From Idea to Exit: OurBabyAI Startup Journey

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I went through the whole cycle as taught by @levelsio in his Make book. That indie startup is OurBabyAI .com, an AI baby generator. Here’s the full story from idea to 5 figure exit and everything I’ve learnt: 🧵

1/ Idea On 1 April 2023, I had the idea to use Midjourney to imagine how my child would look like. So I tested it out with photos of my then-girlfriend and myself, and the results were pretty good to my surprise! These were the first few photos that I had generated with MJ. Lesson learnt: No idea is ever too stupid. Make something to test out dumb ideas. The result may not be what's expected.

2/ Build I had a great idea, but is it something people are willing to pay for? There's only one way to find out. So I wasted no time and made a crappy landing page FAST with @carrd. It has a payment-enabled form at the end of page and looked like this on 3 April 2023. Lesson learnt: It's pointless to build a full-fledged app unless the idea is validated. A landing page that could take payments is enough for an MVP.

3/ Launch The website is live and could take orders but now what? I had to get eyeballs on my lander somehow. So I submitted to many AI tool directories that were popular at that time. FutureTools approved my submission and I had a page on their site within days. Visitors started coming to my site from these directories. I was excited. Lesson learnt: Submit newly launched startups to directories. They provide backlinks and visibility.

4/ Monetize On 11 April 2023, I had my first sale! I was over the moon. It proved that my idea is something people want. I quickly generated the photos for my customer in Midjourney manually, and sent to them via email. They love it! I was so happy. Lesson learnt: It's okay to be scrappy at the beginning. That means doing things that don't scale manually.

5/ Grow Because of the backlinks that I had from the directories, I started ranking on Google page 1 for the keywords "our baby ai", which had decent search volume. This resulted in sales increasing month over month between April 2023 to July 2023. It peaked at $2.9k in July 2023. Lesson learnt: I was lucky that I landed in an SEO honeypot with my product name, but it taught me a few lessons in SEO and to choose good product names in the future.

6/ Automate In early May 2023, I figured that it's not scalable if I had to fulfill the orders myself manually. So I built a simple node.js backend app to automate the image generation and email sending processes for me. When I made everything work automatically in the end, I realised that I had built a money making machine. Lesson learnt: Income generating machines do exist. It just takes a winning idea and time to build one.

7/ Exit I wanted to work on new projects and didn't have the time to grow OurBabyAI, so I decided to sell it in June 2024. I listed it on Acquire but to no avail. Many signed an NDA, but did not make an offer. Luckily, a lurker follower of mine slid into my DMs and said he's interested! The craziest part is he's actually based in Singapore too, and lives a few streets away from me. We met up for coffee a few times, discussed about the deal, drafted our own Asset Purchase Agreement, and finally closed at 5 figure. Lesson learnt: A startup is either growing or dying. There's no in between. Sell it if you're not actively working on it. It's a win-win for both parties.