Seeking AI/software dev with Stable Diffusion expertise
About the startup (Alien Star Cloud)
▪ Helping people to express their identity visually, think social banners, avatars, wallpapers, AR graphics, etc (with a bigger picture vision).
▪ Incorporated earlier this year.
▪ Three co-founders, geographically dispersed (AU, DE, US), including one found via Indie Hackers.
▪ Started with things that don't scale using no-code tools and made some early revenue, made a little more revenue with a product (ID8R) in the market.
▪ Seeing a lot of potential to grow and build on early revenue, but we need expertise to develop new features around Stable Diffusion.
▪ Raised a small pre-seed round (not enough for salaries) at a valuation of A$1.2M pre-money that is covering some basic operational expenses.
▪ Web3 focused, but not exclusively, we see opportunities for the product we are building to deliver value to a wider spectrum of use cases.
What we are looking for
A developer with experience in/a passion for AI tooling, specifically Stable Diffusion i.e. experience with setting up models on serverless GPUs (like banana.dev) would be ideal, along with training custom models and getting the most out of prompts / img2img.
A mix of experience across Python, React, Next.js, serverless apps (or similar JS experience) is preferred.
Consistent part time availability (e.g. could be 1-2 days/week) until we reach funding/revenue that supports salaries.
An understanding of early startup challenges & ability to work in a geographically dispersed team (i.e. meetings outside of 9-5, etc).
Some experience in and knowledge of the web3/NFT space would be useful.
Any experience with WebGL / React-three-fiber would be a cherry on top.
You would need to be available to contribute on an equity-only basis initially, but our aim is to develop a full-time team and pay salaries once it is financially viable either through revenue generated or capital raised.
If it sounds like it may be a fit and you have questions or you'd like to learn more, send me an email joseph@alienstar.cloud, reach out by Twitter DM (https://twitter.com/josephskewes), or comment below.
Hey, I might not be what you're looking for, but all I can say is congrats on raising the VC!
Although my startup is also AI related, I'm doing something way different from you (we allow users to run our AI models on the cloud through an API, so we're the one offering stable diffusion API as a service for AI apps), I feel I'm in the same boat as you but with only one less co-founder: being unable to expand unless we get more people (though I certainly have not had raised any VC yet).
I'm still a little confused though, what exactly does your site do? There is no description and I am brought directly to the editing page.
From reading your twitter, I get more of an understanding, but it's a little confusing on your website.
Do you have any advice for finding co-founders on indiehackers and raising VC?
Thanks and good luck on your product! Followed you on twitter @https://twitter.com/therealetch and I'm curious to see the result.
Btw, if you're only giving them 1-2 hours per week, I'd recommend a freelancer instead. Freeup seems to be a good resource for freelancers.
Was actually a F&F round, including early customer/friends/subscriber from an investment blog I used to write, etc rather than VC capital, so can't really give you advice on raising VC outside of an existing network 🙂
As for finding the co-founder, you can check my post history for the last post to see what I wrote (not dissimilar to above). I posted it here, Reddit, Discord channels, Twitter, Y Combinator, and other places, so don't stop at one location and make sure you have a vision in mind (pitch deck or similar) that you can present to those who express interest in joining you. Also depends on the type of co-founder you are looking for, i.e. Indie Hackers is probably a good spot to find devs, maybe not for marketers though. Find the sites/subreddits/discord servers that the sort of person you want to find would hang at and post there.
At the moment ID8R is designed to create social banners, avatar frames/filters, and device wallpapers that feature NFT avatars and other forms of web3 identity that someone owns, but will be expanding on this. It has only recently been released and we are onboarding customers via Twitter (and other social networks) where they should get an idea of what the platform is for from the tweets/content as you mention. We will create a front facing website at the primary domain when we are a bit further along. At the moment we are not generating organic traffic (e.g. from search) so it is not a high priority. Onboarding customers at the moment is a manual process as we network with individuals and NFT collections in the space.
We are looking for someone that can give 1-2 days (not hours) per week so they can work it around other commitments while we don't have salary funding, but if someone was available to contribute more time than that we would be open to it too (for a larger vesting equity stake).
Stable Diffusion as a service via API is what we are looking to setup with banana.dev (i.e. serverless GPU), definitely going to be a big market for that. Good luck!
Thanks for your advice!
I'm also in the same boat as you with social media outreach haha. We don't even have a website yet, and we've already built a decent discord following from just Reddit comments.
Good luck with ID8R and I hope you find a dev soon!