How I Built It: $10K/Month AI Image Generator

when I started AI career which is at 8,000 Mr currently I was still an employee at IBM how did this girl build a $100,000 Pere AI app while working a full-time job well it's because of how she's growing it to find customers online uh you have to think about where your clients are Pauline spent her first few years as a part-time Indie hacker building side projects but not seeing much success then after several failures she found a winning idea in one of the hottest yet most saturated Industries right now ai apps but it turns out

there's still plenty more opportunity than you might think I think the biggest opportunity might be to I spent over an hour talking to Pauline about her AI business and what I really tried to figure out was how she was able to succeed in such a crowded Market good news is she shares everything how to find good ideas her framework for marketing and AI tools and some unique ways to reduce turn for your users all right let's get into it I'm Pat walls and this is starter story welcome Pauline thank you for coming on it's great

to have you tell me about who you are and the business you built hi I'm paen and I built AI Crea it's a service to renovate home in s thanks to AI you just upload a picture to the service you selected a style and uh a few seconds later you see your kitchen in a very modern or Scandinavian way AA has more than 8,000 user right now it makes around 8,000 every month on the business model when someone sign up to the SAS they have free trials and uh then they are required to pay to

continue to use the Service pricing models is a onetime payment with a certain number of photos and you also have a monthly payment with some extra features so you built this $100,000 per year app while you had a full-time job tell me more about that I learned to cult in uh engineering school after college I uh joined IBM and after this I kind of switch and I said okay thata science is not what I want to do all my life what I want to do on all my life is entrepreneurship but I wasn't ready to

make a big jump of uh uh becoming an N Harker because I needed money as well when I work at IBM I had only the night and weekends I stopped IBM in June two months ago I think it's really different when you are working on a day job or you are Hindi hacking full time wow that's amazing so your side project allowed you to quit your 9 to5 and now you're a full-time founder what I want to know is how do you come up with ideas I think I usually find ideas when I encounter some

problem either me or friends when it's friends like for a carea I ask question a lot of question really you have this problem but when how frequent you have this problem I really think am I able to do better am I able to build something around it am I able to monetize it and to find clients that's really important question and if the answer is yes to everything I start on working on it okay cool so we talked about ideas we talked about problems my question is once you find that idea how do you validate

that is an idea worth building and that it can make money I start some marketing or I start to communicate on my product if I have some client kind of quickly then I said okay maybe there is something that I could do around it like for air I build an MVP and then I show it to a few real estate agent that I found online or in personal Network for people that say that's awesome I want to buy it now and they actually paid for this so that was the validation okay so get your MVP

out there see if people are interested that is the way to build but can you tell me a little bit more about what it looks like to actually create that MVP in my opinion the sooner you chip the better because sometime you imagine your client want this but what they actually want is this so it's really hard to imagine what your clients want if you don't have clients when you start don't expect everything to be perfect AI ca for instance MVP was a simple features bad quality it was done maybe in month but uh then

it's a year of work to improve it Pauline is the perfect example of how one person can turn a simple idea into thousands of dollars even while working a full-time job and her blueprint was simple she found an idea she built a really simple MVP and then she validated that it could actually make money by getting it in front of her actual customers that final step is where almost everyone goes wrong and this is why we built the starter story Academy it's a 5we program where you'll come up with an idea you'll build something simple

and then you'll spend all your time focused on validation and if this thing can actually make money inside the academy is a clear and actionable track you can follow with Milestones deadlines and it's all gamified to get you to take action and work on the things that matter this is not just another course this is the turning point in your journey imagine what you could accomplish in 5 weeks if you simply worked on the right thing what's even cooler is that you'll do it inside our community of thousands of successful Founders working on similar problems

and building online businesses that will change their lives so if you're serious about actually doing this thing and you're ready to take action I'm going to leave a link in the description where you can learn more okay so we build the MVP how do we go and actually find customers to find customers online uh you have to think about where your clients are you have many social media like for instance Faceook Facebook or LinkedIn or Reddit go through them and just type in the search bar like you are looking for real estate agent type it

in LinkedIn let's see if you can find some communities on it for instance AI Crea my best marketing channel is uh probably Facebook and physical event maybe because real estate agent it's really an activity of human but for nexts directory my main marketing channel is Twitter because I have big audience there and my audience is mainly developers or people who want to do handy hacking so this product really is a fit with them okay so the best places to Market our products are where our customers hang out right but what if we want to accelerate

that growth at the very beginning what are specifically some good places to launch apps as a solopreneur now I prefer to launch on product in order to get a backlink for SEO because it's a very good backlink but the visibility is less good than it used to be so I'm launching on product on and also on Twitter because I have a big audence there probably I will use my newsletter as well I didn't launch nextory on Facebook but I launched C on Facebook all right so now you got people interested in the product the next

thing I go to is how to monetize it how do you determine plans and overall pricing strategy for an app like yours if you sell for a low price you you have an image of being a low cost you don't have the same client by selling low cost to high cost and also by selling higher price you might have less clients but it's less support as well so you have to also think about how do you want to be perceived and how much support are you able to deliver as well okay let's talk about business

models do you prefer a recurring subscription or onetime payment I'd love to hear your thoughts on this I like to offer both subscription and one time payment because some people really don't like subscription I had a few subscription in many services and it was a nightmare to consel I don't like this kind of retention my button is very clear when you subscribe you have it consel and it's really easy I think it's really important to earn trust from your customer as well all right I love it besides building trust with customers are there any other

hacks to reduce turn or just increase Revenue in general uh last year I had a high churn and I really reduced it like drastically by adding yearly plan it sounds stupid but now they are engaged for a year so they will use the service better the second one is uh I did a free trial so now people can try before subscribing they are able to see if the service uh fit their need and the third point is I really improve the service like the quality it's much better than uh last year it feels really like

a photo okay and what's the tech stack you use how do you stay up to- date with AI and run your business profitably I use a Discord every day to talk with my cofounder and people are working with us I use crisp for the support clients that they can chat with us uh through the chat window I use Twitter a lot to share my journey to share what's new on AI Crea LinkedIn as well I'm starting to use it I use also buffer to schedule my tweets behive to send my newsletters but I'm still on

the free trial on this one bra for the marketing automation of EMS the database authentification is super base but this is more like technical uh tool I guess I mainly use negs as a language but for AI models I use um python I think my business cost around three or 4,000 uh EUR to run each month But it includes servers it includes some marketing like we run ads sometimes also it could be the cost of a freelancer and going to personal event I could cut some cost but uh for the moment I'm not trying to

save the most money I'm trying to invest uh in order to grow the business okay tell me about the biggest opportunities in the AI space right now I think the biggest opportunities might be to insert AI in uh existing product you receive email every day what if you have an AI that can help you to answer to your email this is a Services plugged in another one and that's something that uh could do because biggest opportunities I think is service got it okay another question for you since the space is heavily dominated by dudes how

does it feel for you to be a successful girl Indie hacker yeah I don't know why but girls are not uh visible they are not doing much in the hacking so please uh don't uh retain yourself if you are girl to think oh but there is only men it's not for me no it's for you as well if you enjoy calling if you enjoy SAS please do it I think it's really important also if you are a girl to be visible because you will inspire other to do the same don't hide yourself or return yourself

from building if it's something that you you want to try all right last question that we always ask all founders when we interview them if you could stand on a younger Pauline's shoulder and give her some advice maybe when you were just starting out what would you tell her okay so if you want to start IND theia King please don't wait for the perfect product challenge just start to do something because it's high likely that your first product will fail I mean I don't know any entrepreneur who achieved the success at the first time so

you will learn a lot during during the journey so please chip very fast uh lunch when you have an MVP and ask for a lot of feedbacks and be consistent and also I think uh make connection with people who are doing mding we exchange best practices we exchange tips we exchange some things that didn't work in order to to improve us and my biggest lesson was uh I think it was to invest in yourself you are the common point of every project that you build and uh think about how you can reach your customers don't

think like oh I okay could do some Reddit message or discard message or DM people I mean think about really how you could build genuine connection to your customers thank you for coming on the starter story Channel sharing everything you know and inspiring millions of people to start their own business see you yo guys I really hope you enjoyed the video and got some good nuggets with Pauline I think the business that she built is really impressive and I really like the way that she went about building it talking to customers and actually building something

that people needed but I want to say something real quick at the end of the day the purpose of this video is to show you that regular people like Pauline change their lives by building a business but watching this video is not going to magically give you a business that changes your life you need to go find an idea you need to take action and you need to work relentlessly to validate it and see if it's something that can actually work while learning is important and action is the thing that's actually going to get you

your dream outcome so if you feel like you're still struggling on this maybe some analysis paralysis not exactly sure what to work on then I highly recommend checking out the starter story Academy again it's not for everyone it's only if you're really serious about actually doing this thing actually building a business while you have a full-time job that could change your life inside the academy you'll get an actionable blueprint to follow every day it will give you the right habits but most importantly it will put you on the path on how to find an idea

how to validate it's an idea that can actually make money and how to actually build that idea and bring it to life just head to the first link in the description if you want to learn more much love and I'll see you guys in the next one peace [Music]