A couple of weeks ago, I saw someone on X repost an open call from Jason
Zhu, the founder of Ship2Market. He was inviting founders to submit their
products, and his team would choose three to promote for free.
I immediately thought of one of my own products. I still believed in the
idea, but getting traffic had been a constant headache. The opportunity felt
like a good fit, so I applied.
More than 70 products were submitted, and I was lucky enough to be selected
for a conversation with the team.
We scheduled the call for today. Jason came across as warm and easy to talk
to. I had expected it to be just Jason and Vivian, but four people showed up.
As an introvert, I got a little nervous, and for a while my thoughts came out
more jumbled than I would have liked.
The product I submitted was InkStudio.ai, which I started building over Lunar
New Year.
I first discovered the category while browsing Toolify’s revenue rankings for
AI products. The fact that even these smaller products were making money told
me there was at least some real willingness to pay.
Then I tried the products myself.
My honest first reaction was: Isn’t this just another AI wrapper?
You type in a prompt, and it generates a tattoo image. It didn’t seem
especially difficult to build. Then I tried looking at the products from a
user’s perspective, and I still couldn’t find anything that truly wowed me.
At the time, I had just started experimenting with AI tools for a global
audience and wanted to get more hands-on practice, so I decided to build one.
At the beginning of the call, Jason asked me:
How is your product different from the competition?
My answer was this:
Most competing products follow the same basic pattern: enter a prompt,
generate a tattoo image, and stop there.
That can certainly give people tattoo inspiration. But it’s also something
most products in the space can do fairly easily, which makes it difficult to
stand out.
These days, with endless content online and generative AI everywhere, finding
inspiration isn’t particularly hard.
But tattoos are permanent, and regret can be expensive.
While researching the market on Reddit, I came across many people who said
they regretted their tattoos afterward. Some were getting their first tattoo.
Others were naturally shy or introverted. They either didn’t know how to speak
up or didn’t feel comfortable giving feedback to the tattoo artist during the
process.
By the time the tattoo was finished, they weren’t happy with the result.
If I had to reduce InkStudio.ai’s core value to one thing, it would be this:
Help people find inspiration and preview how a tattoo might actually look on
their body, so they can communicate more clearly with their tattoo artist,
walk into the shop with confidence, and walk out happy.
When I started building the product, I knew very little about reaching users
in international markets.
SEO was what almost everyone in my circle seemed to be doing, so once the
product was ready, I followed the same playbook. I worked on on-page SEO,
off-page SEO, and programmatic SEO.
But SEO was slow—especially for keywords with any real competition.
At first, I was getting double-digit impressions and single-digit clicks.
Eventually, impressions grew and clicks reached double digits, but the search
queries in Google Search Console showed that the traffic still wasn’t well
targeted.
Without enough of the right users, I couldn’t see where people were dropping
off, what needed to be improved, or what I should build next.
I was essentially building in a vacuum and trusting my own gut.
Waiting for Google to bless you with traffic is anxiety-inducing. Early-stage
products rarely deliver a great experience right away, and I worried that a
weak early experience could make my SEO efforts even harder.
So I decided to be more proactive and look for channels that could help me
reach users—and get feedback—more quickly.
I tried Reddit. My account was banned within a few days.
I tried TikTok. I asked people for advice, worked through all the setup, and
started posting. My videos either got zero views or around 100.
Once again, I had no idea what I was doing.
Instagram and Facebook came with their own learning curves. Every platform
had its own rules, and simply posting wasn’t enough.
As a complete beginner to marketing on global social platforms, testing one
channel after another—and making mistakes on every one of them—was honestly
painful.
During the call, Vivian shared some of what she had learned about how people
in different markets think about tattoos.
She also asked whether I had considered offering temporary tattoos.
I immediately thought the idea made sense. If someone is worried about
regretting a permanent tattoo, a temporary tattoo gives them a lower-risk way
to try the design first.
Since InkStudio.ai is ultimately about helping people reduce the chance of
regret, the idea felt aligned with the product’s philosophy.
Jason also shared how he approaches getting a new product off the ground,
including Google Ads and social media.
Toward the end of the call, I asked him:
The selected products get three days of free promotion. What would it look
like to keep working together after that?
Looking back, that question revealed the biggest challenge I currently face
as a product-manager-turned-indie developer:
The cold-start problem—and, more simply, traffic.
Indie developers often have to handle everything themselves: identifying the
problem, designing the product, building it, and figuring out growth.
It isn’t an easy path.
SEO can consume a huge amount of time. If traffic arrives before the product
is ready, you may not be able to make the most of it. But if you focus entirely
on building the product, you can end up with something polished and no
traffic—which also means no meaningful user feedback.
Building the product is hard. Building the feedback loop around it may be even
harder.
One more thing that meant a lot to me: Ziye, who helped review my product and
previously worked as an AI product manager at TikTok, shared a post about my
product on WeChat Moments, WeChat’s social feed, and encouraged me.
When you’re building alone and constantly wondering whether you’re on the
right track, that kind of encouragement means more than people realize.
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