I Built an AI Logo Maker That Made 50 Sales in My First Month

Igor Kotua

•

Published: December 16th, 2023

save

Igor Kotua

Founder, LogoPicture AI

Founders

Employees

LogoPicture AI

logopictureai.com

from

started November 2023

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools kotuaigor recommends to grow your business!

platform

Vercel

social media

Twitter

design

Figma

seo

Ahrefs

Discover what books kotuaigor recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on LogoPicture AI? Check out these stories:

Hi, my name is Igor. I am 23 years old and live in Georgia (the country, not a US state). I have a degree in physics and math, love building open-source software, started my career as a junior analyst at a VC fund, and am currently working as a software engineer alongside my indie hacking career.

I've been building side projects for 2 years, and LogoPicture AI is my first project generating money. LogoPicture AI is a web app that allows you to generate beautiful pictures with your brand logo for a flat one-time fee.

In one month, I managed to get 13,000 website visitors, 50 sales, and $600 in revenue. My current goal is to reach $1,000 in sales and establish repeatable marketing channels.

But most importantly, several people reached out to me with inquiries to generate images like this with their logo. So it was a no-brainer to me I should build a product around it

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Believe it or not, but my first job right after university was at a VC fund! I was a junior analyst sourcing opportunities to invest in developer tools and open-source startups. During this time I became a big fan of the open-source movement and started making my first contributions to the open-source community. One of my biggest contributions is "Awesome OSS Alternatives" - a GitHub list of open-source alternatives to well-known SaaS products. It has more than 14k stars on GitHub as of today.

The story of LogoPicture AI started when I saw a Spirals app by Steven Tey on Twitter. This app generates beautiful pictures with Spirals based on your prompt. I immediately thought that I could use the same technique to generate pictures with some logos.

Given my interest in the open-source movement, I decided to build a fun app to promote open source – an image generator with the GitHub logo (as a symbol of open source). This is how the idea of OctoArt was born.

I built the first version of OctoArt in 5 hours – I forked Steven Tey's code and built OctoArt on top of it. I immediately launched OctoArt on Twitter but didn't get a lot of likes. I thought OctoArt was a waste of time, but…

Two days after the launch, OctoArt was featured on GitHub's official Twitter account. The tweet got more than 200 likes, 87k views, and 23 posts. It felt like a success.

embed:tweet

Besides that, I was blown away by the pictures people generated and shared on Twitter. They are amazing, here are my favorite ones:

A cherry on top, OctoArt also was featured on GitHub's Instagram account several days later.

embed:instagram

All in all, 4.7k + images have been generated and 2.5k users visited the OctoArt website.

But most importantly, several people reached out to me with inquiries to generate images like this with their logo. So it was a no-brainer to me I should build a product around it – this is how LogoPicture AI was born.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

It took me around two weeks to build the initial version of the product. Because I already had the AI stuff from OctoArt, I only needed to build the app around it, add payments, and create a landing page.

I usually build everything with code and this time was not an exception. For the app I always use Next.js - it allows me to quickly create both the frontend and backend part in one codebase, which I find productive. I also use Next.js for the marketing site. To streamline frontend development, I use an excellent UI kit called ShadCN UI - it's extremely good.

Next.js is a nice framework, but it lacks some backendy things. To fill this gap I usually use SupaBase, which provides database, authentication, storage, cron, and many other things. All this beauty is an API call away from your Next.js app. Btw, LogoPicture AI is open-source, so you can check out all the code here.

The first version of the app was extremely bare bones. All you could do is just login, upload a logo, type a prompt, and press the "generate" button. Generated images are sent to your email in 2-3 minutes. That's it.

I explicitly optimized for the simplest version of the app possible. I didn't care about design, user experience, a password reset form, avatars, customer portals, or anything like that. All these "important" features suck your time and postpone the single most important thing – launching the product. This is the hard truth I learned while building my other side projects.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Before launching the product I had only one thing left – building a website. I have always been bad at designing landing pages, but this time I had my wife Lisa ready to help me.

She designed an amazing first version of the website – I think this is a big part of LogoPicture AI's success.

Once the website was ready I went ahead and launched the product on Hacker News. To be honest, I didn't have a well-thought-out launch strategy. I just knew that the Show HN section should work best for me.

I submitted a link to my website to Hacker News, wrote a small intro about my project, and asked my friend to leave a first comment. Seems like the app idea resonated with the Hacker News crowd – I got a lot of upvotes and comments and my post stayed on top of Show HN feed for almost a day.

This Hacker News post brought 4,000 visitors to my website in a single night and I made my first internet money ever at this very night – I made 9 sales totaling over $100. It was a huge success for me. I was on cloud nine.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

After the initial traffic spike from Hacker News, I decided to make a Product Hunt launch. I am not that good at PH launches, so I picked a Saturday for a launch – less competition, but still decent traffic.

I finished the launch day in 11th place. Not a very good result, but still I was able to get 700 visitors to my website and make 2 more sales. Also, I got a backlink from a website with a very high domain rank – it's good for your soul (and SEO).

At this point, I realized my website needed some improvements. I received similar feedback from several people that my website is lacking high-quality images and it's quite suspicious for an image generation tool.

First things first, I added a better image gallery - best of the best:

I also designed a more attractive CTA and added a "social authority" touch – avatars of users, ratings, and number of images generated. I heard multiple times from indie hackers how testimonials and customer profiles are one of the best ways to increase conversions.

For instance, you can see it in action at HeadshotPro and ShipFast website - the ones I used as an inspiration. I don't have the numbers to support these amendments, but I feel like it helped with conversions.

After the website improvements, I went on to get more traffic to the website. I collected a list of AI tools directories – theresanaiforthat.com, futuretools.io, and others – and there are plenty of them.

I just went to all of them and submitted a link to LogoPicture AI. Of course, not all these directories have a free listing, so I used only the free ones. Unfortunately, these directories didn't work well for me – they brought some traffic, but barely no sales.

Next thing, I went to search for AI newsletters. It's quite easy to find them - I just searched in Google for "top AI newsletters". I landed on this listicle with 35 newsletters and just started reaching out to them one by one (via website or Twitter). The biggest problem is they all have a paid placement.

So, I decided to be creative – I reached out to the founder of one big AI newsletter with a cool AI image of his newsletter logo. He was impressed and featured me for free on the next day!

This newsletter brought me around 1.4k website visitors and another 15 sales. It was a win.

I think getting started quickly and getting your product out on the market as fast as possible is the most important thing (for software businesses).

Also, because this newsletter is very big, other AI newsletters noticed me and featured me in their next issues. That helped me to support traffic in the following days and make several more sales.

Despite all the success, these marketing tactics are not repeatable and can't bring sustainable traffic month over month. So recently I started investing in SEO. I live and breathe indie hackers Twitter and SEO are some of the hottest topics of discussion out here. Judging by their experience, SEO can be beneficial in the long term, and almost no other channel can outcompete it. Though SEO is hard and it takes months to get meaningful traffic.

This adventure is quite new to me and I am only starting, but thanks to AI-generated blog articles I started to rank for multiple keywords around logos and optical illusions and get 2-3 visitors a day from Google search. Looking forward to investing more in SEO.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

My product was profitable from day one – it usually works like this for software products and besides that, I don't have a free tier or a free trial. The business model is based on credits – 1 credit is a one generated picture.

But of course, I don't sell credits one by one, I have three pricing tiers – Starter, Growth, and Scale. They cost $9, $19, and $39 and include 50, 200, and 500 pictures accordingly.

Of course, gross margins vary across these plans, but in general, they are very high – around 90%. It also depends a lot on the utilization of the credits, but most of the users spend only half of the credits bought. Cost of goods solely consists of GPU compute – thanks to the serverless GPU platform I use (Replicate), I only pay for the time when code is running, so it's pretty cheap.

I have a couple of operational expenses like email provider, hosting, and image storage – all together it costs around $40 a month currently.

My product is very young, it just turned one month a few days ago, so I don't have any MoM and YoY stats yet. In the first month I made $621 in revenue – that's 52 sales. It's not a lot, but I am proud, especially given it's the first month.

My total website traffic for this month is 14,000 visitors. With 52 sales, my conversion rate is around 0.4%. It's quite low and my current goal is to improve it. Besides that, I am working hard to increase my website traffic. Also, I am hacking on AI videos with logos to improve the product – hopefully, it will help me attract more users and increase landing page conversions.

In the next 6 months, I can see LogoPicture AI generating $1-2k every month. This product can convert visitors into paid users, so if I manage to double my conversion rate (0,8%) and bring 10k-20k visitors to the website every month via SEO I can generate $900-$1,800 a month quite easily (my average check size is $11).

In the long run, I can see LogoPicture AI becoming a one-stop shop for everything around logos - logo ideation, creation, redesign, logo art, videos, and more. I already started experimenting with these ideas - for instance, you redesign your logo here for free using DALLE-3 and GPT Vision.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I for sure have learned several things. First of all, ship fast – it is very important for a software business especially if you are working solo like me. Getting the product out on the market is crucial. Don't let "unimportant" things like gradients, password resets, and dark mode slow you down, you will always have time to implement them later.

On the other hand, it is very important to have a good functional landing page that sells from the start. I made a mistake and launched my product on HackerNews without a properly optimized mobile version of the website.

I thought it was not so important for the HackerNews launch – everyone uses a computer, right? I was very wrong to see 60% of the traffic coming from mobile and the landing page was unusable for them. If I had a mobile-optimized version of the website from the very beginning I think I could have 2x more sales. Anyways, lessons learned.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

My product is quite small, so I don't use a lot of tools for the business itself, most of them are quite technical. So here they are in no particular order:

LemonSqueezy – it's an amazing payment platform. It covers everything like PayPal, one-time payments, subscriptions, abandoned cart emails, affiliates, licensing keys, and other things. It's an amazing choice if you need an all-in-one tool or if you don't have access to Stripe in your country like me.
Vercel – is a quite well known platform for hosting web apps. Generous free tier, super easy to deploy. Must have for solo makers.
Supabase - database, auth system, and storage. It's a very useful product to quickly build a backend. No brainer if you need to launch fast.
Resend – very nice product for transaction emails. Excellent docs and SDK, generous free tier
Replicate – serveless GPU platform for AI models. Very good API and SDK, per second pricing.
TagParrot – nice product that helps to index your website faster in Google.
Bulkgenerate – very useful product to quickly generate SEO optimized blog posts with AI using your own OpenAI AP key.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I am a big fan of Danny Postma and his SEO-based approach to every business he makes. Recommend checking out a couple of podcasts with him, his approach is very interesting. Link and link.

Another resource I like a lot is a newsletter by Nevo David. He is a very experienced marketer and developer and writes excellent content about open-source growth and marketing in general. Being a developer myself, I find his perspective on marketing very valuable – I learned a ton from his issues.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

I don't like giving advice, especially because I just got started. But if you take something from this interview, I think getting started quickly and getting your product out on the market as fast as possible is the most important thing (for software businesses).

Another thing I found quite interesting is one-time payment products. Developers are usually obsessed with the SaaS business model because it generates recurring revenue. Yeah, it's very tempting to have a stable income stream, but it's just 10x harder and takes much more time.

With one-time payments, you are much more likely to achieve meaningful revenue numbers in a reasonable time (no way I would have made $600 in subscriptions in one month lol).

And finally, don't forget that you are just one side project away from financial freedom and a villa in Bali.

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!