We Accidentally Built the Fastest On-Ramp to Visuals and Why It Matters
by ahmedelalaoui | 2025-08-07 11:12:39+00:00
TL;DR (for serial founders who scan before they dive) Problem: Image generation tools feel like demo-ware — slow, spammy UIs, hidden paywalls.

Insight: YC-style “do things that don’t scale” can actually hyper-scale when you aim at the emotional bottleneck (creative friction, not GPU hours).

Solution: Lartist.ai → a “zero-friction studio” that turns plain text or sketches into polished, brand-ready visuals in < 15 s, with built-in restyling, inpainting, erasing & 4× upscaling.

Traction: 32 k free users, 1.8 k paid seats, 7-figure annualized run-rate — all in 11 weeks, without paid ads.

Ask: Roast our product, steal our prompts, or plug the API into your weekend project. We’ll answer every HN comment.

(Still here? Good. The real story’s below.)

The Moment We Realized “Pretty” Wasn’t Enough Late at night, on a shaky Zoom, our designer typed:

“I need ONE hero image in the next two hours. Midjourney + Photoshop combo is killing me.”

That single line triggered a rabbit-hole brainstorm: If a pro with CS6 shortcuts tattooed on muscle memory is blocked, what chance does anyone have? We sketched a one-pager:

Text-to-Image that respects brand colors.

“Sketch-to-Image” for napkin wireframes.

Instant restyle & erase so no external editor needed.

4× upscaler so final art can ship straight to production.

We prototype-shipped it in 72 hours, posted “Show HN: Lartist — Figma-speed image generation” … and our fake SMTP quota melted under 14 k sign-ups. Lesson: remove emotional latency (head-scratching, context-switching) and users reward you with viral latency — they share immediately.

The Simple Growth Loop That Took Us from 0 → 10 k Users in 20 Days “Make Something People Tweet” Moment Every generated image carries a subtle ℹ hover badge: “Made with Lartist.ai — recreate in one click.”

One-Click Remix Visitors land on the exact prompt + settings; hit Generate → instant dopamine.

Gamified Credits Post your art on X / LinkedIn earn 10 free credits. (Yes, this still works when the output looks good enough.)

Founder-on-Call We reply to every support chat within 5 min. 40 % of those chats convert to paid purely because we’re there.

Why We’re Opening the API Today (and Giving 1 M Images for Free) If you can dream up:

A Figma plug-in that autogenerates product mockups

A Zapier flow that spits out daily personalized newsletter banners

A Notion widget that turns bullet points into shareable quote cards

… you now have zero excuses not to ship. Grab your free API key → docs here → build something, post a “Show HN” and tag us. We’ll upvote (and probably feature you on our homepage carousel).

Steal This “Pain-Dream-Fix” Structure for Your Own Viral Post Pain — open with a visceral, relatable blocker (waiting, paying, feeling dumb).

Dream — paint a hyper-specific, easiest-path reality (15 s from prompt to hero image).

Fix — reveal the deceptively simple mechanism (four integrated tools, no exports).

Proof — numbers, endorsements, GIF demo.

Invitation — low-friction CTA that flatters the reader’s hacker ego (“Build on top, break it, critique it”).

Works on YC Demo Day decks, product landing pages, and yes — Hacker News.

A Final Nudge (Because We’re All Suckers for Scarcity) For the HN crowd only: promo code HNARTIST25 unlocks 25 free credits (expires 24 h after this post hits front page). No upsells, no card-on-file. We want your brutally honest feedback.

lartist.ai — go break it, then tell us how to make it better.

PS: If we hit top 5 on HN, we’ll open-source our prompt-optimizing agent (Rust + Ollama) under MIT. Hold us to it.