The Idea
Create personalized children books with AI-generated illustrations based upon user photos
ICP
parents of 3-6yrs children
Marketing Keywords
personalized children book, AI illustrated gift, custom story book, photo gift book
Execution
Me and my partner spent a lot of time on execution and managed to get a couple of physical books printed using the photos of our daughter. Optimizing for AI image generators was mostly trial and error, OpenAI was better at the beginning, but with many quirks and a not so repeatable output. Then nano banana came out and gave us much more precision and consistency, with a less warm style.
Budibooks First printed Book
Website here: https://www.budibooks.com
We’ve spent much time optimizing the image prompts, writing the stories, creating the website, even automating the book generation process, while having a simpler MVP could have helped much more.
Marketing
This is what we have attempted:
- messaging in moms whatsapp group => one sale
- proposal to children toys shop owner => weak interest
- 80-100 posts on FB groups => 50 impressions a day, 6-7 prospects uploading photos, 0 sales
Decision: archive
We then decided that the project had to be archived, my partner was supposed to do the marketing part on social media, but she has no time nor energy to pursue this. Weeks were passing by and it felt like we were screaming into the desert. The initial traction we got did not motivate us enough to continue. I wish we reached this conclusion before investing 6 months into the project, but there are lessons to be learned here.
Link to project here: https://www.budibooks.com