AutoVideo Maker Pro

Building a one-person AI video pipeline, and the hardest part wasn't the AI

Hey IH — sharing a real lesson from building Auto Video Maker Pro.

The product itself was the "fun" part: a desktop app that takes a text prompt, generates visuals with DALL-E, animates them with Ken Burns effects, adds narration via HeyGen, and outputs a finished video. No timeline editing, no manual stitching.

The actual hard problem showed up after the product worked: I'm based in Ukraine, and most of the standard indie-dev payment rails (Stripe, Gumroad payouts) aren't available here. So the entire billing and distribution layer ended up being a Telegram bot with Cryptomus handling crypto payments — not because it's trendy, but because it was the only stack that actually worked for my situation.

Launched on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, and Betalist. Got traffic, zero sales from any of it. Also tried posting actively on Reddit and Facebook groups — same result. What didn't work was chasing active promotion; what's starting to work is leaning into passive, inbound discovery (search, organic mentions) instead of pushing posts everywhere.

Curious if other builders dealing with limited payment infrastructure in their country found workarounds that actually converted, not just generated clicks.