Get inspired by Stacy to build in public with AI
Stacy’s mantra: Ship more products, not features!
Hey Stacy, we discovered you on Twitter while taking a look at what’s happening around GenAi there. We loved the fact that you are an indie dev creating a tool based on Ai and sharing the process in public. Looking at your pinned tweet, it seems that you did everything in a couple of months! Got a job, quit a job, nomading, building in public etc. Can you tell us who you are and how you ended up doing AI-generated art?
Stacy: Hi, it was a hot year for sure! My name is Stacy and I’m a new solo entrepreneur here on Twitter with a tech background! Although I have several years of experience as a software engineer in US startups, I was also always interested in business parts. I even run my own software agency!
While working full-time, I was constantly researching startup life, exploring ideas, learning about validation, and scaling businesses. Also, I had some great examples to see how startups overcome different kinds of issues from the inside. During my research, I found a Twitter community with people who build in public, and I was amazed to see new role models such as @levelsio building businesses and sharing his experience with everyone.
I realized that you don’t need to have huge funds or “next Facebook” idea just to start shipping. Looking at those big accounts, I thought that I’d be really interested to see other category of people who go from 0 to 1 live. Then it hit me… I could become one!
Speaking about AI, I realized that it could be very different, and you don’t need to go in depth to use it. With the trend to generate images, I recalled my “first business lesson”: niche down into something for which you have a context. Well, I am an anime lover, so I decided to try to generate images of myself as my favourite anime heroes! That’s how it all started!
In this series, we meet interesting founders and creators from the AI scene and discuss with them not only their take on this new era of technology, but maybe learn a few secret tricks from them. If you’d like to share your story and tips, you can get in touch with us here.
Your service is about getting anime portraits of ourselves, a bit like Lensa, but niched down to anime, which is great! How is the growth going so far and how do people react to your service?
AnimeAI became my first app that I shipped by myself and in public, so I learned a lot throughout this journey. And I’m still learning, so I have a little bit of chaotic traffic, that I don’t control but am learning to analyze. Recently, I did a ProductHunt launch, and now this page ranks on the 3rd page of Google! People enjoy anime and support my product; my favorite clients come from Twitter, where they send me direct messages with feedback. A few of them even flagged me small bugs, that I could fix that day. 🙂
Niche down into something for which you have a context.
What are your plans for animeai.lol in 2023, do you plan to ship more features maybe around visual novels or something else?
For 2023, I plan to ship more products rather than more features for AnimeAI! As I consider this project to be almost finished, I’m interested in doing a little bit of marketing periodically or even selling it after some time.
What do you think is going to be the next big thing happening ith ai tech in the near future ?
I believe that several significant developments will occur in the near future, including video AI and even more emphasis on text processing. As users, we will see how big businesses will adapt quickly to AI, we will see old approaches will be restructured and made much easier. So both building and watching will be enjoyable!
With your experience using GenAi, you probably discovered a couple of tips and tricks, Which ones would you be ok to share with our audience?
Yeah, I realized that, especially with image AI, model doesn’t know what is considered as good or bad result. AI just learned on huge massive of data, so it knows how it was described but it doesn’t now what exactly you expect as great results. So, I found it interesting how dramatically arts could be improved while adding simple world as for example “symmetry”, “pretty” or “beautiful”. The model would then research which arts, for example, were regarded as displaying a pretty girl. And everyone wants to look more stunning in art than in real life, so make sure to add something like this.
What is the next thing you are going to try using Ai tools?
I want to experiment with text processing and make a product for entrepreneurs! Now is the new wave which is done by ChatGPT and more updates to come for that field. So, I will learn a lot, test, and iterate!
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Is there anything else you want to share with our audience?
Yeah, for my new products, I will be looking to have some marketing experts help me grow fast! So if by any chance you are an experienced cool marketer or you know one, feel free to drop my DM. I’ll be waiting for you 😉
Where can people find Out more about you ?
People really enjoyed watching how I build Animeai in public on Twitter, so I think Twitter is my main channel right now! I’ll be building a few other projects there too, and I post on what exactly I did, what issues I had, and what results it got me. I also reply to every comment, so feel free to be part of this journey and click follow on Twitter!
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