A GenAI Haiku Journey (Part 2)
This is the second of a two-part series. You can read the first part here.
In my last article I described building Haikudle, an AI-powered daily haiku puzzle app, then pivoting to Haiku Genius, an AI-assisted haiku authoring platform, then strategizing about building a social media presence to bring in haiku enthusiasts. In this part I’ll go over that in more details, I’ll describe my experience of dipping my toes into digital marketing, and will share some of the challenges, a few wins, and lessons learned along the way.
Social Media Marketing Wins and Fumbles
First a warning: I’ll be going into the bloody details from an enthusiastic n00b’s perspective, including metrics and such. If this is not your thing feel free to skip ahead to the TL;DR section below and read on about the lessons learned.
Second, I have to reiterate that I’m a software developer, not a digital marketer. I’ve been building web apps for decades, usually in team settings. The branding/marketing/GTM side of things is usually led by teammates who (usually!) know what they’re doing. I’ve only had glimpses into those dark arts. So, given this opportunity, and with equal doses of enthusiasm and naiveté, I jumped into those strange waters.
So back in April everyone was talking about the total eclipse that would sweep across North America. Naturally, I turned my haiku machine on overdrive and eventually chose one to be featured on that fateful day.
Not knowing much about Meta’s advertising tools, I kept it simple and simply boosted the eclipse haiku post, targeting the countries on the path of the eclipse, initially the US and Canada. At the last minute, realizing that the path included a slice of Mexico, I included that country as well. $20 and three days later:
- Over 3K of engagement — mostly from Mexico
- Shy of 2K link clicks, 1K reactions, and 40 shares
- 0 haikus generated 😒
A partial victory, I suppose! Clearly, I needed to work on messaging and onboarding, but at least it showed that I could bring users in. The big surprise was Mexico — I didn’t think this formula would work in non-English speaking countries but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I continued boosting the occasional haiku post on the three platforms, learning how to operate the various levers. By pulling in users and iterating on the app, I was finally seeing some generated and shared haikus. Many chats with friends and ChatGPT later, I was starting to score reasonable numbers!
At the same time, I continued engaging with Redditors in various specific purpose boards (/r/dalle2, /r/aiArt, /r/haiku, /r/SideProject, etc.), not targeting for traffic or clicks but more of a show-and-tell to solicit feedback on poems, visual art, and the platform itself. The community is well known to be prickly at times: can confirm! But some of the feedback received was priceless. Notably, haiku enthusiasts want serious haikus — none of those Kaiju haikus (see part 1), and don’t even get me started on the 5/7/5 format! I also picked up a bunch of DALL-E tricks along the way.
Highlights
Help from ChatGPT with strategy, messaging, and targeting
- Recommended interests really moved the meter
- Huge wins with Indonesia, India, and Latin America
Carousel format
- Showcase a mix of visual art styles
- First item picked to “pop” with bright colors and such
- Spread the messaging (daily featured haiku/generate your own/free, no signup required/etc.) across the carousel items
- Demonstrate multi-language support by example
Driving traffic to the app worked, and so did driving engagement (likes and follows)
- Many users generated haikus — some even maxing out their daily usage limit.
I finally arrived at a winning formula for Instagram, earning thousands of followers across two carousel and reel ads 🎉🎉🎉 Facebook and X were more stubborn, but I did eventually earn 100+ followers on each platform.
Winning Ads
Clearly, combining the carousel-styled post with better targeting worked well for Instagram. Cheaper too! Applying a similar formula for FB is looking promising, but users seem to take more convincing to actually click on that Follow button.
Promising Approaches and Formats
Pinned Stories to showcase best of the previous month
- Seems to be working more on IG than FB
- Easy to turn into a reel and spend a bit of ad money
Occasionally boosting a single post
- Good to get engagement and follows
- Audience suggested by ChatGPT continues to work very well
“How to” reel
- The first “How to Haiku” story and reel was very successful, bringing users into the app and creating haikus. I might give “How to Haikudle” a try and see if users come in to solve puzzles.
TL;DR:
- 2k+ followers (mostly as a result of those boosted carousel posts and the “How to” reel ad)
- 10–50 organic interactions per post
- Easy to gain followers with good targeting, but they seem to leave over time — will need to address
- Ad tools are simple yet powerful
- Cheap with good targeting
- Fair amount of “Can you send me this pic” spam comments from AI art accounts: ignoring for now
- 100+ followers
- 1–5 organic interactions per post
- Easier to drive engagement or website traffic but harder to gain followers
- Ad tools very powerful but clunky and confusing at times — surprising given the same parent company and backend as IG
- Fair amount of spam messages and comments to manage
X/Twitter
- 100+ followers
- 1–10 organic interactions per post
- Occasional natural spike with retweets
- Ad tools are clunky, more expensive, and don’t seem as powerful as Meta’s
- Ignored somewhat and yet follower count slowly increased on its own
- 100+ post karma
- 0 followers
- Very rich interactions with Redditors — but can be prickly at times!
- Amazing for soliciting feedback
- Have not dipped my toes in paid advertising — I’m a bit scared TBH!
LimericksAI
It turns out not everyone loves haikus as much as I do — shocking, I know! My East Coast friends indulged me to some extent with my haiku business, but they kept insisting I try with limericks. So, I finally gave in and spun off limericks.ai with an initial social presence at facebook.com/limericks
Using a similar formula to Haiku Genius’, but taking a funny, whimsical, and absurd approach to current events, memes, and viral internet topics. Dog-fooding the early MVP with the crew and roasting current events and each other was a lot of fun! Plus, the “arcade-style” edit functionality mentioned in the last part is a great fit here.
LimericksAI is just getting started, so like, subscribe, roast your friends, and stay tuned!
Skills Acquired, Lessons Learned
What a fun ride! Building small throwaway/experimental apps is always enjoyable to me, but the complete journey from concept to MVP, to market, and through the inevitable pivots has been incredibly fruitful.
LLM/GenAI: There’s more to it than just slapping together an app over ChatGPT prompts! Understanding how the models work, what makes them excel or fail, their capabilities, and limitations is not trivial at all. There’s a parallel between LLM models and external users, both requiring thought, analysis, guardrails, handholding, monitoring, etc. Anticipating and adapting the value and liabilities they bring to the given application is the hard AND fun part.
- Mixing haiku poetry and generative imagery turned out to be a great application for this early-stage technology: the poem constraints (5/7/5 or else!), vibe-forward, nature-themed, (usually) non-political subjects. Fewer weird AI glitches to watch for. Limericks, on the other hand, are proving to be more of a challenge. Look for a follow-up article on that.
- As an aside, ChatGPT has been incredible in helping me bring Haiku Genius to market, teaching me concepts, helping to formulate strategies, even automatically quality-testing those daily haikus before publishing to social media. “Thinking out loud” and seeing what wisdom the model has distilled on that topic is bit of a superpower.
Digital Marketing/SEO/Branding/GTM: It was a privilege bringing this little app to market on my own, learning many things outside of my area of expertise. Strategizing a marketing approach, putting together messaging and assets, launching ad campaigns, watching users click/like/comment, iterating on features and UX based on metrics, etc. This is super fun!
Next.js/Tailwind/Redis/Vercel technology stack: I’m obviously not new to this world, but this particular mix is working out really well. In particular, combining the initial server-side rendering via Server Components with Redis’ insanely fast data retrieval provides a super fast and pleasant user experience on the initial page load. No loading spinner required!
- Of note, the Vercel platform is a huge win for building and bringing to market a small app. The Dev and Ops comforts provided are well worth the monthly $20 or so in my opinion. But do keep an eye on the usage!
- Also, I hope the redis-as-a-primary-store thing continues to be hold true in my opinion. Combining a well-thought-out keying strategy with Redis’ JSON capabilities worked out very well and provide an incredibly performant storage solution. I might open-source the simple wrapper I wrote for this, stay tuned!
Workflow Automation: I’m surprisingly happy with Make.com’s capabilities. As a coder, one might think I’d be less enthusiastic about no-code/low-code tools, and one would’ve been right! However, this one tool in particular has shown itself to be capable and powerful enough to reliably power HaikuGenius’ operations and social media presence for many months now. Some of these are incredibly exciting, and I’m thrilled to expand my freelance services to include consulting, implementing, and supporting these innovative tools.
Retro
From concept to MVP, iterations, pivots, and marketing efforts, I’ve navigated an AI-fueled journey with some tiny wins and good lessons. Along the way, I’ve earned followers and MAUs, perhaps exhausted my friends and family with my constant haiku updates! It’s been a privilege to build, learn, and engage with passionate communities, and especially rewarding to see people enjoy my silly creations.
Successes
Among the many iterations, providing well-curated daily haikus on social media is a clear winner. Although inviting followers to engage with the app itself has shown modest success, I haven’t fully utilized those levers yet. But I did find the domain dailyhaiku.ai available so of course I bought it and will doing an SEO deep dive with this one.
For Haikudle, I was able to gain a few hundred MAUs, mostly from likewordle.com, food-le.com, and the occasional organic Google click. Not amazing numbers but given how sticky those users are and how little marketing investment I made, I’d say there’s potential. I’ll be doing another round to see if I can find more like-minded users, explore puzzle platforms, maybe develop a mobile or Facebook app.
It’s still very early for those limericks, but initial social media engagement numbers are very encouraging. Stay tuned!
Monetization
I never really considered monetization: this was really about the journey. It’d be neat to sell physical embodiments of those haikus, maybe actual puzzles, calendars, merchandise. The topic did come up for Limericks.ai with the crew, so if an audience can be found, let’s see.
Freelance
With newly acquired expertise in these areas, I’m excited to broaden my freelance offerings, particularly in Workflow Automation, Systems Integration and related fields. I’m seeing more and more entrepreneurs getting into trouble with their no-code/low-code systems, and this will be an area of particular focus, in addition to my usual Software Development activities.
Thank you for joining me in my AI-fuelled haiku journey! In this leg I detailed getting out of my comfort zone into digital marketing, and the things I learned along the way. Stay tuned for follow-up articles, possibly about open-sourcing some of the neat tricks I’ve developed. To see those haikus, create your own, or roast someone with a funny limerick, see the links below.
Apps
- Create a beautiful haiku or roast your friend with a hilarious limerick: haikugenius.ai, limericks.ai
- Enjoy a fresh haiku every day: dailyhaiku.ai
- Solve today’s haiku puzzle: haikudle.ai
Socials
If you enjoyed this and want to learn more, geek out on nerdy stuff, thinking about building something cool, or need a helping hand, come grab me!
