The Story Of VisionScapeAI
Building your first product as an entrepreneur is exciting. The amount of new knowledge you gain is just extraordinary. Just jumping in head first and figuring things out as you go is a difficult and scary thing to do, but the things you learn will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Our story starts in March when we started making a plan for building our first product: an AI avatar generator.
AiMina
In spring the whole AI scene was in a huge boom and new apps were popping up from left and right. We decided to take part in this boom and build an app that makes AI avatars. Back then there was some competition but nowhere near what it is today. We also believed we could do a better job in this field because most of the results back then were mediocre at best and possibly still are.
We wanted to act quickly and registered our company about 10 days later and the first MVP was up 30 days later. Our first MVP was a WordPress store where we sold the AI images, filling out each order manually (It took about 2 hours per order and the price was 9€). The store was called AiMina which means “Me as AI” when translated from Estonian.
We saw initial sales from Facebook ads and people we reached out to, therefore we decided the idea was worth moving forward with. The grind shall start.
Summer of 2023
As rookies in this specific field, we started to build everything from scratch, which turned out to be a quite difficult task for one developer. As I was marketing AiMina, Ingmar was automating the process we did manually.
Our plan was to launch the app in the beginning of fall but in August only model creation was automated (In order to create AI images of people, you first need to teach the model what you look like. AI does not make the avatars straight from the picture but learns what your face looks like and creates original works).
Soon we understood that if we kept up with this pace, the app would be finished in the next year’s summer and we were losing time by the day. Competitors were building upon their apps and new products were popping up often.
This is where we turned our sights to No Code tools. Since I had no real experience in programming, no code tools were perfect. Even if the more complicated things required knowledge about software development, I could still help with the frontend. This was one of the best decisions we made.
VisionScapeAI
From September we put our efforts into building VisionScapeAI with no code tools and other smart techniques that saved us massive amounts of time. Before building anything from scratch, we made sure there was no easy plugin or template for our needed task.
To our surprise, many of our problems had easy solutions and no need to overly use our brain power. When we had our design pretty much in place, I shifted my focus to building the strategy for our marketing.
Even with the help of no-code tools, there was still a significant amount of work to be done. We had our vision set and spent countless hours tweaking and developing our generator. The end result is an app that is a true competitor to tools made by big companies and indie hackers that have all the time in the world. Keep in mind, that we did all this while both working full-time and getting our degrees.
Takeaway
The work we do still consumes every free moment we have but when doing something you love, it does not feel like work and leaves you satisfied in the end. When you decide to become an entrepreneur, be ready to face the hardest challenge of your life. You will fail and you will feel like everything is hopeless but you have to keep going.
Even if this app doesn’t reach the potential our competitors have shown, the knowledge we gained is irreplaceable. When building a business, you are not only building the business but also yourself.
