My Entrepreneurial Journey: From AI Art to Mobile Game

I planned to publish this article in early January 2024, but I couldn’t post on indie hackers back then. Now I can finally share it with you and update it with the latest content.

In this reflection essay, I will share my entrepreneurial journey in 2023, when I tried to create an AI art tool and a mobile game, and how I acquired my first 100 users for each project. I will also discuss the challenges, failures, and lessons I learned along the way, and my hopes for the future.

AI Art: A Short-lived Dream

At the end of 2022, AI was booming, and I wanted to catch the wave by creating an AI art tool that could generate beautiful images from simple prompts. However, I soon realized that my tool was inferior to the existing ones, such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. I had a grand vision of dominating the AI art market, but I lacked the skills and resources to support my small project. I had to give up on this idea after a few months of fruitless efforts.

Mobile Game: A Lifelong Passion

After abandoning the AI art project, I felt anxious and restless. I searched for good ideas every day and analyzed their prospects. I really wanted to make a successful project. During that time, I remembered a game I played before: Detroit: Become Human. I had a great idea: why not infuse AI with life and let it accompany humans forever?

That’s how I started my first mobile game project, which was also my lifelong passion. The development process was smooth, but the hardest part was getting the first 100 users. The only method I could think of was posting on forums and groups, sincerely inviting people to try my game demo. I did this for about a month, and I managed to get more than 500 users. Then I tried some small-scale ads on Facebook, targeting Brazil, North America, and East Asia, but the results were mediocre. Finally, I followed a friend’s advice and published my game on a game distribution platform, where I got some gradual user growth. Unfortunately, the project was not profitable enough, and I had to end it eventually. But I was still happy that I had this experience.

Lessons Learned: Never Give Up, Seek Advice, and Make Friends

Here are some of the lessons I learned from my entrepreneurial journey in 2023:

• Starting from scratch is really hard, but don’t give up. Respond sincerely to every potential user and don’t lose hope.
• Seek advice from experienced friends. When I was stuck and couldn’t see any progress, I asked for help from a friend who worked in the game industry. I got a lot of encouragement and insights from him.
• Make friends with your users. Some of my game users became my good friends. They had entrepreneurial aspirations, or they could offer helpful advice from different parts of the world. Even if the project failed, I didn’t lose everything. There must be something good waiting for me in the future.

After learning from last year’s experience and mistakes, I also changed my project direction and focused on quickly developing and launching some small projects:

1. I have already released Dolphin Radar in January and I am about to launch GPT Traffic Track.
2. I am also learning how to run my Twitter account from scratch and have gained 27 followers.

I hope I will do better and better in 2024. If you have anything to share or communicate, please leave a comment. I love to hear different voices from you. Thank you!