A GenAI Haiku Journey (Part 1)
This is the first of a two-part series. You can read the next part here.
In the spring of 2024, I started playing around with Large Language Models and Generative AI apps, and unexpectedly got hooked on haikus. I built a simple AI-powered haiku app, turned it into a daily puzzle game, pivoted and brought to market a haiku generator and authoring assistant. Along the way I built a social media presence and earned thousands of engaged followers.
Some aspects of bringing an app to market — brand strategy and management, social media and digital marketing, GTM, SEO, etc. — were at first nebulous to this humble coder, so it was hugely rewarding to do a dive deep and learn new things!
Read on to learn about my AI-powered journey across tech, haiku poetry, generative art, social media, and digital marketing. In this part I’ll go over the initial product, the first pivot, dipping my toes into social media, and the rationale for building a social media marketing strategy. Read the next part to find out how that turned out!
Haikudle
It all started after hacking together small experimental apps — a food and drink menu generator, a trivia game generator, and an exercise tracker. I wanted to build something visually appealing! I began with a simple haiku generator paired with generative visual art and turned it into a Wordle-type daily puzzle game. Users would solve the scrambled haiku poem and reveal the art. Of course I named it Haikudle!
The inner workings were simple at first: users provide a theme, ChatGPT generates a haiku poem and provides the poem’s mood, DALL-E generates some nice artwork using the theme and mood, the app puts the whole thing together with nice presentation and UX. I then built the puzzle logic, daily puzzle functionality, and all the required infrastructure to run the whole thing. This was all built on the tech stack I like these days: Next.js/Typescript/Tailwind/Redis/Vercel.
Sensing some potential, I sought feedback by annoying my friends, posting on Hacker News, Product Hunt, and various Reddit forums, and burning through my personal social media capital! I found some AI tools and puzzle game sites (LikeWordle.com), and some found me (Food-le.com). With a growing online presence, Haikudle was starting to attract some users, some even solved puzzles!
With minimal yet non-zero success, I thought: let’s grow this thing!
Defining increasing levels of engagement as:
Start today’s puzzle → Solve the puzzle ️️️→ Create a new haiku → Edit the poem, regenerate the visual art, share
I wanted to know:
- Are users coming?
- Are they returning?
- Are they engaged?
The analytics framework provided by Vercel offers basic traffic information (visits, views, referrers, etc.) along with custom metrics, enough to provide the insights an app builder needs to answer those questions.
My conclusions:
- Yes, users are coming! At least initially, and mostly from the initial round of feedback solicitation.
- Some users are returning, but not a lot. A surprise win: likewordle.com and food-le.com together brought in a steady handful of users every day!
- Those same returning users are very engaged and actually solving puzzles, no surprise there. But very few users created new haikus, and those that did, often didn’t do it again — likely a “what does that button do?” kind of thing.
After a bit of SEO tweaking, more forum work, iterating onboarding and create experiences, I concluded:
- I have much to learn about SEO!
- More work is needed on sharing and leaderboard experiences.
- It seemed like most visitors just wanted to view those haikus.
- Users who solve puzzles are very sticky!
Meanwhile, in the process of generating/editing/curating those daily puzzles, I caught the haiku bug! Crafting those three little lines of poetry is quite captivating — see reddit.com/r/haiku if you don’t believe me! Suspecting that fellow haiku enthusiasts would feel similarly, I decided to let the puzzle experience run on its own while I doubled down on the authoring experience.
A (temporary) pivot to Haiku Genius would focus on:
- Curated daily haiku as the landing experience
- Emphasis on the AI-powered authoring experience
- Social media
Haiku Genius and Social Media
With the basic mechanics of the app “good enough for now,” it was time to level up the authoring experience with Haiku Genius.
As a superuser, I had access to several features that normal users didn’t have when crafting haikus (including direct database access). The goal was to open up more authoring functionality to users:
- Provide a theme
- Request the poem in any language
- Edit the generated poem (with fancy AI-powered assistance)
- Include more pre-baked artistic instructions for the visual art
Thus, I needed to build:
- Guardrails (obviously!)
- Tight and smooth UI/UX
- Onboarding to guide users
- Traffic to power tweak → measure → analyze cycles
As an app builder, I was good to go on the first points, but the last one would be more challenging. With everyone in my personal social circle absolutely sick of my haikus, I decided to build a proper social media presence. The combination of poetry and visual art would work well on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). So, I created accounts and started building up Haiku Genius on those platforms.
The initial formula was rather simple: a post containing the haiku poem, with a link to the haiku instead of the usual author credits. This would let users click to access the app and leverage social media’s Open Graphs to pull metadata and SEO. I made sure a pre-baked image could be linked to specific haikus via the og:image tags
tag, providing a good sharing experience. The app would also provide links back to the social media pages.
The generated visual art with the poem overlaid would be included in the post, providing a rich visual experience that would work well on all platforms. Finally, I used hashtags to provide discoverability, visibility, and maybe even virality.
I started manually posting a few times a week on different platforms, testing the waters. I hoped users would click on the poem link, land on the app’s daily haiku, generate haikus, and share them on their own socials. I dropped a few dollars here and there to boost posts, not really knowing what I was doing, but happy to learn as I went.
Hoping for some virality, I tried a few topically-inspired haiku posts:
- April 8th North American eclipse
- Star Wars-themed haiku on May 4th
- A series of Kaiju monster haikus for by the new Kong vs Godzilla movie
- A Fallout-themed haiku celebrating the Netflix series
These were fun, especially with friends and on Reddit forums, but they didn’t resonate as much with typical haiku enthusiasts. I decided to stick to the traditional format (nature, seasons, etc.).
These efforts produced moderate traffic, enough to see how the app was used. I looked at who returned, who clicked on what, how many generated haikus, etc. Tweak → measure → analyze, rinse and repeat.
Not many people were initially clicking on the Generate button. I made it more “button-y,” added a large “Create” label, allowed theme input, iterated on UI/UX, etc. I eventually landed on a format that seemed to work.
The edit experience needed a bit more work: I wanted the transition from view to edit mode to be as smooth as possible while providing all the guardrails needed for a good editing experience (long lines, empty lines, etc.). I also wanted to sprinkle in some AI magic without being too intrusive.
I eventually arrived at two formulas:
Editor style
- Click/tap on the poem to smoothly switch to edit mode with usual editor UX (move cursor, highlight, Tab/Enter/Arrow keys, etc.)
- Clear a line and let AI rewrite it.
- Modify a line and let AI fill in when/where appropriate.
- Insert “…” to instruct AI where to fill in.
Arcade style
- Long-click/tap anywhere on the poem to switch mode.
- Click/tap or swipe words to delete, basically an eraser.
- Debounce and let AI fill in the blanks.
- Return to view mode.
Arcade style editing turned out really well, especially on mobile! But as a haiku author, I found that I wanted to be specific with poems, so I decided on the former approach. That mode would work better in another application — more on that later.
As an aside, I needed to build a special mode to create assets for social media. Essentially, the visual art overlaid with the haiku poetry minus other UI elements. Since I already had a long curated calendar of daily haikus, I decided to have a bit fun and set up an old iPad with a purposely built frame (available on amazon here) running the app in this showcase mode, refreshing daily to the current haiku. This is currently installed at my parent’s house and they can’t stop talking about it — two more happy users!
Meanwhile, for some integration work for a client, I took a deep dive into workflow automation tools, specifically Make.com (similar to Zapier). I’m kicking myself for not looking at these tools earlier — I’ve put together way too many bespoke ETLs/integrations/automations over the years! A few days later Haiku Genius’ social media presence was entirely automated, publishing fresh content every day on all platforms. I could now focus on curating the daily haiku calendar, iterating on the app, and figuring out Meta and X’s ad tools.
Thanks for reading this far! In this first part I went over the creation and initial launch of Haikudle followed by a pivot to Haiku Genius. If these were their childhood and teenage years then the next part will cover early adulthood: going to market (GTM), digital marketing and finding an audience. This is a bit out of my comfort zone and so it should make for a good read — spoiler: things picked up quite a bit!
In the meantime I invite you to check out these haikus for yourself, create your own, solve puzzles, and of course like/subscribe/follow/share/re-tweet/etc.
Apps
- Create a beautiful haiku: haikugenius.ai
- Enjoy a fresh haiku every day: dailyhaiku.ai
- Solve today’s haiku puzzles: haikudle.ai
Socials
If you enjoyed this and want to learn more, maybe geek out on nerdy stuff, thinking about building something cool, or need a helping hand, come grab me!
