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

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 one commenter 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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