Her AI Workaround Earned $2,355 Last Month

Kelly Fraser, a designer in South Africa and a subscriber of this very newsletter, emailed me her story and numbers 📝

She sells idmly, a $49 tool that turns designs made with AI into files you can edit in InDesign, Adobe’s page layout software.

How it started 👇

Rushing a client report, Kelly had AI lay it out as a web page, but the client needed editable InDesign files…

I couldn’t find a converter that did what I needed, so I asked Claude if it was possible to convert HTML to IDML.

Apparently it was.

She’s not a coder, so AI wrote all the code.

Then Kelly built a website and started selling the converter tool.

Reddit worked well for her, especially this post in an InDesign forum.

The first sale landed in June, and by the end of October she had 121 sales and $6.2K in revenue 🤑

That’s $5.6K after payment fees and tax, and her costs came to about $215 – mostly ads that didn’t pay off – so roughly $5.3K profit.

Revenue has been trending upwards and October was Kelly’s best month yet: $2,355 revenue.

Buyers include several architecture firms, which she never saw coming 👀

Kelly’s advice…

Take something annoying in your own work and ask whichever AI you use, “Is it possible to do this?”

It could be a converter, a connector between two tools, or something you keep copying across manually.

Then package it up like Kelly did and start selling 😎

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