[uri_merhav]

I own Product Pix (https://www.proproductpix.org). It removes the background from product photos, with the intended audience being mostly people who sell stuff online and need to set their background against a white background.

It makes $1300/month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source of income, so I'm not gonna call it "successful" just yet.

How I got started: I do machine learning, and I methodically searched for places where people buy a service transactionally on platforms like Fiverr and that I think can be automated away (or greatly automated with human reviewers in the loop) with state of the art machine learning models. There are hundreds or thousands of such opportunities that individuals can solve on their own.

I'll be more comfortable giving sage advice once I've crossed the $10K/month threshold, but still I'd say a willingness to try a lot of shit out and get digging on stuff you have 0 familiarity with is mandatory. In this project I've had to learn javascript, frontend, photography, google ads campaign management etc.

Another tip I wish someone had told me is, build a pricing page from day one. The temptation to get _some_ signal you're useful to people will drive you to offer stuff for free, but that will end up getting you a lot of unwanted attention from people who will never ever pay.

[The_Amp_Walrus]

This is very cool. I want to do something similar, with a particular focus on enhancing audio quality. How many ideas did you try and discard before deciding to do your "background remover" service? What were they, if you don't mind sharing?

[uri_merhav]

Previous ideas: 1. Automated proffers io always profile pic selector and optimizer. Like scam your Facebook with permissions and pick out the best photo for LinkedIn, potentially enchanting and cropping Ali g the way. Terrible idea because consumers generally never pay and getting people’s attention to this is going to be far more expensive than the value I can give you.

2. Automated tests for “broken” front end based on how the side renders on various devices. Pretty sure a machine learning model can recognize broken design. I still think it’s a good idea but potentially a pretty complicated sell!

3. The rest I’ll redact because I’m still toying with doing them.

[aptwebapps]

> 2. Automated tests for “broken” front end based on how the side renders on various devices. Pretty sure a machine learning model can recognize broken design. I still think it’s a good idea but potentially a pretty complicated sell!

Now that's a pretty neat idea. I don't know about recognizing subjectively broken design, but recognizing discrepancies between screenshots seems quite doable. Could be a good thing to integrate into a test suite.

[alexcnwy]

Very cool and super inspiring, well done!

Can you give any detail on how you're getting customers... you mention learning google campaign management, is all your traffic via google or have you found any other distribution channels that work (e.g. posting on Fiverr forums yourself kind of thing?)

[uri_merhav]

Post on refit and all the Facebook groups. Unfortunately people’s patience with you runs out pretty much immediately doing this.

I’m also pushing people to give out referrals with limited success.

My SEO game is non existent. I tried a blog post or two with nothing to show for it. I should reach out to sales gurus and such that reach Etsy/amazon sellers how to sell. I’ve only made halfhearted efforts there.

I think that now that I have a pretty decent api going and some users for that, I should probably make a medium blog post about my journey. Might land some more api customers.

[alexcnwy]

Super interesting, thanks for the reply! :)