Selfarama

My AI-Generated Book Business Makes $12K/Month

November 15th, 2024

Who are you and what business did you start?

About two years ago I started Selfarama, a solo business making personalized picture-books. It's like the old "your name in a book" format, with two big differences: it's nonfiction, and your face is in the illustrations. The book is about art history, with portraits of the reader in various styles. I primarily sell to American grandparents for their grandkids, using facebook ads and a custom web app. Revenue last month was $12k (usd) and this month I'm hoping to hit $30k.

Founder-Market Fit

Skills

What skills did Tom Ryan have that led to their success?

No Code

How do you come up with the idea for Selfarama?

I searched for an idea for about two years. I thought about food products, value-priced tech consulting, an analytics SaaS for driverless trains, and a bunch of other things. I consumed a lot of content and had some coaching. Nothing really resonated.

Then one night in December 2022, I woke up at 2am with the idea: use gen AI to personalize kids' books.

I registered a domain, put up a stripe link, and went back to sleep. I got my first sale the next day, from a buddy. I didn't do any validation... I was just sure that this should exist.

How did you build the initial version of Selfarama?

First step was to register a domain with a stripe link, so that I had a clear metric (daily sales) to work on. I had a loooot of zero-sale days, but I liked that I couldn't bullshit myself that people would pay if they could. They could, and they didn't.

Starting costs were a couple hundred dollars to get some test books printed, a few thousand dollars burned on facebook ads before I figured out how to profit with them, and a ton of my time and energy.

I hoped it would be launched and selling in time for Christmas 22...

It was actually ready in March 24.

I worked really hard on it in bursts, then burned out, then went back to it. It was really hard. I had worked in tech for 20 years but I wasn't a coder, and I'd never done any marketing, publishing, writing, design, etc etc.

I mostly financed the business through day job devops work, then later I took on a small amount of investment (like $30k)

In the beginning I expected to do unique, one-off, fictional books, hoping to get good enough that I could partner with...

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Who are you and what business did you start?

Founder-Market Fit

How do you come up with the idea for Selfarama?

How did you build the initial version of Selfarama?

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