Lensa Makes $8 Million in a Few Weeks

Welcome to The ZenPreneur, the 3-minute newsletter that gives you the latest entrepreneurial insights all as you sip your morning Americano.

During the last few months, you’ve probably noticed how everyone- including your uncle Lenny- has been uploading AI profile pictures to their social media handles.

Big influencer accounts like Britney Spears, Chance the Rapper, and Joe Rogan have hopped on the AI profile picture bandwagon.

To put this in perspective on the timeline, search trends for AI really started to surge during the tail end of 2022. This coincided with the rise of various AI model breakthroughs, including Open AI’s DallE-2, the rise of Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT (how could we leave this one out).

To illustrate, here is an image of the google trends search term, AI, for the past couple of months:

Other than the excessive number of tabs open on my computer, a key takeaway is a large spike in interest did coincide with the release of ChatGPT to the public. AI has officially seeped into society’s mainstream consciousness.

But, what does this reveal about human nature, and what opportunities does such a trend provide?

Let's dive into Lensa AI, the app that has taken the world by storm. It allows you to generate beautiful AI profile pictures- the AI gives you the perfect face skin, makes your eyes aesthetic, and adjusts the background. This app is a stroke of genius in terms of understanding what people care about most, as a practical rule of psychology- themselves.

A few weeks prior, Pieter Levels, a prodigious programmer, had been experimenting with AvatarAI.me, a web app that generates AI-powered avatars for you, and had been growing to $10k in Monthly recurring revenue.

Essentially, Lensa AI had taken this exact concept and applied it to the mobile platform, utilizing the iOS Swift coding language. The results have been staggering. In just a few weeks, Lensa generated $8 Million in revenue, with a Spotify-like business model that has premium subscriptions of $29.99 per year or $7.99 per month.

Here are some key takeaways I’ve had from this:

1. Humans really enjoy making purchases to shield their flaws. Much like the IG filter feature that made people look better, the AI-generated avatar premise feeds right into human psychology- they want to look better and fitter.

2. The medium of distribution is huge- Pieter Levels was fairly successful on a web platform that helped users generate AI Avatars of themselves, but on mobile, usage went absolutely nuts. The same thing happened with Uber- the creation of uber at the time had to be mobile-first, and could not have happened before the invention of the iPhone. Like, I’m not going to carry my computer everywhere to call a cab.

3. It's critical to get the right users on board in the early stages of a venture. Lensa grew heavily from traffic generated by top Instagram influencers and accounts- including users like Joe Rogan - who helped spur the demand for the app. Influencer marketing, and generating demand through the right users are absolutely critical in solving the cold start problem in the early stages of a venture.

4. Use Elegance to lower insecurity- the user interface for the Lensa AI app is quite delightful and serves to improve people’s look for its functionality. This is the perfect combination for a product to take off in a noisy world- a beautiful user interface, mixed with a backend functionality that helps people overcome personal flaws, packaged in with great distribution and influencer marketing- the wonderful trifecta.

Take this one step further, and we have tools like Synthesia that can generate AI-powered videos. We’ll discuss how you yourself can build these tools, as well as use them to optimize them for your personal use this week.

Alright lads, hope this provided you with some insights on the latest AI trends. Peace