Launching Desaign Shop
today, i'm excited to share my latest project, desaign shop. it's still very much a work in progress, but i believe it's time to put it out there and gather feedback. from working on major projects in the past, i've learned the value of launching early rather than endlessly iterating pre-launch. this is the first project i'm releasing during its development to actively generate feedback, test ideas, and identify bugs.
am i expecting this to be a runaway success? not really—and that's okay. i've had projects fail before, and i see each one as an opportunity to learn and improve. this approach was inspired by levelsio's discussion on the lex fridman podcast, where he emphasized the power of rapid iteration and embracing failure. if this app gains traction, i'll keep refining it. if not, i'll move on to the next idea.
the app officially launches today with a $5/month subscription and quotas for both image generation and web search. these quotas are intentionally tight for now to prevent unexpected api costs. however, if you run out of credits, just dm me—I’m happy to bump you up manually while we test things out. in the future, i aim to implement soft quotas and rate limits based on actual usage metrics. for now, this setup is the most straightforward solution.
if the app sees continued growth, here are some features i plan to add:
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history - users will be able to view past generations and bookmark products from search queries.
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sharing - a growth mechanic to let users share generations and search results, helping drive traffic to the site.
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image upload - integrating the ability to upload arbitrary photos to find matching products (workflow already exists, pending demand).
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multi-product search - currently, bounding boxes identify multiple products in an image, but adding the ability to search for all items simultaneously could be valuable.
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generate image options - instead of generating a single image for search, users could select from multiple generated images for more accurate results.
i'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback as this project evolves. let's see where it goes.