designstripe

Designstripe was my first true startup experience. The company started in 2020 as an illustration asset platform and their team had built a smart system for generation lots of variations of single illustrations or multiple illustrations composed into a scene.

When I first started, I was working on the admin panel for managing the illustrations and the website. The system was built as a monorepo using React, NextJS, and Tailwind CSS in the frontend, and NestJS with GraphQL in the backend. This was my first production experience with React, having been primarily a Vue developer up to that point.

As I was onboarding with the company, OpenAI had just released their Chat GPT model. The capabilities of the model inspired designstripe’s CEO, Francois Arbour, to pivot the company into developing an AI-driven product. Our first proof of concept was the AI Holiday Cards project, where we used a diffusion image model and Open AI’s API to generate both a unique illustration and a unique message for each card based entirely on real-time user input.

With the project successful, the team kicked off 2023 with the development of a platform for businesses to use the same technology to generate social marketing images and posts using their own branding. At the core of the platform was the concept of Brand DNA, a profile of your brand that we built up automatically for you that the AI could use to generate images that fit your brand’s style. We developed a website scraper that could pull in your brand’s colors, fonts, and styles from your website and social media profiles to build the Brand DNA.

Once we had Brand DNA down, we built a Social Media Post system where you could write a topic for your desired post or choose from suggested topics, and we would generate a caption and 90 social post graphic designs which have appropriate content, colors, styles, and copy for your brand and topic. We built an easy editor for the designs where you could adjust the text, colors, and styles of the design to your liking, and use AI to generate more variations of the design.

I integrated both Auth0 and Stripe together for this platform and setup a paywall and subscription system to allow users to pay for the service.