$12K/Month Creating Books For Kids (With AI)

Tom RyanFounder of Selfarama $12,000 monthly revenue Published May 27, 2024 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

Tom Ryan is the founder of Selfarama, an AI-powered service that creates “educational books starring your child”

Tom recently shared on Reddit that he’s earning $3K/week from it, so about $12K/month

He writes…

This is about one year in. Completely solo, bootstrapped. Been marketing for about two months…

Spending about $1k to get that [$3K/week]. Otherwise, just hustling any way I can always.

His Reddit post is a good example of marketing simply by telling his story, as attests to…

I’m going to order one for my daughter, she’ll absolutely love this

Tom explaining how the business works…

I put together print-ready documents then a print partner prints, binds and ships. I do all customer comms like tracking codes etc…

I get incoming webhooks for all production and shipping events. Then I keep the customer updated, so they can make sure it doesn’t get left in the rain etc. and I can follow up two days later and ask “hey, do you love it? If not, let’s fix that. If you do, tell your friends!!

He then adds

Last thing about printers… the big global networks are easy and kinda expensive. Using locals is cheaper. Not sure which is better for me… I want this to get on autopilot eventually.

Which brings me to PhotoAI, another AI-powered business. Founder Pieter Levels tweeted a few months back… 

First version was an index.html + @Stripe link + @Typeform to upload photos, then I manually dl’d the photos and uploaded them to the GPU

…current version as a web app after 1Y: 100% automated, 1850 customers @ $79K MRR

Point being, you don’t need to automate everything from Day 1

Do things that don’t scale until you’ve proven your idea has legs.

Returning to Tom’s business, a couple of ideas off the back of that

First, someone could probably do similar with books or greeting cards featuring people’s pets. Or perhaps an AI-powered version of Van Woof, a profitable business that creates Renaissance-style oil paintings of pets

Second, remember that fun promo video by Marc Lou, where he places himself as a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast?

I’m thinking that could be a service, helping people create funny fake interview videos to promote something.

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