My AI-Generated Book Business Makes $12K/Month

November 15th, 2024

Who are you and what business did you start?

About two years ago I started Selfarama, a solo business making personalized picture-books. It's like the old "your name in a book" format, with two big differences: it's nonfiction, and your face is in the illustrations. The book is about art history, with portraits of the reader in various styles. I primarily sell to American grandparents for their grandkids, using facebook ads and a custom web app. Revenue last month was $12k (usd) and this month I'm hoping to hit $30k.

Founder-Market Fit

Skills

What skills did Tom Ryan have that led to their success?

No Code

How do you come up with the idea for Selfarama?

I searched for an idea for about two years. I thought about food products, value-priced tech consulting, an analytics SaaS for driverless trains, and a bunch of other things. I consumed a lot of content and had some coaching. Nothing really resonated.

Then one night in December 2022, I woke up at 2am with the idea: use gen AI to personalize kids' books.

I registered a domain, put up a stripe link, and went back to sleep. I got my first sale the next day, from a buddy. I didn't do any validation... I was just sure that this should exist.

How did you build the initial version of Selfarama?

First step was to register a domain with a stripe link, so that I had a clear metric (daily sales) to work on. I had a loooot of zero-sale days, but I liked that I couldn't bullshit myself that people would pay if they could. They could, and they didn't.

Starting costs were a couple hundred dollars to get some test books printed, a few thousand dollars burned on facebook ads before I figured out how to profit with them, and a ton of my time and energy.

I hoped it would be launched and selling in time for Christmas 22...

It was actually ready in March 24.

I worked really hard on it in bursts, then burned out, then went back to it. It was really hard. I had worked in tech for 20 years but I wasn't a coder, and I'd never done any marketing, publishing, writing, design, etc etc.

I mostly financed the business through day job devops work, then later I took on a small amount of investment (like $30k)

In the beginning I expected to do unique, one-off, fictional books, hoping to get good enough that I could partner with...

Sorry, you need to login and/or become a member to view the rest of this content.

Disclaimer: The initial draft of this article was compiled by the Starter Story team based on publicly available interviews, podcasts, and other content from the founder.

Who are you and what business did you start?

Founder-Market Fit

How do you come up with the idea for Selfarama?

How did you build the initial version of Selfarama?

More Business Ideas Like This