I exposed "AI" logo makers stealing fonts
I had just launched my first SaaS, it was 100% funded by my student loans (I don't recommend anyone do this ). I was extremely lucky that the launch went viral on Hacker News, Producthunt, and Twitter which resulted in 4-6 paying customers a day.
After about a month the paying customers were dwindling to around 2-3 a day and I needed to find a cost effective way to bring this back up. My SaaS was a website builder called Launchaco and it was impossibly expensive to acquire customers via paid ads. I landed on making a free / open-sourced AI logo builder as a loss leader when I realized a lot of our users were paying for “AI logo makers”.
At the time “AI Logo makers“ were quite literally just vertically aligning icons + fonts with fake loading screens saying "generating logos with AI", and then charging between $20 - $250 for the resulting logos. From the get-go the business model of these logo makers seemed sketchy at best, but when I started to dig into how they were licensing their fonts that’s when alarm bells really started to go off.
For those unfamiliar with font licensing, the short of it is that not all fonts are licensed to use as logos, and a handful of our competitors were ignoring this (some were profiting 100’s of thousands from fonts they didn’t have a license to distribute). I made a massive spreadsheet of all the biggest logo builders, dug into their source code to see what fonts they were using and manually checked if they were properly licensed. The result was hundreds of improperly licensed fonts across several very popular logo builder tools.
Fast forward 2 months to the launch day of our logo builder, I sent emails to about 100 different font foundries and independent typographers showing them how these logo builders were abusing their fonts.
Not coincidentally some of these companies temporarily shut down for a couple months after I sent those emails and some are still being sued to this day. All the fonts used for Launchaco’s AI Logo Maker were creative commons and we attributed the author per logo downloaded, we also open-sourced the brain behind our AI Logo Maker; we were excited to ship an Open-Core product for the first time & it was well received!
Post launch- Launchaco was getting a dozen or so paying customers a day and eventually was acquired by Namecheap. I recently left and now am working on a free / open source api docs tool which you can check out here: https://github.com/scalar/scalar :)