Anna Veronika Dorogush, founder and CEO of Recraft, reveals how she built one of the world's leading AI image generation platforms by solving real professional design problems instead of chasing AI hype. Some key insights:

"My whole back-end team is medalists and finalists of World Championship in programming." Strong people attract strong people, creating a talent density that enables a small team to compete with giants.

"We are just focused on producing the best models in image generation space for designers, for professional use cases." While others built general AI image generators, Recraft targeted designers' specific needs: brand consistency, style control, and professional workflows.

"That's the major differentiator between ourselves and other AI native tools is we are building our technology from scratch in-house. And that allows us to solve for professional tasks." Training proprietary models in-house allows solving for your users' exact problems (controlling styles, brand colors, fonts).

"At the first stage, think investors mostly are evaluating founders and founding teams. After that, investors are evaluating product market fit and retention and later, monetization starts to be very important. We've raised three rounds so far and on every one of those rounds, different things were considered very important."

Links:

Recraft: https://www.recraft.ai/

Anna Veronika on X: https://x.com/avwriting

Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians

Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en

Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools