Pauline Clavelloux, who created an AI product that makes €13k a month while working as a data…

🌈 Abstract

The article introduces Pauline Clavelloux, a French data scientist who has achieved €13k/month in revenue by working on various side projects and indie hacking ventures. It covers her career journey, the products she has developed, and the strategies she has used to attract customers and increase revenue.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Pauline Clavelloux's Career Journey

1. What was Pauline Clavelloux's career path before starting her indie hacking ventures?

• After graduating from college, she first joined a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft and worked as a data analyst.
• A year later, she moved to IBM, where she successfully built a career as a data scientist.
• She was promoted to a manager position at a young age, an elite position.
• After five years as a manager, she officially quit her corporate job in June 2024.

2. How did Pauline balance her corporate job and side projects?

• Pauline was doing a side project while continuing to work for the company for a while.
• The author describes their own experience of working on a side project while holding a full-time job, waking up at 6 AM, working on the side project before and after work, and working late into the night.

[02] Pauline's Indie Hacking Journey

1. How did Pauline's indie hacking journey begin?

• Pauline's indie hacking journey began after COVID-19, when she was forced to work from home.
• In her spare time, she decided to try automated trading of cryptocurrencies, which she was successful at, making 5 times her original capital in a few months.
• This success led her to explore the possibility of creating a software product that would take advantage of her technology.

2. What were some of the products Pauline developed and their outcomes?

• Her first product was a tool that would send customized buy/sell timing alerts to investors, but it did not sell well.
• Her second product used image generation AI to convert photos into funky styles, which generated some conversions but did not generate ongoing revenue.
• Her third product aimed to gather Twitter data, compile it into a Google Sheet, analyze it, and draw various graphs, but was abandoned due to Twitter's changes to its API pricing.
• Her fourth product, iacrea, which generates images of houses with furniture, was a great success, reaching €13k/month in revenue.

3. What were the key factors behind the success of iacrea?

• Pauline focused on real estate agents as the target customers, as they would use the product regularly to make properties more attractive to buyers.
• She used SEO and affiliate contracts to reach potential customers, and attended industry events to connect with them directly.
• She implemented features like credit carryover and annual plans to reduce the churn rate, which dropped from 41% to 16%.

4. What lessons did Pauline share from her failures?

• Lowering the price of her product by 25% when a competitor offered a similar product at a lower price was a mistake, as it only resulted in a 25% revenue loss without significant customer churn.
• Pauline learned that her product had unique value that customers were willing to pay for, and that lowering the price was not the right strategy.

[03] Pauline's Current and Future Projects

1. What other projects is Pauline currently working on?

• In addition to iacrea, Pauline is also working on a product called nextjsdirectory, which is also monetizing well.
• She is also working on a new SaaS product.