Mine. Live, with paying users · 2025
Imagika
I built and launched an AI product photography tool that turns one reference image into category-aware campaign visuals in under a minute.
Small e-commerce teams often need more campaign imagery than their photography budget can produce.
I built Imagika to test whether one reference upload could become a useful set of commercial visuals. The difficult part was not generation alone. The product also needed category-specific treatment, clear choices, dependable credits, and a workflow people would pay to repeat.
The decisions that made it work
Detect the category first
The prompt layer is category aware. Footwear, apparel, jewellery and packaged goods each need a different realism treatment, so the system classifies before it generates rather than sending everything through one prompt.
Four variations, not one
People do not want the right answer, they want to choose. Four styles per generation turned out to matter more than any single quality improvement.
Four front doors, one backend
Web app, design canvas, brand photoshoot wizard and a browser extension, all against a single Hono API mounted inside Next.js.
An append only credit ledger from day one
Billing that mutates a balance column will eventually lie to you and you will not know when it started. Every debit and credit is a row. The balance is derived. It cost an extra day and has never once been wrong.
1,500+
users
30 to 60s
reference to result
7
auto-detected categories
4
surfaces, one backend