How MidJourney Inspired Our First Pivot ✨

Hello fellow hackers!

This is a short story about how MidJourney helped us not only to create great visual content to a cool new side project, but eventually inspired a whole new GTM angle!

In the last couple of years I've been very busy with an innovative open-source project (more on that in a separate post!). Lately, a desire for a simple product, with a large market and clear value proposition I could lunch in a few days of work started to bubble within me. Something that will force me to work on my marketing skills and might potentially become a passive income source.

As an avid ChatGPT user (who isn't nowadays?!) constantly on the go, I started dreaming of a way to converse with it hands-free, while moving from one place to another. I tried a Siri to ChatGPT shortcut, but it was cumbersome and didn't really work well.

I'm a heavy WhatsApp user, so the next idea that popped to mind is to create an English voice-based WhatsApp-to-ChatGPT bot. I immediately shared the idea with my friend Shilo, who has built very successful WhatsApp bots before. He was hooked!

However, probably unsurprising for most of you, we quickly discovered there were dozens of such bots.

But hey, I started with a main goal of sharpening our marketing skills right?

So I started analyzing most competition and found that most are very technical, acting as a mere wrapper on top of ChatGPT. Many had very generic brands and unrelatable avatars.

Then, I started thinking of ways to narrow the market. We decided to start by targeting only English speaking WhatsApp users. Next step was to narrow it to a specific country, so we could localize the brand and content even further.

After a quick research, and we decided to go with the United Kingdom as our first choice:

Next up was finding a name:

We liked the "Gabby" name (means chatty in British slang 😀), but wanted to make it clear that it's an AI product. That's how the name "GabbyGPT" was born! and we quickly went and bought the .uk domain.

Next up, mascot ideas:

Which quickly turned into some nice directions using MidJourney:

And after some tweaks and variations (MidJourney remix mode highly recommended!) the final GabbyGPT mascot was picked:

Building the actual product was the easy part for us, and after a few hours we had the first version of GabbyGPT live and we started spreading the word with friends and family.

However, traction was not as we expected, and started thinking that a nice mascot and using British slang wasn't enough to stand-out in this crowded space. Although we had yet done any UK specific marketing, we decided to add some content to our blog and let it rest for a while.

I've to write (or better said, co-write 😀) some blog posts, and creating custom images for each post using MidJourney. I tried to be diverse and inclusive with my prompts. One of the images them was:

After tweaking that prompt a bit, and seeing senior citizens in the context of GabbyGPT, I had the eureka moment - GabbyGPT can be super valuable for seniors! It could open up the wonders of AI to a generation that probably thinks GPT is an STD 😅.
Also, using voice means no small letters to read or small buttons to press.

This new direction gave a boost of new energy, and we quickly adapted the website and product; added text-to-speech responses (beforehand, Gabby would accept voice but reply in text), changed the marketing site copy and added a clear use-case - explaining grandkids things:

And that's how MidJourney inspired our first pivot!

Thanks for reading so far, and any feedback regarding the journey, choices or anything else will be of huge value.

PS: we're live on ProductHunt today, your support can be priceless to us 🙏🏻