I accidentally built an AI that makes better thumbnails than I ever could

It started as a weekend experiment. I was tired of wasting 30+ minutes designing thumbnails that still looked average. I wanted something faster — smarter — something that didn’t make me open Photoshop at 1AM. So I built a basic prompt-to-image generator using Replicate. No UI. No auth. Just raw output. It was ugly, but the results? Kinda amazing. Then I showed it to two creator friends. One of them replaced 8 thumbnails with it. The other messaged me saying, “I would pay for this.” That’s when it clicked. So I turned it into a product. Today, Thumbgen is live. It generates thumbnails in seconds, uses OpenAI + Replicate, and runs on Next.js + Tailwind + Vercel. You type a few words, it creates an optimized, click-worthy thumbnail for your video. No templates. No design skills. Just pure AI output, editable and ready to publish. In our first few days, we hit 2,000+ users and $2k MRR. Still early. Still messy. But it’s real. I’m not sharing this to go viral. I’m sharing because building this almost broke me — debugging model failures at 3AM, handling latency spikes, rewriting Stripe logic 4 times, and doubting if anyone would care. But they did. If you’re curious about the stack, the problems, or the weird edge cases we hit while building an AI design tool, let’s talk. I’m all ears. You can try it now. I’d love your feedback. https://thumbgen.app

Apr 22, 2025 - 02:47

I accidentally built an AI that makes better thumbnails than I ever could

It started as a weekend experiment. I was tired of wasting 30+ minutes designing thumbnails that still looked average. I wanted something faster — smarter — something that didn’t make me open Photoshop at 1AM. So I built a basic prompt-to-image generator using Replicate. No UI. No auth. Just raw output. It was ugly, but the results? Kinda amazing.

Then I showed it to two creator friends. One of them replaced 8 thumbnails with it. The other messaged me saying, “I would pay for this.” That’s when it clicked.

So I turned it into a product.

Today, Thumbgen is live. It generates thumbnails in seconds, uses OpenAI + Replicate, and runs on Next.js + Tailwind + Vercel. You type a few words, it creates an optimized, click-worthy thumbnail for your video. No templates. No design skills. Just pure AI output, editable and ready to publish.

In our first few days, we hit 2,000+ users and $2k MRR. Still early. Still messy. But it’s real.

I’m not sharing this to go viral. I’m sharing because building this almost broke me — debugging model failures at 3AM, handling latency spikes, rewriting Stripe logic 4 times, and doubting if anyone would care. But they did.

If you’re curious about the stack, the problems, or the weird edge cases we hit while building an AI design tool, let’s talk. I’m all ears.

You can try it now. I’d love your feedback. https://thumbgen.app