Making $6,000 From An A.I Project In Just 6 Months

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hi everyone, my name is Yifan and I'm the founder of OurBabyAI.

OurBabyAI is a baby photo generator that uses artificial intelligence to predict what your baby will look like. It's for couples who are curious to know how their child will look.

I did Mechanical Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, and worked as a mechanical engineer for 3 years.Didn’t like it so I quit my job and went to do a coding bootcamp.

I did the bootcamp with the intention of becoming an entrepreneur.

I work as a software engineer at a Series A startup during the day, and side hustle for OurBabyAI during the nights and weekends.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

To be totally honest, I created MyBabyAI when I was in the shower.

The idea wasn’t scratching my own itch, I’m not married yet, and it doesn’t even solve a problem.

I had lots of self-doubt, if I'm being totally honest with you. I built the landing page in one day but hesitated to launch it because I thought the idea was stupid. I announced the launch on Twitter and all I got were crickets. It brought me down a bit, but didn't stop me from continuing. I had another startup idea to create the best time converter on the web, but didn't work on that in the end.

I think that the sign of any idea worth pursuing is traction.

After submitting my product to a few AI directories, organic traffic started to come in. Some of that traffic converted to sales and, when traffic went up, sales went up too. I also received helpful feedback from my customers and they were delighted to receive the photos.

This is when I knew I was onto something and should invest more time into the project.

How did you get your first initial customers?

Here is a simple timeline of how I went from launching the business to getting my first customers:

April 1st: Idea struck me. The next day, I built the landing page and launched on a few AI directories to get traffic and see if there was interest.

Rest of April: First sale came in on April 11! I was beyond excited, and generated the photos manually for my customer. Made 9 sales for the month of April, and crossed $100 in total revenue. Sweet!

May: I can't generate the photos manually forever, I need a backend to do it for me automatically so that I can scale. So I wrote the first line of code and deployed my backend app to production. Got 18 sales for the month of May. Brought in $325 of revenue.

June: Crossed $1,000 in total revenue! It seemed like an unachievable goal at first but I did it omg.

Today: the business is growing at a rate of 100% MoM on average and I'm hoping it will remain that way.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

80% of my traffic actually comes from Google search.

Whenever there's a trend on TikTok related to my startup, people search for those keywords (e.g. baby ai generator) and I get spikes in traffic and sales!

I feel very fortunate to rank highly on Google, despite not having much SEO knowledge when I first started this venture.

This is not reliable so I've been exploring other growth channels. I'm sure there's some word-of-mouth marketing too, but I can't measure that unfortunately.

I've launched OurBabyAI on Product Hunt and got it to 2nd Product of The Day.

I also submitted my product it to a few startup directories to gain some early traction when starting out, but it was hard to find good startup directories to list my startup.

That's why I've proceeded to built LaunchBuff to fill this need that many indie founders like myself faced. Do check it out.

How does your business make money?

Since launching in April 2023, the business has made over $10,000.

The product monetises by charging a flat fee of $9 for 8 photos, one-time payment and no subscription.

I experimented with different pricing options; $4.97, $9, $17 and $19, and finally settled on $9 after discovering it converts the best.

I used Carrd​ to build my landing page because I really love how intuitive it is to use them. On their Pro Plus plan, it comes with payment required (Stripe) forms, and forms that can send POST request to a server. Just what I needed to build my SaaS business.

I also started out with no backend (just using Carrd) so those features were mandatory for me to shape it into a full stack app at the later stage. I've since wrote my own node.js express server for the backend.

I have a few processing steps (different technologies involved) to generate the images and it’s fully automated with a script.

Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?

Here are some links you can go to learn more:

OurBabyAI: https://ourbabyai.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/imgyf