How I turned my experiments with AI into my first-ever product launch?
Here’s how I turned my learning experiments with AI models into my first-ever product launch: Beautiful 100+ AI generated Images
My Experiments 👨🔬
Seeing a lot of people experimenting with AI models, on November 2nd, I decided to get my hands dirty and try it myself…
For the next few days, I experimented with different diffusion models on my laptop, using Hugging Face, and ended up generating a lot of beautiful images using different prompts, base images, and models and their configurations.
Started doing it in public 📢
I started sharing the generated images on Twitter and was getting thousands of impressions on my tweets. I also picked an opportunity on a thread and tried creating: “a group photo of indie hackers having dinner watching Dagobert’s Twitter course” 😅
You can check out the full story about that in this Twitter thread 😂
Releasing on Gumroad 😬
On November 12th, I found that I have generated quite a lot of images and they are really good.
So, I decided to share them with everyone. I created an account on Gumroad, filtered the best images from the collection, created a product on Gumroad, uploaded them, and set the price to $5+ 😬
And shared with everyone…
I was getting quite a decent amount of views on it, but no one was buying it. So, 2 days later, I made it FREE*, and boom, it started 🎉
*I used a default coupon to make it free, as an experiment. I don’t know if it was the right move or not. I am pretty new here, let me know what you think.
A night before PH launch 🥶
On the night of November 14th, I thought of launching it as my first-ever product on Product Hunt I was nervous as hell and getting cold feet 🥶 but went for it, and decided let’s take the challenge and see the results…
…I was nervous as hell and getting cold feet…
I followed these steps:
- First, I went and scheduled a launch for the next day (November 15th).
- Then, shared it on Twitter with my small following (around 170 people at that time)
- and also, scheduled some tweets for the day
- Had an old newsletter with around ~50 users. Scheduled a small post there too 😬
- Searched for some subreddits, related to the niche. Read their rules, then picked 2 subreddits and shared the launch post there too
I was able to complete these 5 points in a few hours of timespan, lucky me 🥹
*PS: yes, I knew I am making a mistake by choosing such a close date, I was not thinking straight 🤐
Launch day 🚀🚀
I live in India so, 00:00 PST is 13:30 for me, the middle of a work day, as I forgot to apply for the leave 🤦♂️ But still decided to pull it off, added an hour of out of office on the calendar, informed everyone at work.
And when the time came, I remained active for the time being on Product Hunt, replying to people and answering questions. Then for the latter half of the day, I was checking every few hours for new comments and questions.
Luckily, I was featured on the front page of Product Hunt 🥳 throughout the day and was under #10 for 4 to 5 hours — Mission Accomplished 🤩
In the end, I got #30th position with 55 upvotes and 22 comments, it was beyond what I had imagined 🤩 Same for the product traffic. I had not expected that.
Later, I also wrote a short blog post on Hashnode, to keep a steady traffic but it didn’t work and brought zero traffic, you know what “not everything works, unexpectedly” 😅
And this is how my first-ever product launch ended on Product Hunt…
…but then came BLACK FRIDAY 🤩
I had already made the image collection FREE with 100% off, in the launch. So, before BLACK FRIDAY, on November 22nd, I shared the product on a couple of deal sites and changed the coupon name to BLACKFRIDAY with the same 100% off deal 😅
…it went off like a rocket 🚀
And to my surprise, it went off like a rocket 🚀 Within a few hours, the product views got quadrupled 4x and downloads became 10x, and I got my first paid sale 🤑
Yesterday, I reduced the discount from 100% OFF to 50% OFF, let’s see how it goes, so far no sale 😅
Thank you for reading my journey, I really enjoyed it. Please, do check out the image collection here
Originally published at https://www.indiehackers.com.
