Coco Mao is the CEO & Co-Founder at OpenArt. And John is the CTO & Co-Founder of OpenArt. OpenArt is an AI-native social platform, inventing a new paradigm and tools for expression and entertainment with generative AI. In today's episode, They share how they're helping artists and designers 100x their creativity using AI-generated prompts, and their journey from ideation to launching a successful product. The also share their journey in the world of AI and how they built their successful AI-powered platform. Discover the power of leveraging pre-trained models, adapting to new technologies, and focusing on user experience to make a difference in the AI industry. Don't miss their valuable advice for non-technical founders and aspiring AI product creators.


Find the full transcript at: https://www.aiproductcreators.com/

Where to find Coco:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kechunmao/

Where to find John:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnqiao0618/

Where to find Dhaval:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhavalbhatt



In this episode, we cover:
00:00:00 - Introductions and Open Art's mission
00:01:54 - Empowering creators with AI-generated image prompts
00:02:41 - The target audience and the line between empowering vs. replacing creators
00:04:13 - The importance of human creativity and AI's role in supporting it
00:05:13 - The customer journey and how AI gets infused into the user experience
00:07:48 - Business results, user growth, and revenue
00:08:53 - The journey from idea to launch and funding
00:10:28 - The journey from pre-seed to product launch
00:11:07 - The goals of their AI-powered platform
00:11:47 - Evolving audience and focus on creative workflows
00:12:28 - Product market fit lessons learned
00:13:59 - Quick product creation techniques for AI product creators
00:15:35 - Advice for non-technical founders in the AI space
00:16:35 - Upcoming API release and market focus
00:18:07 - The importance of community in AI product creation
00:19:19 - The differentiating factors for AI product creators
00:20:37 - Future vision for OpenAI and personal growth
00:22:17 - CEOs that inspire Coco and John

Transcript:-
Dhaval:
With me, we have Coco and John. They are the founders of Open Art, and we'll start off with the question on what does your product do, what problem does it solve and who does it serve?

Coco:
Thank you for having us here. So in one sentence, open Art is a cutting edge platform where you can discover and generate AI art. Our website, openart.ai has been rapidly growing since our launch in August, 2022. And our long-term goal is to build an AI-powered workflow for creativity. If you think about creative tools today like Adobe Photoshop, Figma, or even Canada, they help you design or create something once you already have a rough idea, but they don't really help you come up with new ideas. You'd still go to sites like Pinterest or be hands check out other people's work to get inspired. However, generative AI can really come up with new and exciting ideas, for you and or with you like no other previous technology could before. So on our platform, we empower users to unlock their creativity with AI by one, generate images based on prompts. And second, train their own personalized AI models. Just as an example, so a fashion designer uploaded her past fashion sketches and trained her own fashion design AI model. And now she can actually immediately get hundreds of new designs waiting minutes. because these designs are based on her pastwork, but entirely new, created by ai and this magical process, really 100x her creativity. So we're really excited to let more people 100 x their creativity with the workflow we're building.

Dhaval:
Very interesting. So you said you launched in August, and this is a workflow product to empower creators with, creative graphic prompts. Did I get that right? Image prompt. Is that artistic prompts? Who do you serve? Like, is it, you mentioned fashion designers. Is there a specific segment within. Creative industry that you have nailed your product for.

Coco:
Yes, great question. To be completely honest, we're still in the process of nailing down very specific target audience. But I would say right now, we are, our audience are creative workers like artists, designers, including, like the fashion designer talk about, but creative workers who have like ideation phase.

Dhaval:
Very cool. Yeah. There is a common theme among the AI product founders, which is if you empower the creators, then your product will go a long way instead of if you trying to replace them. Where do you draw that line? Where do you draw the line of empowering versus actually taking over a little bit of their creativity? Where does that line stand for you?

Coco:
I think it depends on how people use your product because I think the way I think about it is that for for creative workers like artists or designers, like.At least our product, they can really use it as a workflow tool that really 100x their creativity. And we're constantly talking to this artist and designers how our workflow could actually help them monetize more like help them get more clients. So the way we work with them is very, very collaborative. Whereas I do think in terms of replacing artists I can see like in some use cases, for example, if you don't have artistic skills, let's say you are a writer and like you need some illustration, so perhaps before you don't have good tools to get any illustration. But now you can use our tool to make some basic illustration. However, I do think if you need high quality illustration, you still need to go to artists. So I think the AI could replace some basic work of artists, but then like they want really replace artists.

Dhaval:
Very interesting

John:
also think about the human beings, right? So the, the most important or valuable thing is our creativity. The AI just unlock the whole potential of our creativity. So instead of wisdom that maybe 5 years, 10 years, to master like your skills to draw a picture. To paint on the wall. So the AI can help you do that. The most valuable thing I think is, of course your skills is much more valuable. But the creativity is the core part of the whole thing.

Dhaval:
Yeah, I completely concur with you on ai supporting the creativity and creativity being the most important thing for human beings, right? One thing you said is the customer experience, where in the customer journey. Is AI prompting tell us a little bit about your customer journey and where does AI get infused, like specifically in, in the user experience? Yeah, if you can share that a little bit. And how did you go about making that decision?

John:
I can give you an example from one with our user on the platform. That, that guy he has a, like a blue character called Coco, , he has like a maybe 20 to 30 image of the, that character he designed and he upload to our website and use our photo booth feature to generate a model.Then one of the special feature we had on our website is like a presets we have like a presets team in our community. With Very good at writing prompt, writing prompt for the Generative AI is really hard, right? But they're super great at that. So we have a lot of presets and that guy will just by bunch of presets and apply those presets on his characters.And you can see the result are super creative. the blue character is on different off page is in different contexts in the background. And I think he really like that because he's trying to upscale and enhance the image for lots of the results. That is really impressive thing.

Coco:
Yeah. And I want to add one thing is that after, for example, they see so many amazing results. They usually pick the ones they like, and then they can use it as a reference sheet to rejoy it. Or they can actually, if the quality is, they're happy with the quality, they just need to do some touch up on the, on the on the image. And then they can actually, that can be their final like image.

Dhaval: Wow.

John:
I think the guy also came back later and he also purchased lots of model and know, keep changing that factor.

Dhaval:
Wow. This is very interesting. The three keyword I picked up here are preset prompts and outputs, right. Is the sequence presets, and then from the presets you create prompts and then the prompt from the prompts you create final outputs. Multiple outputs. Did I get that right? The sequence.

Coco:
almost, I think so the step are like one you need to train your model and training process is super easy. You just upload some photos of the thing that you want the AI to learn. It could be, for example, an image of yourself or image of a character or image of even a consistent style. So you upl