I got my first sale 🎉
TL;DR: 2 weeks in, built an MVP, shipped to immediate network for testing/feedback and got my first sale 🎉
After building a couple of MVP products, I got access to the DALL-E waitlist and, to my surprise, managed to build some pretty excellent branding assets for my contracting portfolio site. In the venture studio space I occupied previously, a simple logo costed some clients in excess of $1k, so I immediately realised that this tech can create great value, especially for builders.
Excited, I rushed first to the DALL-E API (as-of-yet not public and against TOS to query, even with a valid Bearer Token) then the Stable Diffusion API, and assembled the MVP. After taking on some initial feedback - chiefly, that the outputs of Stable Diffusion are very inconsistent compared to DALL-E without an excess of keywords - I added template examples, a prompt book and a 'Feeling Lucky' button, and pinged the initial users. On Friday night, one of them found enough value to warrant a maiden subscription! 🥳
Have kinda kept this bottled in all weekend, but felt like sharing with the lovely Indie Hackers community and celebrating the (super early) milestone! If you're interested in checking it out - any feedback on the landing page/app would be invaluable to me - please free to check out https://www.depyct.co
Hope you lovely people have a lovely week! 😇
Landing page looks nice, a few thoughts:
P.S. If you want to see what people are doing when they come to your site, we have free plans on Squeaky for new projects like yours (I apologise for the shameless self-plug, it just seemed like an obvious use case).
Good shout - actioned the first two (made the CTA clearer), and going to add some solid examples with my next template update (and thanks for the kind words on design!)
No problem at all to plug Squeaky - love the site! I like how heatmaps and journeys are part of the analytics suite (the current tool I use doesn't have either of these features) - does Squeaky implementation work well with GDPR?
Yeah definitely, I mean of course it depends on every individual use case, but our whole goal was to build the first genuinely comprehensive product/web analytics suite that was privacy-friendly (rather than just a cookieless analytics dashboard).
Squeaky is cookie-free, doesn't use IP tracking, you can mask all sensitive data client side etc, so I think for your site it would be pretty much GDPR compliant out of the box :)
This sounds truly excellent! I had a look at a few others (Plausible and another whose name escapes me) before going with a LTD offer on the current one, but there are features that it could really do with. Squeaky sounds very promising - as soon as I work my way down the current todo list, I'll give it a proper look into and a go. Thanks for sharing :)
Congrats!!! Love the name and landing page
I think adding a quick video / product demo would be super helpful for someone to quickly understand the product. Maybe a gif even
Thanks for the warm words and excellent suggestion! I've got a component waiting in the stands for exactly this - I'll fire up Loom and get something recorded :)
Thanks for sharing the process.
Feedback - you show 0 examples on your homepage. I don't even want to sign up because I have no idea what I will get.
Show some before and after etc.
Hi joshdance, appreciate you checking out the landing page!
I've only only gotten round to it this comment in the past hour, and it's quite late here, so need to double-check my examples/categories in the morning, but initial component showing examples is up.
What do you think?
Hi! Signed up for the free version and tried to create a logo. Received a broken img link and when I tried to download got a 404 error. Is the service currently broken?
Hi jumpymango, thanks for signing up and giving it a go!
This is...unexpected - this is the first time I or any other users have come across this. I'm able to see the images that were generated, and have been able to download them with a download link from my side. Additionally it does seem to have correct content sharing permission - however, I'm going to investigate further immediately. The whole case of 'it works on my machine' is - frankly - not good enough, and I'm going to get to the bottom of this.
In the meantime, I've gone ahead and topped up your account with 100 free credits for the inconvenience - apologies for the embarrassing facepalm moment from my side!
I've found the bug. Borrowed a friend's mobile as couldn't figure out what was going wrong on my end...and sure enough, I've found the same problem on download. As we're using an open source platform in the background, it might be the case that there are inconsistencies on downloads to mobile devices, so flagged this back to its community. Now onto the fix 🔧
...and the solution is here. I've re-written the mobile view so it works succinctly with PWA and doesn't fire any errors (turns out next-pwa totally switched up functionality in Next.config.js without warning a couple months ago, causing errors to unexpectedly fire on some mobile devices - fun times).
Additionally, some browsers' incognito modes disable cookies, which interrupts the session (i.e. the app can't then not tell it's you who's stayed logged in, and therefore that the images you created are indeed your images). Adding in conditionals to check cookie status and keep the service connected throughout.
This is the first time I've wrangled with multiple-browser + cookies challenges, and its clearly a point of improvement for me looking forwards. Suffice to say, this weekend I'm prioritising multi-browser E2E testing, so that neither you nor anyone else has to go through this inconvenience. I'm hugely grateful to you for bringing this to my attention 🙏
Wow you're a beast! That looks so good for a two-week MVP.
And congrats on the first sale. Even $1 is infinitely more than $0.
Thanks Ben 🔥 Though to be honest, I've been a dev on and off for a couple years, so truthfully getting to the starting line took a bit longer than two weeks 😂
And absolutely. First of many steps forward, hopefully!
Congrats on the success. I like the design of your landing page. UI is impressive, and the color combination is also fantastic.
Thank you so much for the kind words qudsia_ali ☀️
Really interesting, fits in with Andrew Chen's piece on the next phase of the service economy, ie can an AI do some jobs on Fiverr https://andrewchen.com/how-marketplaces-will-reinvent-the-service-economy/
Jasper.ai look to have a similar feature out, how do you plan to differentiate yourself?
It's well-put by Andrew Chen. I think these types of AI can do the roles of some positions on Fiverr at scale, but for certain gigs, there will always be a place for the experts who operate manually (e.g. for a carefully structured written piece backed by research citations and graphs, businesses will still need to go to specialist copywriters). I think there's going to be - similar in the content writing field - a transition of everyday piece/asset creation (the very boring work) from manual to automated, and servicemen and women on Fiverr are likely to adopt these tools as well, to help service their customers faster. This includes creation of logos, stock photos and web illustrations.
Jasper.ai and Writesonic are two that have very good examples of text-to-image implementation, using the same technology. The differentiating factor will lie in the model's limitations (opportunity?) of needing very careful prompting to get consistently high quality results (unlike DALLE or, to an extent, Midjourney).
Whereas Jasper.ai and Writesonic are very likely fit their prompt engineering around their user base in content creation with stock photo generation, Depyct will be doubling down on branding assets for small businesses as a first step (logos, illustrations, etc.) - both experimenting and scouring the web for the best use cases and precise prompts (best outcomes are often 40+ keywords long!)
The idea is nice 👍 AI is quite popular nowadays and after such tools are live a lot of competitors appear then. How are you going to promote your project?
I agree. When GPT-3 came out last year, around 40-50 content writing AI tools emerged (still around 5-6 that are dominant today). At the end of the day, it's probably going to come down to distribution channels to differentiate in competitive markets like these - my next steps involve leaning into venture studio circles and doubling down on personalised outreach at scale, which offered impressive returns when applied to contracting (~70% reply rate, 5% close).
What are your thoughts on approaching a competitive landscape?
I'm with you on that one. We are also in quite a competitive niche, and for now, we are focused on connecting with "big clients" whom we can provide with custom contracts. We researched those who can be potentially interested in our services and are about to start the outreach. I'm talking about industries like government, education (universities, colleges et.), and other big players. I will definitely share the results of this journey 👍
Would love to hear about your journey and how it goes, and best of luck!
From experience in pre-sales consulting + venture studios, the "big clients" are a patience + waiting game, needing on average more than the 6 touch-points of a B2C client over a much longer period of time - it's going to be one where persistence is key, and a lot of your competition will count themselves out prematurely before striking the deal(s)!
That definitely makes sense 👍 Thanks for sharing your experience, I will also follow your next updates.
Congrats, no better feeling than getting the first one. I would recommend understanding the customer journey. Interview them if possible
Cheers remotesalesmanager! Indeed, that's the next step. Time to dust off 'The Mom Test' and warm up the comms channels :)
Maybe remove the social links if they are not going to work...looks great and well done.
Very solid shout - I'll remove them until the socials are all set-up. Thanks for the kind words :)
Congratulations :-)
Thanks Askedo :)
Congratulations Terry!
Thanks AnGuRuSO!