How I Built It: $10K/Month AI Image Generator | Starter Story

Pauline built AI Crea, an AI service that renovates home interiors in seconds, while working full-time at IBM. The app now has more than 8,000 users and generates around €8,000 per month. She recently quit her job to focus on the business full-time. The conversation with Pat Walls on Starter Story covers how she found the idea, validated it, acquired customers, and made strategic decisions about pricing and retention in a crowded AI market.

Finding and Validating the Idea

Pauline’s approach to idea generation is grounded in direct observation of problems. She looks for issues either she or friends encounter, then asks a sequence of questions: How frequent is this problem? Can I build something better? Can I monetize it? Can I find clients? Only if the answer is yes to everything does she start building.

For AI Crea, the trigger came from talking to friends who were real estate agents. She built a minimal viable product in about a month—simple features, bad quality—and showed it to agents she found online and in her personal network. Several offered to pay immediately. That was the validation. Her principle: “The sooner you ship the better, because sometimes you imagine your client wants this, but what they actually want is this.” She spent the next year improving quality based on real usage.

Customer Acquisition Channels