With AI changing into extra superior, many conventional issues have gone digital. A single instance of that’s getting a skilled photoshoot. Why go to a photographer if you happen to might get photos made in a couple of minutes out of your laptop computer?

Danny Postma, among the best indie hackers in recent times, is behind the concept of “constructing the photograph studio of the long run” that revolutionizes the modern world of images by AI. (amongst plenty of different issues)

You may’ve already used a minimum of certainly one of his startups’ state-of-the-art services and products, which we’ll get into quickly. You may’ve additionally heard about him changing into an on the spot millionaire inside only one yr as a solo technopreneur. 

As of immediately, he has over 101,000 followers on Twitter. From 500 in January 2019, he is come a great distance in just some years.

Danny would not embody a typical success story about “pure laborious work”; his story is kind of completely different. Postma is a person of assets and a real epitome of sensible decision-making. Right here’s his story.

Earlier than Turning into a Solopreneur

Postma was an odd man from a reasonably small metropolis within the Netherlands. After faculty and earlier than his full-time indie hacking journey, he took on part-time and freelance roles at a number of firms.

Danny’s first skilled expertise was changing into a product supervisor at DOE Groningen in 2013. His function comprised hands-on collaboration with cross-functional groups and stakeholders, which appears considerably dissimilar from his present work setup, proper?

Possibly that’s the place he acquired most of his management abilities from.

Whereas working as a product supervisor at DOE Groningen, he additionally labored at Customized Web site, the place he targeted on conversion price optimization as a CRO specialist, net designer, and did work in front-end improvement.

In 2014, he continued his net design and CRO profession at Conversion Heroes and dove additional into on-line advertising and marketing at *bliep. The next yr, nonetheless specializing in CRO and product improvement, Danny began working at FIT.

FIT is the Netherlands’ main health and well being platform, one of many final firms together with Mediahuis he labored for with different folks in a group.

Danny quitting his former jobs for a extra individualistic profession doesn’t essentially imply he remoted himself although. He simply discovered a strategy to create a enterprise of his personal.

Leaving The Rat Race

By means of years of accumulating and stacking related abilities, Danny constructed a strong basis for his personal quest—one thing greater than his earlier works mixed.

He wrote an eBook titled Headline Formulation along with his good friend Gijs Wierda to assist entrepreneurs spend much less time crafting headlines and obtain greater conversion charges and a photographer too! These additional bolstered Danny’s odds of constructing an empire he can name his personal.

In 2018, whereas nonetheless working for his purchasers and different firms, he based a private holding firm known as Postcrafts, which featured his AI-powered startups.

He started gathering and curating the net’s greatest touchdown web page designs and posting them on Landingfolio, a Postcrcafts startup, for LP design templates and inspo. He was solely 21 at this level.

After deciding he was able to enterprise alone, Danny stepped out of the rat race and labored on changing into a digital nomad. So how did it begin?

It went like this:

When he was 25, he bid farewell to the town of Groningen after reserving a flight to Bali, Indonesia, drunk. As somebody who additionally likes backpacking and touring forwards and backwards, Danny spontaneously booked travels, finally main him to the place to spark the subsequent chapter in his life.

When he acquired to Bali, he found a co-working house that fostered the indie hacking tradition. Since then, he started embracing the journey towards bootstrapping his startup and the liberty of taking the enterprise factor into his personal palms.

Wasn’t {that a} play of future? Who would’ve thought that an alcohol-driven determination could be the game-changer for this now extremely acclaimed indie hacker?

Postma has managed and mastered the artwork of changing into a single-person group. Coding, design, optimization, advertising and marketing, and images—all important abilities that made him thrive and excel at what he does.

It was solely just lately when he began to delegate and broaden, which he claims was tremendous useful when the due time got here.

His website positioning Technique

Taking part in by that rule that he made his personal, Danny approaches his website positioning duties cleverly. By means of programmatic website positioning, he generated a whole bunch of net pages for various international locations and cities, as an illustration, referring domains, which massively helped his rating go up in searches.

Along with this strategy, in line with the Indie Hackers e-newsletter, Danny targets one key phrase in his weblog posts. An instance is mentioning the phrase “Headshot” throughout a number of weblog titles. Backlinks additionally got here into play fairly giant. A majority of his website development got here from website positioning & the group he constructed whereas creating in public (aka Twitter).

Making and Promoting Headlime

Headlime is an AI-powered copywriting software he developed in 2020. Though it wasn’t the very first startup he based, it was the primary one which boomed.

This copywriting software makes use of synthetic intelligence to jot down advertising and marketing copies for companies mechanically. Because of its customer-centric worth that makes it an enormous time saver for busy firms, it immediately took off.

Even so, Headlime didn’t completely begin from absolute zero. Keep in mind that eBook I discussed earlier? Properly, that grew to become Danny’s inspiration for this big-hit platform. If you happen to ever marvel, that headline generator eBook he listed on Gumroad in 2018 was solely 19 {dollars}, which quickly grew into million-dollar income after a number of years in simply eight months.

How did that occur? By means of pivoting.

Danny stepped up his recreation by turning his eBook with promising development potential right into a micro-SaaS enterprise. This micro-SaaS enterprise, Headlime, caught the speedy curiosity and garnered assist from his goal market with over 80 waitlist signups inside simply someday after asserting it and over $400 in gross sales the identical day after launching it on Product Hunt.

One of many issues he did was implement a pricing technique with a lifetime provide of 49 {dollars}, which was a reasonably whole lot. He made some increments in his pricing for his month-to-month subscription plans, which panned out fairly properly for the software.

The stream of ongoing income went on. Yet one more massive break occurred when TechCrunch featured Headlime in 2021, doubling its month-to-month recurring income (MRR).

Regardless of Headlime’s success, Danny had no plans to broaden it to an organization or any form of massive firm. So when two firms confirmed curiosity in buying Headlime, Danny thought of promoting it.

In March 2021, a yr after he began, Danny bought Headlime to Conversion.ai for over a million {dollars}. The acquisition course of solely took two weeks from the start to signing. Now that is an achievement.

AI and Pictures

Aside from AI, Danny has been keen on images. He’s truly carried out a lot of inventory images for Unsplash.

The fusion of his techy and inventive sides paved the best way for his subsequent large startup underneath Postcrafts with a central deal with AI picture processing, together with his most acclaimed AI photographer, HeadshotPro.

Earlier than HeadshotPro, Danny Postma based ProfilePicture.AI, a profile image maker that generates pictures primarily by paid packages providing premium artsy results in over 350 types that customers can select from. It at the moment has over 20k customers.

Quick forwarding to 2023, HeadshotPro grew to become his latest and largest undertaking, a digital photograph studio using AI know-how. It’s a stand-alone startup but in addition extra like an extension of ProfilePicture.AI.

What units it other than ProfilePicture.AI is that it creates company headshots for skilled makes use of, producing tremendous reasonable headshots with a robust and virtually indistinguishable resemblance to precise images.

HeadshotPro gained traction worldwide and at the moment has over 40k lively customers throughout the globe, boasting over 7 million AI headshots created. It earned recognition from massive firms reminiscent of CNN, Bloomberg, Fashionista, New York Put up, and Vice.

Relating to the value, HeadshotPro—truthful to say—isn’t so costly. It begins at $29, making it extra inexpensive than a $200 shoot with an expert photographer.

HeadshotPro has switched the panorama for professionals eager to look skilled whereas barely having to do something. Postma was simply the man behind the pattern.

Listed here are extra of Danny’s comparable startups since he’s an AI images guru:

• HairstyleAI – lets customers see how they’d look on sure hairstyles nearly earlier than getting their hair reduce for actual.
• PhotoShed – lets customers create an avatar of themselves that’s 100% equivalent to their precise appears.
• Deep Company – creates photographs of folks that don’t exist—no actual folks or any bodily location.
• TattoosAI – creates tattoo designs based mostly on customers’ concepts and preferences.

A Trailblazer for the Future Photograph Studio

AI has actually remodeled the world. With countless improvements, many conventional issues have grow to be out of date, or ought to I say, upgraded?

Danny Postma is in truth one of many groundbreakers who disrupted the trade from the very starting. Being on the forefront of superior know-how, he continuously creates a brand new demand for one thing that advantages these the world over.

Spectacular Monitor File, Proper?

What makes Danny Postma an unimaginable indie hacker?

I feel it’s that he has the braveness of an especially calculated risk-taker. He believes in himself and trusts the method; he doesn’t cease studying and discovering no matter how lengthy or what number of jobs it took him to get to the place he’s immediately.

I’m certain each single expertise he’s had over time has culminated into the beast of a developer and enterprise proprietor he at the moment is immediately. By no means get complacent.

Danny Postma is a jack of all trades and nonetheless a grasp of what he does. He is a self-motivated indie-hacker and I don’t suppose his contributions finish right here. 100% somebody to look as much as!