How We Expanded Our AI Image Generator Tools And Make $4.5K Per Month
This is a follow up story for Imagined with AI. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m Sabatino, founder of Imagined with AI. Together with my girlfriend Silke, we try to make a dent in the AI generated image market, and we’ve found some success! On our website, you can upload 10 photos of yourself, a loved one, or your pet!
It will generate unique portraits in various styles, including realistic profile pictures, cartoon styles like Disney and Studio Ghibli, Renaissance paintings, and many more, which you can use for any purpose you want.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Since last year, we expanded our business with AI Puppy and Studio Deepfake.
We started a daughter product, AI Puppy, that uses the same technology, but is specifically marketed towards dog owners. As such, the product is tailored to create stunning portraits of your furry friends!
People love their dogs because AI Puppy now sells more than Imagined with AI. We currently have around 2.500 euros to 3.000 euros ($2700 to $3200) of monthly revenue for this product alone. GPU costs have been on the decline since last year, so profit margins have grown to around 70-80%. For $6.99 you get 120 unique portraits with your dog’s facial features in various styles.
We use a long-tail SEO strategy for AI puppy, where Silke writes articles per dog breed. We show the potential customer examples of results for their specific dog breed, so they can already get an idea of what to expect.
We also advertise on our Instagram Account about once a month, which amounts up to around $250 per 5 days.
We lucked out with the AI hype, and we’re not seeing signs that it’s slowing down any time soon.
We also wanted to expand our AI business into the fashion industry by using the same technology to generate photorealistic images of yourself wearing any kind of clothing you want. We first thought about naming it Wardrobe AI, but then rebranded it to 2 separate products: Studio Deepfake and Shoppatar.
Studio Deepfake is tailored to customers looking to buy more realistic photo packs for several themes. A theme that - unexpectedly - is doing extremely well is the boudoir-style photoshoots.
Boudoir photoshoots are spicy by nature, but we have taken steps to prevent abuse by employing several nudity checks and integrating invisible signatures in the generated photos.
We made a dedicated landing page for this specific photo pack called Boudoir.ai - and this pack alone currently generates around €1.2k/month in revenue.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Our biggest challenge right now is time or lack thereof. We both work full-time jobs and these projects are weekend & evening projects. Responding to every customer through our support channels in a timely fashion is becoming quite hard to do.
We’ve also seen quite some competition over the past year, but by playing the long SEO game, we’re hoping to keep seeing success in the long run.
The biggest problem with the technology we’re using right now (Dreambooth) is that it takes around 20 minutes to generate our model & photos. People don’t like to wait that long, so what we see happening right now is that competitors are using alternative methods to generate images (eg. using some clever prompting, or using Dall-E 3).
These alternative methods have massive benefits:
- They are super cheap
- They are pretty fast (results in 20 seconds instead of minutes)
However, the biggest drawback today is still that the similarity is lost when using these alternative methods.
We still believe the technology behind our product yields the best results today, but we are preparing to integrate alternatives, so we don’t lag behind. Think of a free ‘cartoon your pet’ service (that uses the cheaper/faster tech), that we can then use to upsell our paying service - something like that.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Had we spent more time doing B2B reach-outs and sales, I think we would have seen more success. In 2024, we’ll be focussing on finding more B2B partners (like portrait providers, etc.).
We lucked out with the AI hype, and we’re not seeing signs that it’s slowing down any time soon. We feel like 2024 might be the year we will start generating videos in addition to static photos, so we’re very excited about that.
Finally, combining a full-time job with multiple side projects has forced us to make time for each other as well. Working on these projects was an amazing opportunity, but we had to make sure that we were also doing non-work activities together.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We’re currently working on a rebrand for AI Puppy, because let’s face it, that’s a way too generic name. We are working on an additional AI tool that incorporates other animals (like cats!).
Currently, our images take around 20 minutes to generate, we do believe this year we’ll see some major advancements with regards to the speed of generation!
We hope to see some form of AI-generated video content incorporated into our tools as well. With the recent announcement of OpenAI Sora, we feel like we may see that happen in the coming months.
We’re also experimenting with a spatial app, so who knows we might even launch a VisionOS app this year.
On a longer horizon, we’d like to become the best image generator for pets on the internet - but we still have a long way ahead of us.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
The best book I’ve read in the past year is Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book truly helped me to start living a bit more healthy over the last year. Atomic Habits provided a guide on how to gradually improve some daily habits, such as exercising more, eating healthier, and becoming more of a ‘morning person’.
Currently, I’m reading the biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. I’m not sure I will take any lessons from it, but right now it’s entertaining!
There are a couple of tech podcasts I think are very interesting and which I listen to frequently:
- Acquired by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
- Launched by Charlie Chapman
- Accidental Tech Podcast by Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa
In January I connected with a couple of like-minded iOS devs over at iOSConf in Singapore. It’s been the first conference I went to in 5 years, and boy did I come back feeling energized!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
A thing that helped me a lot was the mentality to just have fun with it. Not everything you do needs to be productive or result in a pile of cash. It’s important to continue to have fun, and the results will come automatically.
This mentality has helped to set aside imposter syndrome because the idea of ‘just trying things’ seems less daunting than ‘launching a new product’
Always keep being curious, dive into new tech, and try to embrace the unknown instead of being scared or running away from it.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
