NightCafe Creator

I've spent the last couple of months focused on user acquisition and SEO. I've now got to #3 on Google for "AI Art Generator" (actually I seem to fluctuate between 3 and 4), I'm getting pretty steady traffic and use (100+ creations per day from existing users and organic traffic), so I decided it's time to start focusing on revenue.

The first thing I did was auto-generate product mockups for every creation. If you make a creation now (seriously, please give it a try - https://creator.nightcafe.studio) you'll see what it would look like as a poster, framed print, phone case, coffee mug and t-shirt.

It's too early to have any kind of results just yet, but I'm optimistic. Now that I have the mockups, there's a lot more that I can do with them - next step is email drip campaigns and beyond that I'm sure there's more still.

I would love your feedback on how the mockups are presented. I do worry that some people will see it as too in-your-face.

Thanks for reading!

It's been (a bit over) 3 months since I launched NightCafe Creator, and in that time, thousands of AI generated artworks have been created by hundreds of users. I've still got work to do on retention and engagement, but we're getting there!

3 months in + the end of Summer (here in Australia) seemed like a good time to throw together a list of my favourite 20 creations from users of the app.

Check them out here - https://nightcafe.studio/blogs/blog/top-20-ai-generated-artworks

Over the holidays I was in Dev mode and managed to start and finish my app's killer feature - style masks.

For some background, my app is an AI Art generator. You've probably seen others like it - Deepart.io, DeepDream and a handful of others. Until now I didn't really have a point of difference to stand out from those, but now I do.

Style masks let you use multiple style images in your creations, and clip each style to a region of the image. A typical example is to style the foreground differently to the background. Here's the best example I've made so far - https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/w2wukAoEwX0G4Jk0jMtU

I start a new job tomorrow and am glad I was able to get this done before my life gets a bit busier. I will be switching from Dev mode to promotion/user acquisition mode for a while now.

That's my update for now. If anyone wants to try out the Creator and give me any feedback - good or bad - I would love to hear it!

My most immediate goal with NightCafe Creator has been to increase the conversion rate of new visitors creating artworks on the site. The first step was to add Unsplash search so that great images were easy to find, and I recently completed the second step, which was to remove the hurdle of having to sign up before being able to create something.

Firebase was a great help. Anonymous users are actually really easy to implement, and it's made it so much easier for new users to reach the core value of the app. If anyone wants any help doing a similar thing I'm happy to answer any questions :)

Over the holidays I will hack on a few features, but my focus will be on growth and marketing for a little while.

Happy holidays!

My most immediate goal for NightCafe Creator is to reduce the friction and cognitive load required to make your first creation. One of the hurdles was picking photos to use. Often people settle for an average photo from the last 20 in their camera roll. Some people might not find a good enough photo and just give up entirely.

Yesterday I finished adding an Unsplash search directly into the image picker so great photos are super easy to find. My API access hasn't been approved yet so it's limited to 50 requests per hour.

The other major hurdle right now is the requirement to sign-up via Google, Facebook or email before you can create anything. This is the next thing I'm going to tackle - reducing onboarding friction #2. My plan is to look into Firebase anonymous users. Has anyone worked with them before?

After a few weeks of working on the "Creator" side of NightCafe, I launched an MVP. It only had a small selection of available styles,with no way to upload your own style images. I posted to Facebook and Reddit and got about 30 people who actually used it, maybe 10 of which made multiple creations.

Next steps: improve the Creator options and set up buying options (prints, swag, etc).