$0 to $4K/mo selling picture-books

thentrepreneur

Read time: 2.5 mins

Welcome Back

Today's newsletter explores the lessons learned by a father from Melbourne, Australia through his hyperpersonalized picture-book startup and highlights the benefits of building in public. Plus three resource recommendations for entrepreneurs.

Key stats

• Product: Hyperpersonalized picture-books

• Revenue/mo: $4,300

• Started: December 2022

• Location: Melbourne, Australia

• Founders: 1

• Employees: 0

Who are you?

“Tom is a 42 year old dad from Melbourne, trying to create a business to replace his devops career.”

What’s your idea?

“Use face2img ai and print-on-demand to make personalised picture-books.”

How did you get the idea?

"I woke up at 2 am one night in December '2022 with the idea for the production process. I registered a domain and added a Stripe checkout on it. It took a few months of trial and error to get the content right."

What was your initial growth like?

"I made $60 on the first day. About $1,000 in the first year, then I burned out because I hadn’t automated delivery and I'm not great at it. Then I bounced back. I automated everything in March, and became the marketing department in April, selling over $4k (USD) worth of books."

What was it like to build in public?

"Awesome. Building in public has made it much easier to connect with others and get better feedback and advice, even from customers. It also helps alleviate the loneliness of solo building."

"Knowing that even one or two people look forward to my daily updates is super motivating. It makes me want to have news for them every day, too."

What would you do differently?

"Focus on a single product until PMF [product-market fit]. I've spent too much energy keeping space open for more products in the future, which has been a distraction. More recently, I've set clear goals about how much success I need to achieve before considering other ideas."

"The one exception to this is... doing very small 'finished in a weekend' side-projects occasionally. This has helped me overcome burnout when the problem at hand seemed too huge. It's nice to finish something once in a while, just for myself."

Any advice to other entrepreneurs from your experience?

"Focus on scaling the customer journey from acquisition to satisfaction first. If that means nailing a single product, feature, or use case, do that."

Key takeaways

• Building in public makes it much easier to connect with others and get better feedback and advice. It also makes the process less lonely.

• Focus on scaling the customer journey from acquisition to satisfaction first. If that means nailing a single product, feature, or use case, do that.

• Focus on a single product until PMF [product-market fit].

Three Resource recommendations 

• ‘0 to 1’ by Peter Thiel. Great look into contrarian thinking & General advice for startups.

• A great video if your considering getting into YC.

• Fynk - Create, review, track, sign, and analyse contracts at scale with AI.

Useful links

Tom’s X Account - https://twitter.com/TomFromRealLife

Selfarama book’s website - https://t.co/KU1WHSNXSM

Thank you for reading, i look forward to seeing you again!

Thomas

p.s. are you an entrepreneur with a story full of valuable lessons? Contact me at [email protected] if you want to share it.