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, and uploaded them, and set the price $5+ 😬

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 followed these steps:

• First, I went and scheduled the launch for the next day (November 15th).
• Then, Shared on Twitter with my small following (around 170 people at that time)
• and scheduled some tweets for the day
• Had an old newsletter of 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: 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, not everything works as 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 😅

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