Boyang Niu is the Co-Founder of Stylized. He holds Bachelor and Master Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. In today's episode, We discussed his journey and vision for the AI-powered e-commerce platform. Boyang shares the long-term vision for Stylized, which is to become an asset-first e-commerce platform, simplifying the process of setting up an online store by taking care of all abstractions, from website building to SEO. Boyang emphasizes the importance of understanding one's strengths, whether it's distribution, core ML, or UX, and iterating quickly to create a high-efficacy product. Tune in to hear Boyang's insights and experiences in building Stylized and how you can apply these lessons to your own business. Find the full transcript at: https://www.aiproductcreators.com/ Where to find Andrew: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boyang-niu/ Where to find Dhaval: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhavalbhatt Transcript:-

Dhaval: This former Dropbox engineer built an AI product to create stylized professional product photos for people running e-commerce shops. Boyang is a founder of Stylized ai. He Figured out a way to leverage depth extraction, AI and 3D rendering to empower e-commerce sellers to transform their phone photos into professional assets for everyday use. One of the biggest lessons I gleaned from this conversation is how he approaches product development by focusing on areas of growth and applying the user mindset to product creation.

Hey, Boyang , talk to us. Tell us about your journey. How did you come to, identify this, space? And, tell us a little bit about you first and then we can talk about the product.

Boyang: Yeah, absolutely. Great to be here. Dhaval I joined Hive. So Hive was a social media company back in 2015, building like a Twitter clone. We pivoted hard to enterprise computer vision SaaS. And so that's where I first like learned about ImageNet, um, did all this AI stuff built like a trading pipeline and all of this stuff. And then after that, worked in some productivity tools at Dropbox, worked at e-commerce at Square, and then for the latest venture, I like put all those things together. And really it's about targeting the market that I care about, which is e-commerce sellers, which is a huge market, right? You get a lot of customer iterations, a lot of customers to go after. You don't have to really be scared to approach any particular one. And that's a great feeling when you're just getting off the ground, right? Because you need that iteration cycle. And so we, we. Sort of putted around me and my co-founder, looking for ideas that really resonated. And one of the things was like, oh, people want to take photos, right? People, when they sell things, they need photos of the thing. that's where buyer decisions are made, and they pay like 35, $50 per photo professionally for these images that they're putting on Shopify. And so people are coming up to us, they're being like, oh I waited like six weeks for this photo set. For, 250 photos, it cost me 10 K or 5k, whatever. And we're like oh this is interesting, right? Because, there's this new image stuff going on and maybe we could really leverage that, to make this workflow better.So that's really where we came up with the idea for, what is now Stylized, Stylized.Ai. What we're building is professional product photos, for people running e-commerce shops in under 30 second

Dhaval: oh wow. So tell us a little bit about where your product is at this stage and have you launched, is it in the pre-launch stage? Is it in the wait list, stage, et cetera, et cetera.

Boyang: Yep. We have launched, we are soft rolling out a launch with this is a prosumer product, right? And so we're really concentrated on the B2C motion of go to market. We're doing like organic seo. we're running a bit of ads on the side. And so this is all just to build up , a brand name and also to get really fast iteration on what the product surface is. So we have soft launch. We have about 200 customers right now. That's growing probably at a rate of, I would say, like 15 to 20 per day. Which is pretty good, right? It's only been like, I think since we opened the beta. To one and a half weeks. So we are pretty happy with that. And I think the goal for us really is to get that distribution and get in front of people into their workflows such that we get embedded. And because no one really knows, like honestly, no one really knows where the AI models are going. And so by in the next three months, someone could do some really magical stuff, right? And we want to be able to put that magic in front of customers. And to do that, you have to have a big audience. So that's our goal, right now

Dhaval: That's awesome. Focusing on distribution first, that's novel. Most of the founders and product creators, they get their heads down and they start building the product and it. They spend months and months and months before even thinking of the first interaction with the customer. And as you already know, it never goes as per the plan. Right. So what is the main value proposition? What is the main customer pain point that your product solves for?

Boyang: Yep. Customer pain point. I have a product. I'm trying to sell it. I have a Shopify store. I need good images. Right now my options are I get like a light box set up, which is, they can be pretty complicated, right? I need to set up a photo studio area in my house. I need to take pretty meticulous pictures. I need to then learn Photoshop and edit those just the way I want them. Or I go to a professional studio and get my photos back to me, in a couple weeks. And so that's my blocker right now. I can't get it on Shopify. So what we do is, you. An iPhone image, and as long as it's like pretty good neutral lighting, like anyone can do this. I've done this many times and I'm bad at taking photos. Right. So I do that in my product. In 30 seconds I get a virtual light box. So this is a staged, 3D rendering actually. And the technology is relatively, I wouldn't call it simple, but it pieces together a bunch of existing models, right? To render your product in 3D. And then you get to adjust whatever you want about that rendering such that you know your product is professionally lighted. You get to change all the backdrops as if you are in a product studio or in a photo studio with like different types of materials or Hey, I want this on marble or slate, or all of that stuff. But you get to do that from the comfort of your computer and the iteration time is, on the order, five seconds versus two weeks. so that's what we're going for.

Dhaval: Wonderful. Yeah. I've been a product owner for e-commerce companies and that finding good stylized photographs of your product has been the biggest game changer. Like experiencing, showing people experiencing the product has been the biggest game changer. So you're solving a real pain point. You said you are in a prosumer space. If you can unpack that a little bit, why is that presumer and not just e-commerce sellers. How do you differentiate?

Boyang: Yeah. So for us, the biggest differentiation is whether we are b2b, which would be selling to e-commerce platforms. And we've talked about this as well as whether we could go to Shopify and say, Hey we have an api, or we have a third party tool that. You could purchase for your sellers to make their shops more efficient. Whether that's the route or if we want to go directly to the customers themselves. So we see that as more presumer because it's self-serve one, we're just launching to anyone. You can come in, you enter your email, um, you upload a picture and boom, it's there it's free to use. You just get these premium add-ons. And that's how you are introduced to that product at first. So we're calling it prosumer mostly because all of our customers are independent shop owners, and they really get to make the decision about their own product.

Dhaval: Very cool. Yeah. So your product roadmap could be either build up your distribution, get a lot of, Prosumer e-commerce, use your product, and then become down the line, become this extension or plugin for all the e-commerce outlets that are out there. Is that something you're thinking of?

Boyang: Yes. I guess I won't go into too much detail, but we do have a Shopify extension that's coming out soon. As I said, we're focused really on hitting that distribution and just nailing it, getting as many customers as possible. And one of the, one of the benefits here is like we're solving one. Very individual problem, right? So it's, Hey, I need a photo. There's a very clear input, like I take a photo, there's a very clear output, I get a better photo back, right? That takes 30 seconds, 15 seconds, whatever it might be. We're solving that pain point. So it's very easy to get in front of people and say, Hey, look. This is what you're getting from us. and it's easy to onboard. And then from there, I think the strategy here is if we get many customers, we can start building up, catalog extensions. We can say, Hey, put your entire store catalog with us, like we will optimize it. Or you get better photos through all of your store. And then we can really start to leverage all of the newer AI things that we see coming out in the future. So if one day there are, very good AI models for just creating catalog webpages, we could leverage that. We could then let you kn...