Building an AI side hustle to $8,638/mo in an unfamiliar industry

33-year-old Pauline Clavelloux built an AI-powered virtual staging product for real estate agents when she had zero experience in real estate.

She also had no marketing experience. And even though she had built an audience of 18k followers, they didn't overlap with her target customer.

But she built IACrea to $8.6k/mo anyway and, a few weeks ago, she left her full-time job to turn her side hustles into her main hustles.

I asked her how she did it. Here's what she had to say. 👇

Build for an audience you can reach

Building a tool for oneself doesn't guarantee success.

During the COVID pandemic, I wanted to dabble in automated trading, so I contacted a friend who worked in IT and proposed that we work on a project together. We created a prototype that traded for us 24/7, yielding a return of over five times our initial investment.

We tried to monetize it by providing customizable alerts for traders, but it was a failure. I spent months trying to get customers, but I sold zero alerts.

I wish I had known the importance of building a community and validating ideas with potential users before diving deep into product development.

You need to build for audiences that you can reach!

We eventually stopped the trading project and moved on to other SaaS projects, making sure not to repeat the same mistakes.

Building an AI side hustle

My main project now is IACrea. It’s a real estate SaaS that stages house photos in seconds. It helps people sell homes faster by allowing the buyer to visualize the rooms with furniture. It’s currently making €8k/mo.

I came up with the idea because a relative was having trouble visualizing a room and I realized that I was good enough with AI and image processing to solve the problem. And I also thought I’d be able to reach a large market with it.

It makes money from both subscriptions and credits. The credits allow people to enhance their photos without a subscription. The unit price is higher than with a subscription, of course, but some users prefer it. That's why I choose both — to fit client preferences.

Validating an AI MVP

So I created an MVP using NextJS with Typescript and Supabase. I ran into issues with NextJS, as I was learning it as I built the product, but my mentor helped me. I really recommend finding mentors. It has made me a better developer.

With the MVP done, I got feedback from specialized real estate groups by attending real estate events and hanging out in forums. I even organized webinars.

The product was very basic. There was only one feature: Renovate a room. And it was buggy. If no one was interested, I was prepared to move on to the next project, as I always do. But people found it useful. And soon, people started paying for the service.

I can't describe the feeling when I received the first payment, it was awesome. That’s when I considered the idea validated.

A few months later, my tech cofounder joined the venture.

Side hustling with multiple AI products

Until a few weeks ago, IACrea was a side project while I worked full time at IBM. The product was successful, but when you subtract the taxes and my partner's share, there wasn’t much left. It was financially more secure to keep my job.

Now, I’m a full-time indie hacker and I have a new SaaS in the works, that I hope to launch soon. More to come on that.

I also have NextJSDirectory, which is a boilerplate in NextJS for building directory websites in minutes. Directories are websites that aggregate resources in a niche and earn passive income thanks to affiliation and sponsoring.

I sell it for a one-time payment. I launched it a month ago and I’ve earned $800 so far. Fun fact: I have a demo directory set up and I decided to put affiliate links in it — and I actually made around €60 from that alone.

I recently stopped working on APIForAI because it failed. We had a few customers but not enough to keep spending time on it. We are considering selling it, but we haven’t taken the time to list it yet. If anyone’s interested, let me know.

It's also worth mentioning that I built unrealme.io last year and sold it three months later. There was no MRR when we sold it but we had made about $500 in that three months. I sold it for four figures on Microns.

Growing a personal brand

One of my most significant breakthroughs as an indie hacker came from leveraging Twitter.

I started tweeting daily about data science, entrepreneurship, and SaaS. I share my successes, failures, and my story. And doing this consistently was enough to gradually increase my follower count (18k+) and engagement.

My audience doesn't really overlap with the IACrea target customer, so I don't get many sales directly from my followers. But it does overlap with some of my newer projects. And it helps in other ways too.

It also allows people to know me — and hopefully refer people to IACrea when relevant. Many share the link on their social media, giving me backlinks for SEO. I get support when I have questions about tech, SEO, strategy, etc. And it helps me find business opportunities and top talent. For example, when I needed to find a freelancer, for example, I got 300 applications in my DMs.

Tips for growing a personal brand on X

If you want to build an online presence, don’t do it with your product. Do it as a person. People love to hear other people's stories. Plus, when you exit the business, you’ll still have your audience.

Remember that if you give, people will give back to you. Provide value consistently.

Building an audience is difficult in the beginning. At least, it was for me. But it's worth it. To stay motivated, I tried @tibo_maker’s "100 tweeting days challenge" and I recommend it.

And lastly, remember, that building your brand doesn't mean sharing every personal detail about yourself.

I wrote a full post on building a personal brand here if you're interested.

Growing an AI side hustle

For NextJSDirectory, my audience aligns with my target customer, so I’m relying on my social media. I tweet about it, retweet posts from people who make money from directories as social proof, and announce launches.

Later, I’ll shift focus to SEO so that people outside of my circle can find it. I tried ads but they didn't work. I have a lot to learn about converting with ads.

Beyond promoting on social media, marketing has been challenging for me. I was never trained in it.

I grew IACrea mostly by leveraging communities who spread the word. I’d say about 30% of our revenue comes from these communities. I simply answered questions that related to virtual staging, and I posted about new improvements in the product.

I also partnered with real estate professionals who do not sell houses — photographers, coaches, etc. I would say around 20% of our revenue comes from these partnerships

And, after converting a customer, I made sure churn was low by offering a higher quality product and developing the features that were requested by users.

I considered investing in influencer marketing as well, but I’ve never found any influencers for real estate agents. There are real estate influencers showing off fancy houses, but their audience is individuals; not agents. And that's important. The influencer's audience needs to match the target customer.

Experimentation vs doubling down on an industry

Sticking to one niche — a niche that you know well — is a good idea. It’s an accelerator. You can capitalize on your knowledge and audience. Traffic too, if you link your products to each other.

But I didn't do that. I'm not specialized in a particular industry. My main SaaS is focused on real estate and I had no real estate experience when I started. It was a big disadvantage at first.

And lately, I’ve been focusing on other niches.

For me, it's working. If you aren’t an expert in any particular industry, I think it’s helpful to explore and see where you’re most comfortable.

So I plan to keep growing IACrea, but I plan to do that by expanding it into new markets. And I’ll keep exploring other industries with my other projects as well.

Parting advice

Here's my advice for newcomers.

Don't overthink. I almost didn't start because I was in my head about what kind of business entity to start and what laws I didn't know about.

Don't be afraid of competition. Competition is a good signal.

Stay consistent.

Stay confident.

And remember that first projects usually fail but you'll learn from failure and you'll have assets that you can use to launch faster in the future.

You can follow my journey as I launch my next SaaS on X, my newsletter, and LinkedIn (French posts). Or check out IACrea and NextJSDirectory.