Reading time approx. 4 minutes
Artificially generated captions and captions for platforms like Instagram? No problem with the CyberLab team imagetocaption.ai! The founder Joshua Heller explains the business idea behind imagecaption.ai and answers the well-known ten Gründerview questions.
Your startup in a tweet:
imagetocaption.ai is revolutionizing the way captions are created, especially for social media. With our user-friendly tool you can create suitable text from images within seconds.
How did your business idea come about?
The idea arose from my own problem with creating suitable texts for my photography channel. As a part-time photographer, Instagram is an important channel and the captions are important to address potential customers and increase reach. Since I couldn’t find a suitable solution on the market, I quickly developed the solution myself: imagetocaption.ai. After I put a free MVP online, there was a high response within a few weeks. This drove me to improve the product and build a business model.
How big is your team, who is part of it and how did you find each other?
So far I have built the business alone. Through my studies in business informatics and experience as a software developer and as a self-employed photographer, I have acquired many of the skills that are necessary as a founder. However, I am currently looking for a co-founder in the areas of marketing, sales and business development in order to scale the company.
Who benefits from your idea and why?
The main beneficiaries of our idea are content creators, small and medium-sized companies and other private users, such as photographers or people who regularly post content on their accounts. imagetocaption.ai saves time while improving reach and relevance on social media. Companies can also reduce their costs by foregoing external marketing agencies or reducing personnel costs in the marketing department.
What does your everyday working life look like – is there even such a thing as an “everyday routine”?
Everyday work is varied and iterative. As an advocate of agile working, I try to continually improve myself and my product and respond to the needs of customers and the market. There is no fixed “everyday life” yet, as I am in a constant phase of growth and adjustment and currently only work from home.
Why did you choose an accelerator like CyberLab?
I chose CyberLab because it offers access to a valuable network, mentorship and specialized knowledge in the tech and business sectors. You also get to know other founders who are facing similar challenges and with whom you can exchange ideas. Karlsruhe is also an ideal location because the entrepreneurial spirit and innovative mentality are very strong here.
Which startup excited or inspired you the most?
As a photographer and AI enthusiast, I find the startup imagenAI from Israel very exciting. They have developed a tool that automatically processes and sorts out images. I find their pricing model (pay per image) and the innovative mindset in Israel in general very interesting.
What’s the next big step?
The next big step is the ability to upload videos and create detailed descriptions from them. In addition, the online shop and automation market will be developed by developing plug-ins for Shopify and Zapier.
The vision is to train individual text models for all users or for different use cases in order to become the market leader for image-based text creation for all use cases.
What stumbling blocks did you have to overcome during the founding process?
Since I had neither experience with the AWS cloud platform nor with the integration of payment service providers Stripe and PayPal, a lot of things went wrong at the beginning. However, I believe that the best way to learn is to try things out and make mistakes.
Also, I didn’t initially expect such a large range. I sometimes had tens of thousands of users on my site every day. As a result, costs have skyrocketed. However, I quickly found a way to greatly reduce costs and integrate a subscription model and advertisements.
Do you have any advice/tips for other founders?
Focus on creating a product that solves real problems and leverage the resources available to you through networks and mentors. Try to grow organically as much as possible and find your product-market fit as quickly as possible through an MVP. Monetization and business model can be reconsidered later, as long as the product is easily scalable.
About imagetocaption.ai:
imagetocaption.ai is an innovative SaaS solution that makes it possible to automatically create image descriptions, especially for social media, based on images. AI image recognition and text generation with LLMs creates appropriate text for each image within seconds. This not only saves users time, but also optimizes their reach and relevance on social media.