How I got $100 in revenue with AI pictures product in one night from a HackerNews post

Hey there

Some time ago I built a site that generates AI pictures in a style of GitHub logo. It's completely free, and even official GitHub accounts in Twitter and Instagram (yes turns out they have Instagram) posted about it. It was fun. And I just realized this story deserves a separate post :)

So I thought it would be cool to build an app that works with any logo, so people can generate nice branded pictures with their logo.

I went on to build LogoPicture AI. It's build with Next.js, Replicate API and Supabase.

It's a very early version of the product, I built it in a weekend.

It works like this: your upload a logo, type a prompt (or select a predefined one), select number of variations to generate and click a button. Images will be delivered to your email in 2-3 minutes.

After the basic functionality was there, I decided it's time to launch. Enough of procrastination!

How I launched it on HackerNews

Launching on HackerNews was actually pretty easy and fun. I expected much worse reaction and not a lot of traffic. I was so wrong. I couldn't expect someone would actually pay for it.

So, the title is very important on HackerNews. It should be obvious that's this thing is about. I went with the following: "Show HN: Web app to generate AI pictures with logos "hidden" in them". Pretty self explanatory, right?

It's also very important to write some description / story under your link. Without it, it's unlikely someone will comment it, and comments give your points and boost your post in the feed.

After several upvotes and couple of comments, my post made it to the top of Show HN feed. It stayed at the top for several hours and even now after 24hrs it's still on a place ~10.

It brought me over 6,000 unique visitors over night:

But even cooler than that, I managed to make 9 sales totaling $100 - 8 Starter plans ($9.9) and 1 Growth plan ($19).

So it was nice validation.

Lessons learned

The only bitter sweet thing is mobile version of the website. More than 60% of users were from IOS and Android, but my website looked like a shit on mobile. I should have done it better from the start.

But another positive thing I learned that HN people are pretty friendly. Their criticism is quite reasonable.

This comment made my day:

So I encourage you to not be afraid of HN - it can be a very valuable place to launch.

All the best,

LogoPicture AI