From idea to paying customers in 1 week! ☄️
Today, the first two paying customers on the Ainter.me! It's our first publicly released project, and we are delighted with this result! We came up with the idea 7 days ago. And here is our past week.
After awful logos from Fiverr for 200$, @tilyupo and I decided to create a cool ai logo/app icon generator. We built a simple beta version with a landing for 2 days, made posts in small Reddit communities, and ran Twitter ads (just 20$). The following 5 days were the same: from morning to evening, we received feedback and improved our product as quickly as possible. Finally, it brought the first dollar.
Here are the main lessons we learned:
- Constant updates of the landing page based on feedback. Every day we improved the landing page based on the comments and questions we got. Our conversion has increased over this time several times.
- Most people will not pay just for landing with 5 pictures. They want to try the product out. Yes, we did not have a demo version of the project at launch. After launching the demo, we saw a lot of user engagement.
- Develop on what you know and write shitty code. We initially agreed on writing terrible code as quickly as possible. It's allowed us to make so many things in such a short
- Talk about your product everywhere. Despite the fact that reddit and indie hackers turned out to be relatively small channels. We received the most valuable feedback there.
We already have the second product version, which produces much better results. I hope this helps someone here get more customers!
Trending on Indie Hackers
This is awesome, thanks for sharing! From a technical/legal perspective, I would be interested in how you generate the images. Do you use a model/service like Stable Diffusion or DALL-E 2, and how does that work out legally if you do this commercially? (or do you run a model on your own server?)
Wow, really a master calls in how to launch fast and iterate. It's so Important. From a VC perspective many startups make excuses that they need VC backing before they can acquire users. For most projects (especially in SaaS) that's not the case and we value it highly if founders bootstrap the first paying customers.
Amazing stuff! Developing on what you know and writing shitty code that just works is definitely a skill 😆 For my next project I need to do this more and try to launch as early as you guys did.
Also, do you have any insights about the kind of posts you submitted to Reddit? I've written a blog post about how to find your first customers on Reddit and was wondering if you did something similar or if you had a different approach? 🙏
I used similar techniques like the ones you mentioned in your blog post to get my first paying customer. It was my first ever online money too!
Nice one! I got my first paying customer yesterday as well 🥳
Really great ideas, Amos. I just started posting on Reddit recently. I am curious to know which communities were the best for the feedback you got? And, what was the post (if you can recall) where you got the sign ups? The reason I am asking is because I know self promotion is not looked upon well so how did you "promote" your product?
I got the most feedback on /r/SideProject (here's the post) and I also think I got the most sign ups from this one, but not 100% sure.
Self-promotion is not always frowned upon, so it's just a matter of finding subreddits where you can do it without fear of getting banned (I think Postpone.app even warns you if it's against their rules) 😄 I put a list of all the subreddits I posted to in one of my posts on IH, hopefully it helps.
Same for me
Thanks for writing such an actionable blog on finding customers through Reddit.
This is amazing and impressive, congrats! It's a great reality check for a perfectionist like me, who could spend months on improving the product instead of "just launching".
I'm curious, did you directly ask for feedback on reddit, or did the users contact you with their feedback on their own?
Yes, in each post we indicate that we are at an early stage and we need feedback.
Are you currently looking for feedback for your product or service?
Sure!
Awesome, Andrei! I'd love to invite you to check out Geeks and Experts where we have domain experts from various backgrounds. We are in the early stages of development so we're currently opening some slots for complimentary consultations - no signup fees or subscriptions.
Lukas has sessions on MVP launches and ideation.
Kristen has slots for customer discovery.
VB has experience design expertise and offers UI/UX consultations.
Feel free to check them out :)
Every day I tell myself that perfectionism is the best excuse for procrastination.
Hi! I've tested the app. I would love seeing more examples on what should I write in order to get the icon/logo that I want. Only the placeholder from the input it's not enough. Also I would like to select how many credits to use. Good luck!
Hey! Thank you for detailed feedback. We'll take it to work.
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Congratulation @arey
Thanks!
Great work
Thanks
Well done! I figured you've basically copy-pasted the design from hey.com website and I must say that it was very smart. If there's something that's obviously working why not built on top of that rather than re-invent the wheel? Cheers to that.
Thanks for mentioning hey . com
it really looks amzing .
No worries :)
Yes, header and landing structure really good :)
You are right, your code doesn’t need to be perfect at the beginning and honestly it doesn’t need to have a 100 features too but what’s truly important is being quick with solving the user query and working on their feedback!
With our SaaS tool ruttl our focus has always been providing continuous support to our customers and that has worked great for us till now.
Thank you for sharing your learnings with the community.
All the best for your second product version!
THanks!
Congratulations! Three weeks ago I also went from Idea to first customers in a couple of days. What a rush it is. You must be thrilled.
For me I had trouble sustaining the rush, and I also created a little more amorphous product than you.
Your value proposition is simple and sweet. I think you're on to something - just keep tightening your target audience and acquisition strategy.
What did you use to build that nice homepage btw? And how do you plan to keep the momentum?
tailwindcss and nextjs
Great stuff man! The results are awesome!
Feedback: I generated some images on the free version and they had watermarks but you could get more people signing up by just having a small button near the results with "Remove watermark" and send them to a checkout
Nice idea! I'll do it today.
This is an incredible product but effect on many tech start-up companies. This product also have a best algorithm to generate the images so far. Congrats!
Hope it's help you!
This is so amazing... Idea to revenue in a week's time. Will check out the pending page. Do you have a section which says why you are better than current logo generators?
hmm...
awesome journey keep it up, good luck!
Hey Andrei, great! Thanks for sharing your journey.
we are going to share more in the future, stay tuned
Cool :-)
Hey! Thank you!
Congrats Andrei! What are your future marketing plans like?
Thanks! We plan to add Google search Ads and try to optimize the sales funnel. Continuing to collect feedback and improve the product.
Awesome stuff! Listening to customer feedback is always key at any given stage! Congrats!
Pretty amazing stuff. Very encouraging to hear a story like this. Congratulations and thanks for sharing.
This is cool!
I hope you came up with a good logo for the company haha
That's a very lean process to validate your idea. Congrads!
nice your doing good work. Keep up your great work! your website speed and design is supper cool!
Congratulations! May I ask how one can build an AI product in such a short space of time? I don't expect you to give away your insider knowledge, but I'm just curious on a more general level. I've been a developer for over 20 years really and AI is still a mystery to me. Does this not involve collecting lots and lots of data, building complicated models, training…? Thanks and good luck with your next 100 customers, great stuff!
You can just fine-tine existing models. Check replicate.com or https://huggingface.co
Nice Andrei! I'm a building a similar thing but for album covers, so it's nice to see that it's not subscription-based! Would love to learn more about your learnings going with the current pricing strategy but maybe in another post. Thanks for sharing!
Very good landing page! Did you used a website builder or is it code? Do you have a template?
Thanks for sharing! Did you do A/B testing with your pricing? How did you decide on how to price it?
Just randomly picked. Thinking about a/b now.
How much sales would it need to get to break-even then? I quick-googled and it seems like the cheapest GPU machines are around $400 a month and there are no easy options to have something like GPU enabled lambda.
With your package pricing it seems like break-even is around 20 sales a month...
Actually maybe it's not that big of a number if it's a real business for you. For a side project several hundreds a month would be a tough call.
Anyways I am curious: do computing resource costs influence your minimal pricing much?
Beautifully implemented. Fun to use and quick.
That’s a beautiful landing page! What tools did you use to design it? I love it 🔥
My brain... 😀
Hey Andrie. Congratulations on the launch. Did you had any established personal brand on any social apps that helped in traction?
Congratulation! Onwards & Upwards 🚀
congratulations Andrei its tough market to crack!
Website looks great, you have an @hey.com email in the footer. Having a look at the landing page it feels like you just do app icons, it would be good to showcase your logo generations also as I would imagine this is where the majority of your customers will purchase. Fantastic and so great to see sales already!
We don't hove logo generation yet
Awesome work, Andrei. This post would be so useful for anyone starting out on this journey.
Congratulations on the early success. I had a few questions:
Congrats Andrei! Would you mind sharing what AI technology are you using? Openai, Stable Diffusion, etc...
we tried different models, but ended up using fine tuned version of stable diffusion
is advanced knowledge of Ai needed to implement stable diffusion?
It depends on what you are trying to do. For a lot of problems there are detailed guides on the web that you can use.
That's very inspiring! Thanks for sharing these lessons.
Great work!! As someone who is heavily in AI alright now, just wanna say congratulations and I wish you the best!!! Love the website!
Thanks!
Nice learning, Andrei! I'm building a startup on my own as well. May I know which channel contributes the most? What's your plan to make the growth sustainable?
Love the way you went from finding a problem to starting a product. Opportunities masquerading as problems.
What was the pull towards twitter ads instead of other channels? (Previous experience? Better targeting/reach?)
Better understanding of Twitter
This is an awesome little product and congrats on the first $$!
It will be interesting to see how your product grows. There are many websites to create logos through templates (most of them are horrendous)
AI it's the future and you are in. Great product, congratulations!
Wow amazing journey! That "writing shitty code" definitely speaks to me 😂
Interesting story. Seven days really is rapid. What would you say your target market is and how did you make sure your product was seen by those people?
Hey. We decided that the easiest audience at the moment is indie makers of mobile applications. Next, we looked for thematic communities and tried to make sure that we were noticed.
Magnificent story! Congrats!
Thanks!
sorry but your story is total fake
how is that?
Love stories like this!
Nice best of luck!