Hii HN community!

Each week, I share stories and insights from the scrappy teams and solo founders building the AI unicorns of tomorrow.

Today, I want to share my interview with Nathan Landman of Try It on AI, and would love your feedback on how we can improve our format to bring you the most value.

Nathan shared how they first started out with an AI hack to let people virtually try on clothes online. But when the clothing images weren't looking great, they realized the portrait shots were coming out crisp. So they quickly switched gears and built Try it on AI - an AI headshot platform that just took off virally and crazy enough, hit 7-figures in revenue within months, all without any investor money.

Key Metrics:
Solution: AI Headshots
Revenue: 7 figures within five months
Founders: 2
Employees: 5
Location: Remote
Established: 2022

P.S. We've just launched and are eager to hear your thoughts! Visit our site.

The Inspiration Behind 'Try it on AI'

I’ve been studying and applying AI since my college days, so when Stable Diffusion 2.0 came out in November of 2022, I had an almost anxious feeling to stop everything I was doing and work with the technology fully - I truly couldn’t stop thinking about its potential. So, I convinced Adriana (Adi), my co-founder and life partner, to enter an AI hackathon with me in December.

Shifting Business Focus

The largest pivot was certainly out of clothing try-ons and into headshots. It happened rather organically, and because our team was still only Adi and myself, we made the decision within a couple of minutes. The only negative is that we made our company’s name a momentarily slight misnomer! However, we’re firm believers that the try-on technology will get there this year, and we’re positioning ourselves as well as we can to capture that technological shift.

Growth hacks

Having a 'TikTok moment' has been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. That viral moment catapulted us into prestigious media publications, which made us rank very highly on search engines. While it’s hard to take much credit for this almost fully organic moment, we learned that.

Overcoming Obstacles

This is my second company with Adi and things have gone very smoothly. We are quick to act and we know where each others’ strengths lie, so we’re good at delegating decision-making when appropriate. Disagree and commit, as Bezos says. On my side, starting and scaling the tech infrastructure was quite a challenge.

The Market

I put down my personal email in almost every point of contact we have with customers, and trust me, when they’re dissatisfied they yearn for that email address they can vent to. This has helped us establish quite a few good relationships with customers - customers I still bounce ideas with to this day!

Growing Customer Base

Fully organic, all from Facebook groups. We posted in about 20 groups until we found the group that really loved it, which ended up being coaches and small business owners. It was an exciting and validating experience seeing real interest from the community.

Advice from Experience

Ah, this one’s tricky because I’m at risk of spitting platitudes, but here they go: Follow your curiosity and don’t get good or become an expert in something you don’t like doing, or you will likely keep doing that. The sooner you find good people to work with, the more fun (and easier!) building becomes. Lone wolf stories are the outliers. AI has made it extremely easy for people to learn how to overcome almost any obstacle. Put in the time and the results will follow.

Let me know what you think?

This full interview, and many more, can be found on Homebase.so.