I built GoStudio.ai solo from a small Indian town — now reaching $1K

Kanika Bhatt — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 15:33:32 +0000

Hey devs 👋

I'm Kanika, a solo founder from Chandigarh, India (tier-3 city) and I launched GoStudio.ai in Jan’25. It’s an AI-powered platform that lets users generate professional, studio-quality headshots from their own selfies.

No DSLR. No makeup. No expensive photographers. Just a model trained on your photos.

Why I built it

After two unpaid internships, zero job offers, and rejections from dozens of companies, I realized people often get judged by their LinkedIn or resume photos. I couldn’t afford a professional shoot. So, I built one using AI — for myself and then for others like me.

As of July’25, GoStudio.ai is doing ~\$1000/month in revenue. 100% bootstrapped. All growth is organic (mostly through LinkedIn so far).

The Tech Stack

This is how I built and shipped it solo:

Hosting / Infra

Vercel – for deploying the frontend and serverless functions.
BunnyCDN – to store and serve image assets fast globally.
Upstash Redis – for queuing, caching, and rate-limiting.

Backend

Supabase – for Postgres DB + Auth (email login + token-based flows).
Fal & Replicate – used both at different times for model training and inference. Some tweaks for getting the best quality - then betterpic or headshotpro
FastAPI – backend API to manage user uploads, queue training, and serve predictions.

Frontend

Next.js – full-stack React.
Tailwind CSS – clean UI.
ShadCN UI – for form components, modals, tabs, etc.

Analytics + SEO

PostHog – for product analytics and funnels.
Google Search Console / Ahrefs – for tracking SEO (still early days).

Growth & Challenges

What’s working:

Cold DMs + daily LinkedIn posts helped me find early users.
Word of mouth is picking up — especially among freelancers, coaches, and job-seekers.

Still figuring out:

Scaling to new growth channels (thinking: YouTube shorts, affiliate programs, and maybe Reddit).
Better model quality at low compute cost.
Handling feature requests with limited dev time 😅

What's next

Team/couple headshots
Localised pricing for small countries
Mobile support (so many people asked!)
Launch on ProductHunt etc

Lessons so far

You don’t need a big city or a big team to build something real.
Customers care more about quality + trust than about your backend stack.
Consistency on social > waiting for perfect launch

Thanks for reading. Feel free to check out GoStudio.ai and let me know what you think 🙏

DMs open on LinkedIn - Kanika Bhatt or drop a comment here if you have feedback or questions!

DEV Community: Kanika Bhatt