From idea to paying customer in 48 hours! What happened next will surprise me...

TLDR:
What it is: AI + personalised kids books = https://tigerhousebooks.com/
Success: first paying customer this morning, 48 after the idea 🤘

So I woke up two nights ago in the early hours of the morning, and the idea I'd been furiously idling for these last two years hit me like a ton of books.

"Use chatgpt and dreambooth to make automated immersive personalised kid's books" I said to myself. Much, much cooler than the old-school "There once was a kid named [name]" text-insert model available today.

I quickly skimmed @levelsio's book again, created a trial account with carrd.co, and set to work making a sales page. My dreams of having it ready in time for Christmas are dead, but I'm hopeful I can ship actual books to arrive in January. I have some time off over the holidays and no plans - win!

For now I've only worked on telling my story and accepting payments, so I can immediately seek that sweet "16 digit validation".

I created a stripe account and tried to figure out how to tie it in to my site... the carrd.co template I used had a mailing list subscription widget by default and I started using that, linked it to convertkit, but thought "that's too many damn clicks"... and someone rightly chastised me for capturing emails when I could be capturing $$$. Then I thought maybe typeform with stripe integration... and finally I settled on using the stripe widget in carrd directly. Way simpler! And it's just one click 💕

I wrote "under $50" in my copy so that I can vary the price between USA (US$40) and Australia (AU$49) markets without too much magic, and set Europe to Eur30 because I reckon they'll be a bit more price sensitive.

I added google analytics because it was easy, without really knowing how that works. For later.

I tried to set the price a bit above what the old-school books sell for, based on my belief that this is a much much better solution to the same problem.

This morning I had my first sale. It was someone I know, and I'm still waiting for true validation of having strangers buy it, but still! A real person, who I know is on a pretty tight budget, just dropped fifty bucks on this thing!!!

What happens next is... I have to figure how the f*** to deliver it.... woah!!

Beyond that my cogs are turning for ways to make it a bigger deal...

• subscription service that sends out monthly or quarterly books between age 1 and 7
• use my velvety voice (what can I say) to read stories aloud and sell the recording and/or use it as a marketing tool

But mostly I feel a panicked need to hustle on marketing before the big players show up and dominate. I'm starting with nearly zero audience.... help!!

Sincerely,
Tom