Logojoy: AI-powered logo creator

That does seem dodgy, so we took the 15k/month bit out of the title. I guess we'll leave "AI-powered" so as not to leave it completely naked. Or should it just say "Logo Creator"?

I noticed that https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=indiehackers.com constantly uses this trick of revenue numbers in titles. That's annoying clickbait in an HN context, but on the other hand, we need more good stories about startups, entrepreneurs, and projects, and dodgy stories are the price one pays for good ones. So I think the answer here is continued community vigilance.

Usually we'd see a point like this before 11 hours had gone by, but clearly not always, so everybody: if you notice something misleading on HN, especially if it doesn't get fixed right away, please alert us at hn@ycombinator.com. We can't read all the comments but we do read and reply to emails.

That initial wave got them this blog post and now #1 on HN. In 2 more days they'll be up to $30k/mo, with a 4 day doubling rate!!!

In all honesty, the press -> growth -> press loop caught me up on on my first launch. When it stops, the real work starts.

Feel like IndieHacker isn't requiring any proof of revenue.

Does anyone know what, if any, fact checking process Indie Hackers has to verify the claims by made by a startup?

That should have been made clearer. I totally thought he had launched a year ago.

Still, it's a very impressive achievement.

I just flagged this post for what clearly is a very dishonest title. The title should be changed at least, and maybe the entire post taken down, for the dishonesty.

If that is accurate and the number is based on 7 days of revenue at about $500 per day average this smells a lot like growth hacking nonsense.

He added a comment on indiehacker with the dates:

    Started working Sept 1st, launched beta Nov 15, PH on Nov 22.

The article says he made $450 of sales the day it launched on Product Hunt. $450 * 31 is close to $15,000.

Yeah and if you count that's about 60 clients in 7 days

This tool is pretty good! (This from an inexpert small business person, with no design sense -- but still, that describes a lot of potential users.)

I've been on the other side of the annoying design client experience, playing the role of annoying client. My old law partners and I asked a design firm to do an identity for us, some 7 years ago now. They spent a LOT of time with us, presented numerous concepts, and eventually the only logo we could agree on was a blue circle with our firm name inside of it. Actually it was a pretty good logo, if I do say so myself! But I could tell it was painful for the designers to hold our hands through this process.

The chair of the firm where I started my career liked to talk about the "$300,000 period". The firm had a slogan, something like "We're there for our clients." (minor details changed to protect the guilty) As part of a firm-wide rebranding, they hired an agency to help them update their identity including this slogan. The result was to put a period in the middle, so it became something like "We're there. For our clients." $300k, boom!

I played around with the AI logo creator. It is good as a starting point, if you want an logo that looks more or less like other logos in the training set. I suspect that describes 99% of small business users, so it's perfect! Just provide a MOO integration and you'll turn $15k/mo into $100k.

I would be interested to see the tool opened up, so you could do logos with arbitrary training data -- but with some hard constraints imposed by the user so it's not just a sea of pornographic aliens cavorting on Dali-inspired worlds. (edit: unless that's what you're going for, of course)

At the end of the day, what justifies a big agency fee is partly just the ability to make high-ego corporate clients feel good about their decisions, and to help them sell those decisions within their political environment.

Really well said.

I understanding the right blend of what people think they want and what they need is a powerful thing. I imagine it varies based on the problem domain/market.

> Old and boring is still sometimes the best.

It's not so much old vs new, or cool vs boring, but rather the thing you are most experienced with. If the goal is to just build the damn thing, go with a stack you would be most productive in.

One of the hardest things for programmers to learn (including myself) is that success is almost entirely determined by how well your solution solves the problem you're aiming at, and how well you market it. The tools you use to create your solution matter to almost nobody.

It's true that if the company really grows, scalability, code manageability for teams etc. might become an issue if your backend is very poorly engineered, but that's the exception to the rule. As long as it works, it's good enough to launch with.

Programming languages and systems are basically theorems.

The nice thing about theorems is that even when they're old, they're still theorems.

Imagine your in the cleaning business and you focus all your efforts into making the most light weight durable broom in the world and one day you wake up and realise the guy with the wooden broom has all the actual business.

In this case some developers actual go further down the tool rabbit hole and start building tools that build tools..and they wonder why they fail.

... yet when I tried to use it, it gave me "Firefox is not supported. Use Chrome". Feels like 2001 indeed.

> Nowadays everyone - myself included - is trying to have an excuse to try the sexiest JS framework of the day and most of us fail miserably to deliver anything useful - because of lack of experience or just reinventing the wheel altogether.

That reminded me the article titled "How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016" https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628921

I don't think PHP has anything to do with that. Probably more experienced coders (i.e. older, hence PHP), just cranking out great code. Language/stack has nothing to do with it.

For example, my day job I work with Android all day long. But as a side project, I wanted to make a small mobile game as a invitation for my wedding. So I loaded up Phaser.io and wrote some really easy Javascript. I had a working, playable game that night. To be fair, it's a really great framework. But I think choosing a framework that fits your needs at hand is much more crucial than which language or database you use.

For me the biggest issue is motivation, rather than old and boring vs. new and shiny. More than what I know, it's about what makes me happy. I'm sure people build awesome things in one Javascript du jour framework or another every day, but I'm just not one of them. I know Javascript and Node.js fairly well, but I don't find any joy in programming in them. Whenever I make the effort, my motivation always dies off and I either abandon the project, or rewrite it in something else. Anything else.

On the other hand, technologies like Elixir, Erlang, Elm, and Riak, for instance, are immensely enjoyable to me, so they keep my motivation alive. In my opinion, whatever makes you happy and motivated is the best.

We ship $2+ million/year through WooCommerce/Wordpress and a PHP/MySQL backend on Digital Ocean servers. It's enjoyable to come on Hacker News and read the thrashing about new technologies and the like.

There's something to be said for working with the tools you're familiar with but I am also quite happy to have put my PHP development in the rear-view long ago.

I would posit that it is not old vs new but the vision you have of what you are building. If he had used ClojureScript this would still be just as good. If someone uses PHP and jQuery on an uninspired vision it will not be very good.

At work, we've been using a new JS framework paired with server-less infrastructure for the past 9 months. It's barely production stable, so it's been painful, but hey look at our fancy new framework.

When I started a new side project, I wanted to get an MVP out as quickly as possible. I opted for PHP/MySQL, and development time felt like lightning. It was so refreshing.

I plan on rebuilding the code base, now that the side project is making money, and perhaps I can use newer tech for that, but quite happy sticking with PHP for MVPs.

Who cares if it's old and boring? Making money is what you need to do as an entrepreneur (by improving your product and delivering more value), not playing around with various "sexy" technologies. I would write something in COBOL if it made sense to do (i.e. faster, more efficient, w/e)

Personally I don't really enjoy the development work on the "for profit" projects I build. I love seeing a finished product, though. Use the sexy untested tech for a "fun project", not a commercial one.

There is a lot to be said for the adage: do something new or try a new tool, but never at the same time.

Good ideas executed well are the best regardless of what tech stack you are using.

That was the first thing I thought when I hit the URL.

Here's the thing, I'm guilty as charged. But, analyzing my own behavior, trying the sexiest (JS or otherwise) framework is just an excuse to play/learn it. My subconscious mind never had the intention of actually following through with a product...

I hope we can recognize (and avoid) the pattern in the future and use whatever we are more comfortable with to rush the product out of the door.

I noticed the same thing. Was previously working on a startup using PHP/MySQL/Backbone. We just kept churning out releases out of management's ever changing specs.

After a while with the chatbot hype, in comes this external contractor, and started dismissing people left and right that either did not code in javascript or wanted to use his simplistic challenge/response chatbot (we coded a decision tree based system). In any case, at that stage the startup was failing, I ended up leaving, kept working with same cooling in my own startup and have been happy ever since.

So for me, the moral of the story is, work for somebody that is focused on the product instead of trying to win a hipster contest. First time I saw that was when .NET was in beta mode and our tech lead decided to switch everything over to an undocumented/buggy system back then.

While the backend might be what you call "old" PHP/MySQL, the design and front-end (UI/UX) is extremely good and modern.

Envision I believe still runs a ColdFusion backend.

Thanks! Yeah, it's a little unnverving not knowing if you'll make any money tomorrow, but it's a simple model that fits the solution.

I went the same route as Logojoy with Shodan and it's worked out great. Even charging $5/ month was a non-starter for most individuals whereas a $49 one-time fee is more palatable. And despite it being a one-time fee the monthly revenue is very predictable so there isn't much uncertainty in terms of budget planning. I would highly recommend startups to consider one-time payments, especially if they're targeting individuals and not businesses.

One time fee works well here because there is a one time cost per sale. If you are talking software as a service where there is ongoing use, and therefore ongoing costs, you better be sure that the one time price is greater than the lifetime cost of the customer.

It's hard to see a subscription model for logo designs though. It's not like you need a new logo each month.

I definitely agree with this. So many products force a SaaS model when it doesn't fit the business. I find it especially when spas and massage services push a yearly subscription for discounts (not even units) on services. It doesn't make any sense.

In fairness, it is apparently his first month.

So there might be a substantial drop-off in revenue next month as there is no recurring revenue from existing customers.

Also, making a logo is a one-time service. What value can you provide in the month after the logo is done?

>Once you truly know that every problem can be solved by breaking it down into smaller pieces, nothing can stop you.

Also great advice. I've used this mentality to go places I never thought possible.

Have you looked into whether this is legit on legal usage? You appear to be using noun project icons in these logos, and afaik most logos on the noun project are creative commons with attribution (and I confirmed by selecting a few logos with icons which matched this license on the noun project site).

It doesn't appear that you provide any attribution at all to the icon creators wherever you display the icon, and I have no idea what license you deliver to the end user (I haven't went through purchasing a logo - knowing that you're just sticking some text with a noun-project icon doesn't strike me as worth it, honestly). Are you in the clear to be displaying these icons with no attribution, and are the users that buy your icons clear to be putting it on websites and business cards without attribution?

I haven't even looked into whether your font usage is appropriate, can you clarify that as well?

You talk about the ML being reinforced over time by user actions so you must have suffered from the 'cold start' problem in the beginning. How did you address this? Did you initialize it with your own expert curated rules/weightings? Something else?

Have you done any automated mining of the elements in existing "good" company logos (e.g. Nike, AirBnB, etc.). I could see doing something manual too like Music Genome Project or Netflix's internal curated movie characteristics tagging. You'd go through assessing these gold standard logos for qualities like contrast, amount of whitespace, if brand name intersects the artwork, etc and then augment your model with these style rules.

Any insights you'd be willing to share would be appreciated!

So, I went through the whole logo creation process and got stuck at the sign up screen. I don't mind signing up, but when I used last pass to generate a password, I got told it was too long. I only tried to generate one that was ~9 characters long. If you are checking length, might want to put the requirements on that screen

Hey! Just a heads-up, there's a small typo on your landing page-- It says "They chose Logojoy because it's of how easy it is to make a great logo." That "it's" is superfluous. Anyways, great product! Congrats on your success.

I tried it, but got a Firefox is not supported message. Why not? What's the missing feature?

Otherwise looks pretty cool! Nice business, it's inspiring.

Their is a login form on the website on a page without HTTPS. You should change that.

Hey, awesome work! Your story is inspiring :)

Having trouble accessing the site though: "logojoy.com" does not work, but "www.logojoy.com" does. Unfortunately Indiehackers links to the one without the "www". Just wanted to let you know.

I was quite concerned the checkout page didn't use any encryption at all, which caused me to cancel my purchase.

What can you tell us about the algorithms you used or where did you start on learning A.I. ?

Interesting approach for logo creation!

Dawson, just came here to just say that I am super impressed with Logojoy, and especially how the onboarding process is both so fantastically smooth AND it actually IS the product! Very cool.

On the flipside, this surely has the potential to put thousands of cheapo logo designers out of (that line of) work.

Fantastic work! Landing experience (result first, registration later), logos seen working in context (blanks, packages, etc), overall smoothness... even the support guy notifying about possible outages during to HN hug of death, everything is so perfect!

You are a natural talent, and I envy you. :)

I tried "lûd" as the company name, and that works but many of the logos show "ld". It looks like some of your fonts don't have accented characters.

Please stop having Javascript take over the scroll event in the logo generator. I am having to throw my mouse across the room to even barely scroll down the page.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that you are losing money on adwords, unless about 50% of all sales are enterprise level, in which case adwords breaks even.

1800 visits 25% signups * 0.5% sales = 2.25 sales* for $250 spend on adwords.

Really well done! I was just playing with it and noticed that when I combine an inline icon with a name, the icon hangs way lower than the middle line of the next. Is that a bug? A design choice I don't understand? As another point of feedback, some spinners when searching icons and loading logos would be really nice. Maybe because of the HN effect or maybe for some other reason, but it took a few seconds for lots of actions and I wasn't sure if stuff was supposed to be happening or not. But the product is fantastic and I hope to use it soon.

hey Dawson - would love if you could go into more technical depth on how things work. Cool product!

So I tried it. It seems like almost anything is going to require designer interaction. The logo I ended up with has such low contrast with the background I would be embarrassed to even present it as a mockup, much less treat it like final product. I couldn't get logos in containers, which seems obvious, and very simple to do from what you're already doing. The color picker is suuuuper dumbed down, it'd be nice to see some true color palette options in the vein of Coolors (many other examples exist but that one is representative of what is doable pretty easily and light years better than picking shades of yellow). I could imagine giving this to someone and having them play with it for 30 minutes to get an idea of what they like, but right now unless they want a company name in a single color format (and even then many color options have no legible results) you aren't going to finish anything there.

Do you plan to allow editing the stroke color independent of the background? This is the most immediately problematic issue for me, because it means I cannot get a high contrast logo in any light color. Maybe I missed a way to do this?

Looks great! Made a logo in like 5 min that looks amazing. Letting me share it before buying lets me discuss with other people on the team before making a decision.

You mention trying to compete with designers "on the same level", but this seems like a different space than design. I do logos for my clients and most of the work is helping them make choices about what they should do with their logo, not actually drawing it. Have you considered partnering with designers instead of seeing them as competitors?

Hi Dawson - What is your background? What's your team consist of?

Trying the site with chrome on android, some frustrating issues:

* as soon as logos appear the signup form covers all of them, so I can't see the logos. Is it by design? I tried signing up and the wheel keeps spinning, I'll retry later.

* Since I tried multiple times, the browser allows to autofill forms. When I do that the js validation fails thinking I haven't entered any char yet.

* not sure what to do on the Selectr-icons-screen, I've tried clicking here and there with no results. Luckily I can skip the step :-)

* Reloading the page (eg I'm wondering if the server is overloaded and I want to give it a chance) the logo generation restart from scratch. Pls consider keeping state in the URL.

Anyhow, great idea :-)

Hey Dawson. I'm trying to create an account on logojoy, but it looks like you're blocking emails with a + (plus) sign as invalid. This bugs me, as I like to give each app a unique email address.

I would love to know more details on the tech side. Did you use a machine learning framework or api? Just would love to know your process as a dev looking to incorporate some machine learning.

Is it mostly a solo effort?

I am releasing my first larger project soon - any tips in terms of release, first places to post to spread the word etc? Also top X things you would have done differently?

Also one step that did not quite work for me was picking the icons (it said pick 3 icons you like or something). There were three cutouts and words flying by, but no images and there were no selections available. Here is my browser version: Version 55.0.2883.44 Ubuntu 16.04 (64-bit)

This is really cool -- my major issue has been that it doesn't preserve case sensitivity. So logos like eKitten don't seem to work :(

Only works in Chrome...

Might be caused by all the traffic, but received this error when clicking "Make Your Logo"

>Connection Failed: 1226

Hey Dawson, small world! I worked at RHINO for a bit last year. Were you working on this at that time and what was the time commitment to it back then? You mention two and a half months but given the freelancing I’m guessing it wasn’t full-time effort?

Dawson, how did you decide what were the simplest things that needed to be done first?

Signup didn't work for me. I was stuck there.

Love what you guys are doing, I tried it out and ended up with way better logos than any of the designers we found.

FYI, I thought I'd give it a try today, but it appears to be broken (syntax error in the console).

Is there a way up prevent the design mock-ups on the preview tab from capitalising the first letter?

just tried it and it's stuck at only two logos but it says it's generating more logos :/

would love to know if there's free alternatives like logojoy, I think it's nifty

Same here, that part of the flow seems like it could use some polish.

Two simple improvements could be:

1. make the "Search for icons" focused when the page loads (so the user sees a caret and that they can type something)

2. put a spinner while the logos load.

Yeah - gotta make that more clear. Even my smartest tech friends get confused there.

Type a word or phrase then press ENTER. (Suggestions are scrolling below.)

THEN choose an icon from the suggestions. Clear your typed input, repeat.

I had to hit enter and wait...and wait...and wait

Have you seen https://www.makethunder.com/, thefalcon?

I've not used it, but it looks like it might help. Here's a demo video: https://vimeo.com/163751319 (warning: loud surf-rock soundtrack).

Please contact me admin [at] crazyctr (.) com with your ideas.

I had a few years ago a product that made banner variations, now I'm looking to revive it.

Thanks for the feedback, really really appreciate it. I've taken notes!

* slow-loading/blank logos is due to HN traffic * reloading the page won't lose your favorites if you have signed up.

Logojoy assumes that your need for a logo will outweigh the artificial roadblock that they place in the workflow. The only problem is that they've provided no carrots leading up to the roadblock, so I have no motivation to continue. I need to test the service and have confidence in its quality before I sign up for anything. Never mind that I don't actually need a logo, I'm just curating a resource for future use. So I have no innate momentum besides mild curiosity, and I bounced.

Same. Developer tools helped me remove it :)

Thanks for your feedback, will definitely test different arrangements.

VC Money

Yeah, same experience here, there are other sites offering different fonts + 'clipart' to make a rand() logo. Don't see much AI here, still waiting for SkyNet...

I have the same problem with the word dépôt it will render as dpt instead.

How would plus-addressing prevent them doing something nefarious? I would think that if they're selling it, they could strip out anything post-plus in the process easily.

If people would write to standards w/o crazy tricks or browser specific extras, it wouldn't matter what was used.

From my perspective, this tool and others like it in areas like web development or stock photography are beneficial. Affordable access to these resources for businesses and individuals will make the world a better (aesthetically speaking) place.

When I'm introduced to new clients, I always explain that what they get out of hiring me is my critical thinking and manner of solving problems. Deliverables, be they logos or videos or interactive experiences, are incidental to the strategy.

Sometimes clients say all they want is a <logo|image|video>. After listening to their reasoning (financial, time sensitive, short-term need, etc), as designers we can and should offer honest advice and any guidance that comes along with that. I'm often amazed at the public ridicule some designers will put people through for simple inquiries. It might not be the right project for me, and I would thus not recommend anyone else for it, but I could point them to a service like this.

If you click into a logo, then click back out, it should un-stick.

I talked about the ML in a comment here and on IH.

And yes the site is definitely hurting right now :P

In that case (based on minimum wage in the US), either you're getting five dollars worth of quality, which is probably even less than this because this process allows extremely fast revisions, or the person doing it is getting massively underpaid. Or they live somewhere that cost-of-living and a typical wage are low enough that $5 for the work makes sense. Or they're using an automated system with an even lower cost-per-unit, which probably overlaps with the first possibility.

Not under US copyright law.

One thing is the intimidation factor. 3 months ago, I had 0% confidence that I could do anything that even touched ML. I'm still very new to the game, but once I started learning about it, it became much more approachable.

I'd say these two factors:

1. Most practitioners had to go to graduate school, while many entrepreneurs try to get out there asap

2. ML requires a lot of data, and that's something that big companies have more than startups

I'm not sure this is really ML based. It looks more rule based.

There are 3 or 4 different layouts and a selection of fonts and font pairings which are likely categorized(probably pulls that from Google fonts etc). I smell snakeoil even if this is a useful product. Putting the AI stamp is probably just for marketing.

Indie Hackers has a vested interest in inaccurate/misleading revenue reporting[1]. Regardless of that, I'm not sure they properly verify the revenue in the first place.

I wouldn't go as far as to call the numbers a lie, but I would never use this website as a data point to create a business model.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425

Do you have any proof that his revenue number are those? I don't, so...

> 'AI-powered lego creator'

AI-Powered Lego creator would be pretty awesome. Make custom lego sets based on various real life things you pick.

The messaging here is a little coy - "Signup to save your progress" But I don't care about saving my progress, I'll just close this and... oh, I can't. So it's not so much, sign up to save your progress, it's sign up, period.

yeah, getting a lot of negative feedback on that. Will definitely be testing it as an optional signup.

Plus the email checker doesn't work. So emails with + characters in them get rejected.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13065810

> Firefox has known issues with svg

> I'm sure we can get around them, but not in v1

This is an especially cynical and petty comment, and that's coming from someone who isn't exactly a glass is half full type of person.

As someone who's launched several ventures, this solves a big pain point and it is very apparent that a lot of thought went into putting this together.

There is room for improvement, sure, but to dismiss it so casually or attribute its success to dumb luck because of a syntax error really sounds jaded.

Not so much "bad engineering going far" as much as "engineering is less important than you think it is" unless you're a Tesla or Uber.

Yes that is what is known in the trade as a bug.

Go back to your mom's basement. He built an actual company with actual nice revenue.

You've probably bumped into that friend many times in the street on an almost daily basis without noticing it..

It's just that most sites/frameworks that use PHP use some kind of rewriting so the ".php" isn't visible (CodeIgniter/Wordpress and many others do this automatically).

so passé right now