Pet Booth: AI Pet Photos - Sharing our journey with the Indie Hackers community!
Hey Indie Hackers! 👋
We are excited to share Pet Booth (https://petbooth.app) – an AI pet photo app that lets you create incredible pet photos and portraits of your cat or dog in a wide variety of themes. The service has been up and running for a while now, but we wanted to finally share our journey with the amazing Indie Hackers community. This community is what inspired us to build it and without it, Pet Booth wouldn't exist. This post is our way to say thanks and give back to the community!
Pet Booth is our first product and we were very excited to see the first wave of customers trying it out.
To celebrate, in the spirit of the holiday season we are giving out free Santa AI Pet Photos (see the link at the bottom of the post).
But first, let us take you through our journey so far.
Challenges:
Venturing into business: As software engineers by trade, delving into business, marketing, SEO, etc. was a learning curve and we are still learning everyday.
Learning AI: While our background was in software engineering, AI wasn't something we had studied much in school. It took some time to learn how to work with the current AI models.
Turns out making products is hard: Despite the app being seemingly simple, productization and everything involved with turning the service into a full blown product took longer than anticipated.
Balancing side project with full-time work: Finding time outside of our regular jobs to work on Pet Booth was a challenge.
SEO missteps: We stumbled a bit with SEO, resulting in only one of our pages being indexed by Google for a while.
Things we tried:
Organic traffic: Despite our SEO fumbles, we still have been able to get organic traffic from Google.
AI tool directory listings: Initially, we posted in various free AI tools directories, which helped in gaining initial visibility and possibly SEO, but didn't provide many customers.
Reddit & Facebook: While Reddit and Facebook proved challenging due to strict self-promotion rules, we're still exploring ways to crack these platforms.
Paid ads experiment: We tried running ads on Facebook, Reddit, Google, and Pinterest. While not meeting our initial expectations, we're continually experimenting.
Email list building: We are slowly building an email list through our website.
Next steps:
SEO: Hoping for increased SEO traction, we're concentrating on creating content for the site, getting backlinks, etc.
Continue spreading the word: We'll keep exploring avenues to get the word out and connect with our target audience.
To celebrate this journey and the holiday season, we're offering everyone a free Santa AI Pet Photo! 🎅
Receive yours today at https://petbooth.app/santa.
We'd love to hear from the community if anyone has any feedback, tips, or advice!
Happy New Year, and here's to more exciting AI pet photos in 2024! 🐾
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Hey, what a great idea and product! As a dog lover I like the idea really much. Have you considered generating vector graphics? I directly intented to use the photo on a big canvas in my living room
@Tornado97 we have thought about adding more styles including vector graphics and may add this in a future release so stay tuned. We have also thought about selling canvas prints and are trying to gauge interest. Is this something you would be interested in?
Woah woah woah! I'm dying to get my hands on this one. I'm sure my pets will too! 🐱
Hi! This looks really cool, and the generated photos look amazing. I'm curious how long did it take to train the model? I did my undergraduate project about super-resolution models and I didn't got the results that I was expecting, I probably didn't have enough images to work on but the model was taking like 8 hours on the best case so I had problems with Google Colab environment haha
@CarlosGG Sounds like a cool project! We fine-tune a popular base model for each pet and it takes about 30 minutes or so.
Oh nice, that's a good approach, thanks for sharing 😁
Thanks for sharing.
I am also planning to shart Facebook Ads to get some leads for my design subscription agency.
https://www.pentaclay.com
Any tips for me?
@pentaclay nice website! We tried tried running Facebook Ads but didn't have much success with it. That being said we might not have spent enough time with it. Recommend setting up the Facebook pixel for event tracking. Believe there is a period where their systems learn as it's all ML based, so make sure to give it some time. They have a lot of different campaign types as well and I believe there is a specific one for leads that you could try. I remember watching some youtube tutorials (forget which ones but there are a bunch) just to get an idea of how it worked. Hope that helps!
Ahm you know there’s AIPetPhotos.com right? 😭