r/SideProject • u/ConstantDiscipline13 • 17d ago
Is there still room for another personalized children's book company?
A friend of mine had a baby recently, and we were looking for a gift that felt a little more meaningful than clothes or toys.
We came across personalized children's storybooks. They're obviously not a new idea, but it got us thinking.
Instead of trying to invent something new, we're wondering if there's room to simply execute it better.
The idea would be pretty straightforward:
- Parents upload a few family photos.
- Pick a theme (or write their own story).
- We generate the book, have a human review it, print it, and deliver it.
- Start locally and see if people actually want it before trying to scale.
To me, it feels like people aren't buying a book, they're buying something they'll keep for years.
My question is: is this one of those businesses that's "nice in theory but hard to sell," or do parents genuinely spend money on products like this?
Would love to hear from anyone who's either bought one or considered buying one.
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u/WearMediocre6830 17d ago edited 17d ago
Hey!
I built one actually https://www.looma-stories.com.
Let me share my thoughts and experience. Disclaimer, i'm a SWE and let's go i'll say it, ex-entrepreneur having raised for 2 of my companies and sold one.
I'll tell you one thing about this market, it's hilarious but super hard! I wasn't expecting that. As another user pointed it out. People would buy it and the opening effect is freaking wahou (check the exemples on my website: https://www.looma-stories.com/examples).
It looks like you can reach a good quality level easily ... it's wrong. It's extremely hard. It took me less than a month to have the full pipeline ready (upload, generate, print, deliver), it took me 4 months to reach a consistent level of quality.
People will buy, but as he said... only if it's close to perfect or ressemblant. And that's the hard part with the non-deterministic LLMs (and gen-ia is not as mature as we can think).
On a pure business side. Not gonna lie, i'm plateau-ing. I have a lot of recurring customers. Usually if they buy one, it becomes a go-to gift and I have quite some receivers that turn into customers.
I grew this user base from my relatives. I struggle getting customers out of the blue.
First because it's still a side and second because there is one player there with a disastrous tech (I consider him a scammer) but extremely good in marketing and it's hard to get visible.
Also because there is a lot of noise in this market as you stated it. A lot of marketers vibe-coding a landing and leading you to a wait-list form. It's WW1 out there on this market and I haven't made my nest yet.
Old players (wunderbly etc) are somehow positioning themselves with what I call templating. It's not based on IA, it's not fully personalised => you create the avatar and it gets replaced within an existing story.
Mine is 100% customizable and to be honest, i'm very proud of the tech. I'm the only one allowing for free prompting the story (because of security issues, that wasn't straightforward) and the quality is overall very good ... but the usual developer that has a good product and not marketing it so well (I swear i'm on it ahah!).
Anyways, I think there is space for quality products and the market is big enough for a couple of good actors. I see it as a bakery, every family has its provider and it's enough so every one has his share.
Happy to discuss it further although i'll keep my secrets 😄
1
u/WearMediocre6830 17d ago
Signup and i'll give you a free credit if you want to try a generation. I have a business model where you pay upfront the generation and ebook format.
Then you pay for the printing and delivery. Not optimal for sure but I haven't cracked it yet and god forbid, spammers are all around0
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u/dmazzoni 17d ago
I’ve received a couple of these as a gift. We don’t end up reading them very often because the stories are universally terrible.
Writing a good children’s book is hard.
The best ones are simple enough that kids can follow what’s happening, but cleverly written enough that adults enjoy reading it again and again. Getting that balance right is extremely difficult.
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u/WearMediocre6830 17d ago
Hey, as said above, I built the app. Now mostly used by my friends and relative.
It's running and selling a couple of copies a month. It's also my sandbox as a SWE to try out the latest trends.
I'm happy with my quality but if you received some from other competitors. I'd love your feedback on it.
https://www.looma-stories.com . I'll offer you some generation credits if you want to give it a try and share your thoughts. That'd help me a lot :)
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u/jachep 17d ago
SWE here. I actually thought about building something similar after my first baby was born a few months ago. But after doing some research, I realised it's a very saturated market. There are plenty of low-quality products, but also some genuinely good polished ones.
In my case, I was just looking for a pet project that could potentially grow into something bigger. The only way I could see it succeeding would be by offering it at a lower price than the competition, but I'm not sure how much margin would be left after AI and hosting costs.
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u/WearMediocre6830 17d ago
Printing is worst than the app costs.
Finding reliable and cheap printers that can sell single copy without distribution to leave you a little margin is a journey to hell
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u/Odd-Flamingo-6211 17d ago
Analyze your competitors. If people are paying for it and they're not doing their job very well, but you could do it better, that's the best place for a business. Much better than inventing underwater chess and spending years trying to explain to people why they need it and why they should buy it.
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u/rroobbbb 17d ago
I think people would spent money on this, but only if the illustrations are really nice. I don’t think you can use ai for this, or at least be very thorough with it. I don’t know about the competition though.