no. 28 - Launch at The Foundry
Plus takeaways from product hunt launch and notes on online entrepreneurship.
Table of Contents
Launch Day for LuminaLog.com
The Foundry Demo of LuminaLog.com
Key Aspects of Being a Successful Entrepreneur
Successful Online Entrepreneurs That Share Their Journey
Conclusion
Intro
The rapid pace of AI development has many on edge, sensing that soon life as we know it will forever change. Nearly all leaders of the AI field say that there is a high risk that humanity will become extinct, surpassed by AI as the apex organism on Earth. It is something that comes back to my mind periodically. I found this really interesting take on how AI could take over the world in this short video. With that in mind, this week I have been making my own contribution to what I believe is the best way for AI and humanity to form a symbiotic relationship, by launching an AI journaling app LuminalLog.com. Believe you can change the world and you can do it. I cover some takeaways from the experience of putting this product out into the world. Then I frame how this journey is guided by the online entrepreneur life and work path. Hit play on this song as a sound track for this weeks newsletter on .
Launch Day for LuminaLog.com
This Friday I did the Product Hunt launch of my AI journaling app. This is a helpful step for officially launching an online product. It gives you a place to talk about your product and it is an opportunity to point people to the website where they can see a short description of it, video demo and screen shots. After working exclusively on this app for the past four or more weeks, I felt it was overdo and that I need to ship it as soon as possible. It can become a trap for developers to overly focus on building new features and polishing the app too much only to find out later that it had no impact on the end user and was just a waste of time.
For a while I was focused on building more features like a telegram bot integration, sending reminders and more. But then I realized I was falling into the trap, and that already the product was getting overly complicated and becoming difficult to explain to people. It is wiser to get it in front of people earlier and then iterate based on their feedback. The practice of presenting and selling an app itself is a skill that has significant impact.
I stayed up all night on Thursday night, testing and fixing last minute bugs. Writing the Product Hunt launch page text and other tasks that were necessary. In the end it got 20 upvotes. The top products of the day get 200-300 upvotes. Overall I see it as a decently good outcome, it was as I expected.
I had been using the app myself for weeks and found it beneficial. It becomes a companion, a trusted advisor, and a kind of therapist.
This is a consumer app, it doesn’t really help towards some business use case, where it helps the end user solve some business problem, so there is less of a motivation for people to buy it.
It needs a distribution channel. If I could get this app in front of 100,000 people, then at least 1,000 would make the paid subscription. Right now maybe 50-100 people came to visit the website. It is a long way from the first sale. I was successful in making the first sales with apps in the Vision Pro App Store. This was because they had more viewers and perhaps were more simple and trusted by being on the App store platform.
To get visitors and first customers to LuminaLog.com there are several strategies that could help. First it is to post the web app to AI app directories. This would improve SEO from backlinks and people would find out about it. Second is to publish blogs on the website around journaling, self development, AI and similar topics, to improve SEO. Third it would be to continually create social media content and engage with communities on websites like reddit. Fourth would be to find influencers in this space that could promote the app, as affiliate marketers. There are websites that can facilitate this.
This kind of app can grow and make it to 5K-10K MRR but it would take six to 12 months of continuous improvements in the app and promotion.
This is an iterative process and through launching this I have learned more about building an app and selling it. Next I will keep going with other app ideas to build. The important part is that I went from 0-1, from idea, to building it, to having it out there in the world ready for people to discover and use. Over time it will compound as more people discover it and find it useful. At the same time the world is changing fast and I am on the look out for the next app idea that can be even better. This time I am focusing more about building something that will attract an audience of 100,000 on launch day. This is the goal to discover some opportunity where there is already a big need for a specific app and I am able to build it within 1-2 weeks.
The primary app ideas that I have are:
worldforager.com - an app where you can create an Instagram AI account with a consistent face. Upload an image of a face, AI generates images, uses face swap technology to replace the face and then can post to Instagram and other social media accounts. This streamlined and easy to use tool would be valuable for those building monetization social media channels, and to those just interested in creating with AI.
YouTube long form to shorts generator - an app where you enter a youtube video, and it identifies a list of possible shorts that it can generate. Then you select which one you want to create. This could use twelve labs video understanding technology. This could be difficult to build for it to work well as it has a lot of moving parts and video generation can be complicated. On the other hand this would be very valuable as this is a multi million dollar industry that is currently done manually.
Steve Jobs AI clone - this I could build in a few days and it could be valuable to people that are looking for advice in startups, product and design. A second version would have a website design review, just enter a website URL and Steve will give you a critique of your website.
These are just the top three ideas I have, out of many more. It is valuable to spend more time on generating, validating and researching out ideas.
It was pretty discouraging to see that the app LuminaLog didn’t get any subscribers in the first few days. It is a critical part of being an entrepreneur to be able to quickly adapt to setbacks and to view failures as stepping stones to success. This resilience empowers them to persist where others might give up.
The Foundry Demo of LuminaLog.com
On the same day as the Product Hunt I got to demo my app to a room of about 150 people at a venue called the Foundry. It is organized by a web 3 tech and art community about every month. In my demo and presentation I explained that I chose to build this app, because it allows us to better merge with AI as voice to text journaling gives AI a bigger surface area to get to know us and give us feedback on our thinking, something that can inspire new ideas and perspectives. I went over how my life had been changed by using it over daily over the last few weeks. Afterwards many people came up to me and congratulated me on the demo and we had conversations around the tool.
Here is the recording:
Key Aspects of Being a Successful Entrepreneur
It has been about eight years since I chose to be a coder, about seven since my first coding job and about 2.5 years since deciding that I will be an entrepreneur.
It is a long journey to learn to be a successful entrepreneur. It is very different mindset from other career paths. Here are some key attributes of the entrepreneur mindset that I have learned.
Working 24/7: Your work becomes your life. To be successful you need to be thinking about it all day. In the beginning it will require this, once you develop this focus, systems and some traction over the first few years, then you can have some freedom as the systems you have put in place can keep going themselves.
Resilience: You have to be comfortable with putting yourself out there and facing criticism and failure. You will need to quickly adapt.
Risk: Be able to tolerate financial instability.
Maintain a relentless work ethic, particularly during financial hardships to ensure financial security and in the future financial freedom.
If you are able to overcome such challenges and grow a business then the upside is limitless.
Successful Online Entrepreneurs That Share Their Journey
There are several people that come to mind as models of successful online entrepreneurs
First comes to mind a friend I have met from Buildspace community Dante Kim. He has created several web and mobile applications that are profitable. He shares his view points on building businesses and mindset on his Substack, here is one about online entrepreneurship view dubbed ‘The Great Online Game’ that I particularly found insightful.
Jason Cohen is an inspiration by showing that you can build an online business yourself and bootstrap it. He has built several bootstrapped and VC backed businesses. He shares his insights frequently on podcasts and his on blog found here:
https://longform.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen/
These are two bootstrapped founders that I have drawn a lot of insights from.
Conclusion
The life on an entrepreneur is in a way embracing all of the best in humanity, that of being creative, inventive and putting your values and beliefs about making the world a better place into your work and life. This week was a milestone of launching an app that helps people get to know themselves better with AI.
✌️ Konrad