TextUnbox.app

Wow, seven months have passed since the last post about textunbox.
I can tell you one thing - I've been actively and constantly working on new things and there's been some traction for the first time in the history of the product - I've had two months in a row where people have been buying units and I've been getting paid about $12 a month. Yay. 😃

It's a very nice feeling. The traffic is coming from two or three major AI tool sites. I think I will use this as proof if enough people buy or even if traffic goes up if there are no purchases I will have to pivot.

Since I'm also using my own tool, I added a new feature - Image Background Removal - enhances images by removing the background, leaving only the foreground object, and making the background transparent. You can see an example here: https://textunbox.app/docs/textunbox_removebackgroundimage_example.jpg

I also started rewriting and redesigning the documentation. Originally textunbox was supposed to be a "from developer to developer" technical product, but support chats over the last few months have shown that some people are interested in the "visual experience", so I think I'll keep both worlds and try to improve the user interface.

I'm working on the next endpoints TextToAudio and ChatGPT integration. When they are done I want to combine them and I want to try to build something cool and similar to voicedraw :)

Stay tuned.

Yesterday I finally added the option to set the size of the generated image. DALL.E offers three different (square) sizes (in pixels):

• 256x256
• 512x512
• 1024x1024

Depending on the image content, the size of the downloaded data can be up to 4 MB for some 1024x1024 images (and of course much less for the smaller image sizes).

Please give it a try at https://textunbox.app/voicedraw. 🙂

Over the last few weeks, I've been prototyping an idea I had: everyone was creating images with AI text prompts, and they are/were all in English.

Since I use an AI service with many capabilities, I thought I could use it to create a chain of AI services that generate images with speech/voice (in (almost) any language) as input.

My PoC works - the first layer does the speech recognition, the second layer translates the recognized text into English, and the third layer generates an image from the "prompt".

To accomplish this, the TextUnbox REST API has received three new endpoints:

• ExtractTextFromAudio
• TranslateText
• GenerateImageFromPrompt

Whant to see it in action? Here it is: https://textunbox.app/#demo

Would you like to try it out? Write me a message. :)

As always, stay tuned, I'm working on more ideas.

Playing with the AI features, I decided to add a nifty functionality to the TextUnbox service - analyze an image and describe it with a short sentence. It's amazing how far AI has come and how easy it is to use such services.

Want to try the new feature? I would still love to give away a few trial license keys and get more feedback in return. 🙂

And again - stay tuned - I'm working on something really interesting right now that's inspired by AI trends.

Building in public definitely pays off. 🙂 Shortly after I posted about pivoting, I was contacted via Twitter and asked for a trial license key. I got a shout out about the text extraction and also super valuable feedback - it's amazing! Two major changes are already in production:

1. a pricing section
2. and also the license key purchase is now embedded in the site (the experience is similar to purchasing through Stripe).

Please visit the site and tell me what you think. I would love to give away a few more trial license keys and get more feedback in return.

Fueled by feedback I work with motivation.

Stay tuned.

A year (or two 😅) later I’ve decided to pivot TextUnbox and to change the approach.

I have dropped the Windows Desktop application. Instead, I’ve changed and redesigned the website so that you can just paste an image from your clipboard (or upload a file) and the extracted text will be presented in a second.

Please give it a try and tell me what you think! :-) https://textunbox.app

The REST API is still available and I have plans to build integrations for it.

I also changed the pricing a bit – there is no subscription option available at the moment, but only fix amount for fixed number of extractions. If I get enough people that are interested in a recurring subscription, I can add the option very quickly. You can check the prices here: https://keenthinker.gumroad.com/l/textunbox

If you want a trial key to test TextUnbox, please contact me. 🙂

I also almost completed the Twitter bot that extracts text from images embedded in tweets. 🤖 I'll let you know once it's ready.

Stay tuned.

🎉TextUnbox is officially live! :)

https://gum.co/textunboxapp

This time I made it - 3 followers were waiting for the product! Yay
My first ever product on Gumroad is live!

Everything went well.

Now I need to stay on track, do a little bit more marketing and promote the product. I think I could have used a bigger audience, but I concentrated on creating the product first.

Stay tuned.

I'm making good progress in preparing for the product launch of TextUnbox. Almost everything is in place now

• product cover
• documentation
• landing page
• installers
• tests
• scheduled announcements
• calculated and configured the pricing (including discounts)

I'm really thrilled about next Wednesday - 31.03.2021 08:00 CET 😊 and how everything will go.

I found the Gumroad #14DayProduct challenge very helpful - a guide, a checklist and an active community giving feedback - awesome. 🤩

Stay tuned for more updates.

I missed the scheduled release date - March 21 2021. 😢

I made a lot of progress, learned a lot, but there wasn't enough time to launch.
I was pretty unhappy yesterday.

But that's part of the game and also building in public - share failure, not just success, and learn from it.

Even if it is not easy, I continue to work on the open tasks today.

I managed to create a good product cover page for Gumroad.
I am currently working on the disclaimer and I am starting to plan the release day.

The path to success is a continuous marathon, not a short sprint.

The new release date is 31.03.2021! The countdown is on - see https://textunbox.app

Last week I worked tirelessly on TextUnbox, discussed a lot on gumroad circle community and the results are there - watch the short demo video on the homepage https://textunbox.app/ (or in YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDw-BG_E7e0).

I also created a documentation page for the desktop app and the API. I've already contacted the first person willing to try the product and I appreciate the feedback (whatever it is). Tomorrow I will write to the second person who wants to test.

If you'd like to try the product before it's released, please let me know. 😊

I also added crisp.chat to the main page, so that users can contact me more quickly at any time, especially if they have problems.

You can follow me on Gumroad for news of the upcoming release and for a 50% discount on a one-year TextUnbox subscription before the product hits the market.