Unrealme: from 0 to acquisition in 3 months

Context

After I launched Cryptopy , I started marketing for customer acquisition. I talked about it in discord server, reddit post, Facebook... But it was inefficient: people didn't know me, I was banned regularly.

Then I tried talking with traders who have a crypto audience to offer a partnership. 95% never answered. The remaining 5% were not interested or asked for too much money.
Lesson: no matter how fabulous is your product, you won't sell if you don't have a marketing strategy.

I tried for a month, then I stopped. I had other strategies on mind (write an educational trading blog for instance) but it takes too much time and I had in mind to build another SaaS related to data. So I started to build my other project with my cofounder.

The idea

One day, whereas I was on holidays, I discovered @levelsio and @dannypostmaa avatar's creation. I was impressed by sales they shared: they earned 10K$ in a single day for avatarai.me .
I thought: why don't I create another avatar generator with other themes if the idea is validated (i.e: people are willing to pay for a service)?

I knew I wouldn't have the same success: levelsio had a 20x bigger audience, he was the very first and was known in AI field.
But, we had all skills to create a similar service with my cofounders and we could build it fast. I thought we could make a few sales at least to cover expenses related to my projects.

I jumped on the opportunity, we built Unrealme in a few days. We planned to officially launch on Wednesday 23 of November.
Wednesdays is a great day for us because we are employee in a company and my cofounder is free on Wednesdays: she can be reactive in case of bugs.

The launch

I asked indie hackers community for help to be visible on the launch. Stats were quite good, 69k impressions, 5 sales the first day: our annual company expenses were almost covered.
Sales were far from avatarai and profilpicture but I expected this.

What is funny is that the first sale was made the day before the launch, because I entered a discount code for blackfriday in @tdinh_me  repository and another website. I shared the same coupon code on both so it's a mystery which website led my first customer to Unrealme.

This project wasn't planned at first, we seized an opportunity as we saw the idea was validated. I tried to propose the concept to communication agencies to offer special customization by inserting their logo and I created a special landing page for that. 0 answered.

I also contacted press, journalists. 1 answered: @Korben  (Thank you!). The project didn't fit with his website as it's not free, but it's great to have an answer.

After that, we added a few themes, and the possibility to let users choose between a surprised package. We also translated the website in French to reach a bigger audience.

After the launch

We made a few sales but we weren't motivated enough to build something bigger, nicer and we didn't have idea to bring more values to users.

We decided to sell.

We first listed the website on acquire and got a few buyers interested but it's on microns that I found a buyer.

After a few discussions, we agreed on selling Unrealme at a lower asking price but we keep rights to reuse the code.
Doing this, we no longer are the owner of Unrealme domain name, but we are able to sell the code  to other persons interested in having an AI image generation business. (Are you one of those persons? :) )

Fun fact? The most complicated part in the sales wasn't to find a buyer or a deal. It was to find a bank to transfer the money. Our bank accepted only SEPA transactions. We had to open an account on Revolut Business.

It's not without emotion that we sold it, but now it's time to move on. I created aboutdata.io as a small project to collect all data resources, but I'm working on a project for coders. Stay stuned!

I hope that story inspires you! To learn more about my story you can follow me on Twitter: @Pauline_Cx or subscribe (free) to this blog's newsletter.