Celebrating Failure: “Perfect” Dating Pics Part Deux
I feel like a failure.
So much so that I almost didn’t post a part II about this project.
If any entrepreneurs feel discouraged or shame because of a project that you kept putting off, this post is for you.
My first post about this was over a year ago, and that was already many months after I started the project in earnest!
But if I’ve learned one lesson in the startup life, it’s perseverance, even in the face of my own procrastination.
Our “ninja team” on this project made a breakthrough in the quality of AI-generated photos almost a year ago.
A crucial piece of the tech is using LoRAs to analyze your face before using Stable Diffusion to generate the photos, to ensure better resemblance using fewer seed photos.
It took us another 6 months to get the system automated, due to staffing issues, a confusing mismatch of quality between the manually created photos vs. the automated photos, and notably, my own failure to lead the project.
Finally, we gave up on the automated results matching exactly what we had before, and tweaked the process to just generate the best results it could.
How this sort of AI photo tools usually work is:
- you need to feed them way many (20+) photos of the subject (you)
- it analyzes your traits from various angles and lighting
- and then generates a new photo using your specified degree of resemblance and text prompts describing the scene
We got the requirements down to just 7 photos to achieve good results, and we think we could get it even lower!
Better yet, you can just take some quick selfies of yourself if you don’t have 7 individual photos already.
I wanted to get silly with this, so I went for the most stereotypical men’s dating photo categories:
- With adorable dogs!
- Looking bad ass in a leather jacket & sunglasses
- Suited up
- Hiking or outdoors
We even had it generate some shirtless pics, but decided to scrap that!
After seeing the results and how competitors evolved their target market, it became clear these could be used for more than dating profile pics. I’m currently using one for my LinkedIn profile and had requests from others for the same.
I’m also updating my wardrobe with Aviator sunglasses and a jacket, because I looked so bad ass, like Tom Cruise’s long lost (younger) brother!
I invite you all to try our iOS app for yourself! In this testing phase, we’re pricing it super low for everyone to try:
(it won’t even come close to covering our costs).
https://apps.apple.com/my/app/photo-generator-dapper-ai/id6476905877
If you cannot afford the super lower rate, I have a few limited free passes to give to people who help me share this widely!
We’re still making the server more scalable, and it’s important to remember:
The goal is to find a few good photos in each category to use, not to have every photo be perfect.
We released the app a few months ago, and already we’ve seen some great photo results from real users! Despite the setbacks — and even if this app doesn’t succeed — I’m proud of the perseverance our team demonstrated to get this over the finish line!
