AI Summary
5 min readIn early 2021, Danny Postma was one of the first developers to launch a product on top of what would later become the GPT-3 API. He called it Headline, an AI copywriting tool. Within months, it was doubling revenue every two to three weeks. He had acquisition offers and talks with Sequoia. But instead of raising money and scaling into a CEO role, he sold the company. “I just knew like it wouldn't be my life to work 80 hours managing people,” he says. That decision set the pattern for everything that followed: build fast, follow curiosity, automate ruthlessly, and stay small.
The virtual influencer as a marketing channel
Postma’s most talked-about recent project is “This Model Does Not Exist” — an Instagram account featuring an AI-generated virtual influencer named Ailis. A new photo is generated every 15 minutes, and the community votes on which one gets posted. The product took a morning to build because Postma had already built the underlying infrastructure for his earlier product, ProfilePicture.ai. He grabbed a batch of photos from StyleGAN, an AI that generates millions of fake faces, selected the ones that looked like the same person, retrained the model, and ended up with a consistent character.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **The "This Model Does Not Exist" Virtual Influencer** - Danny explains the concept of an AI-generated Instagram model named A-list that posts photos every 15 minutes, with community voting on which photo gets posted.
- 2 (02:52) **Why Build a Virtual Influencer?** - Danny reveals his marketing philosophy: create mini-products as marketing rather than traditional ads.
- 3 (04:16) **The Future of Social Media and AI Content** - Danny predicts social media will be "dead in five years" because everything will be AI-generated.
- 4 (08:46) **Scaling the Virtual Influencer Concept** - The host suggests building a product studio around virtual influencers and partnering with talent agencies.
- 5 (14:18) **The Headline Story and the CEO Decision** - Danny recounts building an early GPT-3 copywriting tool that doubled revenue every 2-3 weeks.
- 6 (16:30) **ProfilePicture.ai: The Core Product** - Danny explains the product: upload 20 photos, train an AI model of your face, then generate any image of yourself (e.g., "Danny as a Game of Thrones warrior").
- 7 (18:46) **Competition Strategy: Why Lensa's Success Helped** - Danny shares his evolved mindset on competition: big competitors create market awareness that benefits smaller players.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Today Greg is joined by Danny Postma, a full-stack developer whose build AI apps like This Model Does Not Exist, Profile Picture AI and Headlime which was acquired by Conversion.ai in 2020. In this episode, Greg and Danny talk about app ideas powered by AI that could make millions in the next five years.
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LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
Production Team:
https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.com
Danny Postma:
https://www.postcrafts.com/
https://twitter.com/dannypostmaa
SHOW NOTES:
0:00 - Intro
0:11 - AI Generated Influencers
8:53 - Building AI tools as an indie hacker
16:30 - Case Study: Profilepicture.ai
18:46 - How to think about competition
27:00 - More AI app ideas
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