 6 days after launching.

Insights

He got early feedback from people requesting bald hairstyles.

He did have some issues when training photos the training photos weren’t suitable. In those cases, he asked the buyer to re-submit photos. He also added more photo upload fields to increase the input variety.

Nick tweeted that he was becoming knowledgeable in 392 different hairstyles.

New Hairstyles

Nick shared when he added new hairstyles. Examples include:

• asymmetrical and bob haircuts (females)
• receding hairline

Increasing Conversions

At one point, the initiated vs. completed order ratio was 10%. He simplified the order flow.

He added social proof from Testimonial.io on November 8.

Added more details to upload instructions to make the process clearer

Pieter Levels launched Avatar AI as an ‘AI mini project‘ in October, 2022. The service quickly went viral and surpassed the income he made from his other projects.

He had his first sale within 17 minutes of announcing the launch. An hour later, he had made 6 sales.

He has been building the product in public.

Types of photos

Pieter also added different types of problems in response to audience requests:

• Couple photos. Some problems with MM and FF couples cause AI likes to revert back to MF, will add selector and fix tomorrow
• Dogs and cats

Styles

• Style selector. People could create a package of the type of styles they wanted to generate. It was hosted on Typeform.
• 4K high-resolution avatars. He added a added 20% off link when launching the avatars. He later described the new renders as insanely detailed and photorealistic
• LinkedIn-style professional headshots you can use for work. You can see photos of Pieter as a business woman
• Added Halloween and Christmas in response to holiday demand

Sales

He made $10k within a day from over 139 customers. This includedover $4100 in first 17 hours.

These sales were mostly from Twitter. However, Instagram quickly became the top referrer after it went viral on the platform

After 10 days, he had made $100’000 USD from Avatar AI. He had made 2,943 sales with an average of $33 per sale. He had paid around $25k in GPU costs, which included $8k in just one day.

Marketing

Pieter has done a couple of marketing experiments.

He launched Avatar AI on Product Hunt on November 2. It became the #2 Product of the Day with over 900 upvotes. View the launch.

He offered a special Halloween promotion. Customers could get %25 off.

He added a referral link. People could get extra avatars if they shared the linked on social media.

Privacy

He shared a Twitter thread about the risks of train models leaking from AI apps.

He made a robot that auto deleted all photos, and the entire AI model, 24 hours after rendering.

Technical Issues

Spent an evening making making a robot to process the unfinished jobs. Some people wouldn’t get their avatars as the GPU image library occasionally died due to bad input files. He made a mini dashboard to keep track of GPU jobs to try and reduce the failed jobs from 5% to %0.

He temporarily took the API that he used to train the models down after too many people signed up.

Copycats

He quickly saw ads on Upwork from people wanting to build similar websites.

Building the MVP

Kyle tweeted that he wanted to ‘tinker with AI’ in mid October, 2022. One week later, he announced that he was working on his first AI product idea.

He shared an ‘interesting’ example of the first prompt. Within hours, he got the stable diffusion prompts good enough for an MVP. Despite the improvements, he had issues with the amount of time it took to guess different prompts. He learned that using the same seed each time produces the same image, which made it easier to test prompts.

AI Logo Tool

Kyle tweeted that he was building an AI logo tool in late October. At that point, the output was an equal mixture of useful logos and complete garbage.

He tweeted a link to the prototype at AI Graphics. He described it as a logo generator. He also said that if he couldn’t get the app to consistently create consistent quality logos, he’d pivot to generating marketing/advertising images.

By October 28, the service had generated 700+ AI logos. He decided to test interest by limiting the amount of free logos people could get before asking for an email address. This increased signups by 42%.

Validating AIGraphics

Kyle had many feature ideas for the product, but hadn’t validated the business. One of the ideas was that the images didn’t have to be perfect; they could serve as inspiration for designers.

He bought the aigraphics.io domain name and expanded the concept. The service would now generate different types of graphics. He started testing different graphic types to validate demand. He built buttons for every feature with an email capture, and built the most requested features. At this point, he didn’t even have a pricing page.

He added subscription plans in early November. He tweeted a graphic showing the different plans. He got his first paying customer within a day – despite not having a landing page!

SceneryAI launched November 3, 2022.

The service launched on Product Hunt the next day. It became #7 product of the day with 169 upvotes and 56 comments.