Product Overview
All artists and designers experience a creative block, leading to lost time and revenue. Generative AI presents an opportunity to change the way designers start. GSPhotoCo’s large repository of high-quality, stock images and assets defines a clear moat for the company to develop a generative AI-based solution that allows designers to turn asset packs of images and fonts into a first draft of an idea, turbo-charging their design process.
Scope and Objectives
GSPhotoCo’s Visual Studio is a web-based platform that launches from the last page of the GSPhotoCo asset purchase page. The platform prompts the designer with a series of open-ended questions to understand how they want to utilize the assets, then outputs compliant PSD files for the user to download and begin modifying.
| Primary Objective | ||
|---|---|---|
| Provide an easy-to-use tool that allows designers to quickly create a rough draft of their design from the assets and images they select | ||
| Secondary Objectives | ||
| Establish Visual Studio as an Essential Step | Utilize New Creations to Hone Generative AI Algorithm | Foster Creator Community |
Users
Our target audience and demographics caters to professional creatives who cannot devote all their time to single design or project, who see design as a smaller piece of their overall job and/or consistently asked to go outside their comfort zone for designs. These three core tenants allowed us to identify three segments who we want to target first with the Visual Studio: Part-time freelance designers, small-firm marketers and independent consultants. These demographics all share singular responsibility for designs, vary in their expertise of professional design tools and must split their time between several projects/clients ranging in difficulty, description and thematic elements.
Personas
\
Jobs
As a freelance designer, I want to quickly generate a PSD from my selected asset pack so I can produce the final asset faster.
As a marketer at a small firm, I want to generate a professional asset so I can return to working on the advertising campaign.
Storymap
Story map for freelance designer encountering the MVP Visual Studio for the first time
Functional & Non-Functional Requirements
Functional |
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|---|---|---|
| Requirement | Purpose | Details |
| Authentication | Allow users to create accounts, log in securely and manage their work between sessions |
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| Creation Generation | Guide designers through a prompt-based flow to collect fuzzy information about their desired design including thoughts on style, color palette, and phrasing |
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| Creation Export | Enable designers to export the rough draft of their creation in a compliant format |
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| Artificial Intelligence Pipeline | Ingest natural-language prompts from users about how they want their design to look, how they want to use their selected assets, and how they want the algorithm to regenerate creations |
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| Asset and Blob Storage | Store large image and video files, including the source assets as well as usage logs for analysis and prompt logs for quality assurance and offline training |
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| Payments | Collect payment for users exporting first-draft creations as PSD or other supported format |
|
Non-Functional |
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| Response Time | The platform shall respond to design generation requests within 10 seconds under normal operating conditions. This rapid response time is essential to ensure a seamless user experience, enabling designers to maintain their creative flow without unnecessary interruptions | |
| System Scalability | The platform must be scalable to handle simultaneous design requests. It should support concurrent users without significant degradation in response times or user experience. This scalability is crucial to accommodate peak usage times and a growing user base | |
| Resource Efficiency | The AI algorithms must be optimized for resource efficiency, utilizing minimal computational resources to deliver high-quality design outputs. This will ensure cost-effective operations and reduce the environmental impact of excessive resource usage | |
| Reliability | The platform shall have an uptime of 99.9%, ensuring consistent availability to users. Regular maintenance and updates should be scheduled during off-peak hours to minimize disruptions | |
| Data Protection | All user data, including design inputs and generated outputs, must be encrypted both in transit and at rest. The platform shall employ the latest encryption algorithms (e.g. ED25519 for asymmetric encryptions) to secure sensitive data against unauthorized access. | |
| User Authentication | Robust user authentication mechanisms shall be implemented, including MFA. This ensures that only authorized users can access the platform and their respective design projects. | |
| Security Audits and Updates | Regular security audits shall be conducted to identify and rectify vulnerabilities. The platform must be kept up-to-date with the latest security patches and updates to protect against emerging threats. | |
| Access Control | Role-based access control (RBAC) shall be implemented to ensure users can access only the features and data relevant to their role. This minimizes the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive features or data within the platform. | |
| Data privacy compliance | The platform should be compliant with the latest data privacy regulations, including GDPR for the EU market, Data Protection Act (UK) and Consumer Privacy Act (California) | |
Wireframes/Mockups
Outstanding Unknowns
| Type | Unknown | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Assumption | AI generated images adequately break creative block | Without any existing solutions combining reference images, stock assets and generative elements to produce editable artifacts, there is no way to truly verify whether this product can actually reduce creative block. However, lean testing of each isolated piece has only verified our hypothesis and given us confidence to invest the resources to test the central conceit. |
| Assumption | Creative designers are familiar enough with AI and prompting to be successful | We assume designers will be familiar enough with generative AI tools such as ChatGPT that they will be able to successfully prompt our studio to combine and generate assets as desired. We believe this is a safe bet to make as generative AI will only become more commonplace and everyone will become more comfortable with it. |
| Assumption | Most designers use an iterative, waterfall like workflow | We assume most designers, by the time they purchase stock assets, no which direction they will take the design in. We feel like this is a fair and safe assumption as all our case studies and user interviews have reinforced this behavior pattern to date. |
| Constraint | Cloud compute resources | GSPhotoCo does not own any physical compute and must therefore pay for cloud compute to train and host the generative AI model. Cloud compute is expensive and GSPhotoCo’s cloud expertise is in storage, not compute. |
| Constraint | Existing GSPhotoCo assets | The generative AI algorithm can only be trained on existing GSPhotoCo assets for legal, ethical and quality assurance reasons. |
| Constraint | Design Locality | As the MVP is designed, the Visual Studio can only be leveraged for designs which (1) require stock assets and (2) all or most of the assets reside within the GSPhotoCo repository. We can expand the studio to allow additional media in the near future. |
| Risk | Generative AI Cloud Infrastructure Availability | The generative AI algorithm requires significant compute resources to train and execute. Without cloud infrastructure, the cost of running a generative intelligence algorithm would be very high. However, after training the algorithm requires significantly less time to compute, so in the even of a cloud outage, we could run the algorithm, as is, on-prem. |
| Risk | Open source alternatives | Open source or free image generation alternatives may threaten Visual Studio, though the problem of generating editable files from set of assets is fairly niche. This requires careful observation of open source software and free generative AI alternatives. |
| Risk | Design Market Reduction | Generative AI could cause the human-creative market to shrink substantially. Mitigate this through careful observation of the design market and GSPhotoCo stock repository usage and adjusting pricing and tooling as necessary (may require pivot). |
Milestones & Timeline
| Stage | Timeline | Product Goal | Development | Performance Indicator (Users) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preparation | December, 2023 – March, 2024 | AI-based PSD generation |
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50 Pilot users commit |
| Pilot | March, 2024 – June 2024 | Fully functional creation workflow |
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50 pilot users (use for free) |
| Launch | June 2024 – September 2025 | Payment, Account Support & Scale |
|
10k Monthly Subscriptions |
| Expansion | June 2024 – September 2025 | Performance & Enterprise Support |
|
100k MAUs |
Resource Requirements
Human Resources
| Role | Description |
|---|---|
| Product Manager | Oversee the conception, creation, launch and success of the Visual Studio initiative |
| UI/UX Designer | Research, design, test and iterate the user experience |
| Full-Stack Web Application Engineers | Architect, build, deploy and manage the three stage web application for the cloud (client, server and database) |
| Artificial Intelligence Engineer | Design, train, deploy and manage generative AI algorithm for creating new assets |
| Quality Assurance Engineer | Write automated unit and integration tests, manually test new features and release and solicit customer feedback |
Technical Resources
| Level | Technologies | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Frontend |
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Simple SPA statically served from a selected cloud provider (ie. AWS Amplify) |
| Backend |
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Serverless backend for rapid prototyping, simple development and isolated deployments |
| Authentication |
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Reuse authentication and session endpoints from existing GSPhotoCo cloud solution |
| Payments |
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Implement payments through Stripe and PayPal; two most popular, secure, checkout methods |
| Storage |
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Implement document database for rapid prototyping and simple blob storage for asset use and construction |
| ML Pipeline |
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Industry-standard ML pipeline augmented with OpenAPI endpoint; trained existing repository assets |
| Development Operations |
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Industry-standard Development operations, automated testing, and continuous deployment infrastructure |
Testing and Quality Assurance
Proactive Quality Assurance
- Automated unit test suite executed on each feature branch
- Automated unit and integration test suite executed on each release branch
- Manual testing and smoke tests of each release
- Third-party down-detector service with direct pager to on-call engineer
- A/B test new features and changes
- Periodic case studies and user feedback sessions
- Randomized user feedback solicitation via email or pop-up
Reactive Quality Assurance
- Address bug or issue immediately
- Perform post-mortem or retrospective to identify how issues occurred
- Implement proactive preventative procedures
- Solicit feedback from affected users on how they perceived the bug
Metrics and Success Criteria
To maintain laser-focused on bringing the Visual Studio to market, and allow the team to ensure they are allowing user empathy to guide their understanding and development of the product, we will only focus on one key objective in the new future: successfully build and launch an MVP (with features outlined above).
OKRs
| Objective | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Build an MVP | |||
| Key Results | |||
| Onboard 10 pilot users | 70% return and reuse rate | 30 minutes spent on the platform per user per month | 75% aggregate score on Likert Scale surveys from selected designers |
Supporting KPIs
- Monthly Active Users
- Creations per user per month
- Rate of stock searches converted into creations
- Conversion Rates of accounts from free to paid
- Customer Acquisition Cost
- Average Revenue Per User
- Churn Rate
Go to Market
The GSPhotoCo enters a crowded industry of editing and design software. However, due to our parent company’s large repository of high-quality, curated, ethically sourced, human-produced assets, we feel confident the Visual Studio can successfully capture a faction of the $50 billion design industry. The below graphic represents the market analysis we completed to understand the total size of the freelance design market within the United States.
Pricing Strategy
The visual studio has 3 main tiers of pricing and an added 4th on the horizon. As a side note, because the Visual Studio will share account, and therefore, payment information, with the parent stock media repository, we reduce or completely element the fraction of paying as most designers – especially early adopters – will already have loaded their payment information into their GSPhotoCo account to purchase asset packs.
Free
The free tier allows new designers who signed up to test the product without having to pay for it. This is akin to a 1-month free trial from other Saas products. However, by limiting new users to 5 creations, we aim to give designers enough time to see, or even integrate, the tool into their design workflow, before asking them to pay. Ad, as well as generate scarcity by only giving them 5 free credits. This method encourages designers to try the tool, exploiting humans’ emotional reaction to getting a deal and the endowment effect (since they are putting in work to create designs).
Per-use
The per-use tier has two main aims: allow part-time or infrequent designers to only pay for what they need when they use it, and act as a low-risk investment for skeptical buyers to dip their ‘toe in the water’. The pricing strategy is designed to quickly upsell high-throughput designers by sending them messages about how much money they may have saved had they purchased a subscription rather than paid for each use, in the past month. This can easily be followed up by a discount promotion, triggering the fairness effect, the deal effect, and leveraging regret as a motivator.
Subscription
The subscription tier is the ultimate goal for each designer. For most designers, estimating 5 to 6 creations a month – designer output adjusted for increased efficiency collected from user interviews – will cover the cost of the designer on the platform. We will run periodic promotions and deals to encourage new accounts or upsell existing designers. Additionally, the MVP will give all college students free access to the tool while in school, to try to cement the Visual Studio as a necessary part of their design workflow.
Enterprise
Coming as a fast follow, the enterprise pricing will allow the Visual Studio to start selling more lucratively to companies and design agencies as a time-saving tool. We will use the data we collect from early freelancers to illustrate how much time the company can save if they purchase GSPhotoCo studio and encourage its adoption by their creative team.
Sales Strategy
The initial pricing tiers are carefully designed to dovetail with our sales strategy, which slowly steps users up in commitment, de-risking each financial transaction while providing powerful regret motivations. Designers enter the top of the sales funnel from lead-generation tactics, outlined in the distribution and marketing promotion sections, and are awarded five free creations. These creations (1) allow designers to play with the product, as well as (2) get used to it as a piece of their workflow. After their free credits expire, they will be able to pay on a per-use basis. For infrequent designers, this is the right tier for them, however, we will attempt to motivate most designers to the subscription tier by leveraging regret metrics; explicitly “You lost $x this month paying 1-time fees! Upgrade now?”. We will need to A/B test the messaging, but the basic strategy holds: (1) demonstrate value, (2) insert ourselves in the value chain, and (3) change designer behavior.
- Lead Generation through Free Workflows
- Tactic: Offer new users a limited number of free workflows as a lead generation tool. This allows potential customers to experience the value of our product without any financial commitment
- Objective: Build interest and demonstrate the utility of our software, while capturing user data (like email addresses) for future sales engagement
- Nurturing Leads towards On-Demand Purchases
- Tactic: Implement targeted email marketing campaigns and retargeting ads to encourage users who have completed free workflows to purchase a one-time workflow. Highlight the advantages of the on-demand option, such as flexibility and cost-effectiveness for infrequent need
- Objective: Transition users from free trials to becoming paying customers, emphasizing the convenience and quality of our platform
- Upselling to Subscription Model
- Tactic: For users who have purchased one-time workflows, showcase the long-term benefits and cost savings of the subscription model. Use personalized communication based on their usage patterns and preferences. Offer exclusive deals or limited-time discounts to incentivize the switch
- Objective: Convert one-time purchasers into subscribers by demonstrating the greater value and unlimited access offered by the subscription
- Customer Retention and Advocacy
- Tactic: Provide excellent ongoing support and regular updates to enhance the user experience. Create a referral program that rewards users for bringing in new subscribers
- Objective: Retain existing customers and transform them into advocates for your product, leveraging their networks to attract new users
Distribution Strategy
Because the Visual Studio is a B2C Saas product, the distribution strategy is a straightforward Level-0 direct distribution strategy. However, due to the plethora of design marketplaces and popularization of gig/freelance work, we plan to test elements of a Level-1 distribution strategy and analyze our success.
Initally, our primary channel for designer acquisition, especially early on, will be via B2C channels which will hinge largely on a product-led growth strategy, with designers acquired via our marketing strategy and sign-up to onboard directly from the application itself with no sales touch. Though we may run promotions and discounts to help motivate new customers, all those marketing channels will funnel designers back to the web application to sign up and purchase a subscription.
Post-launch, as we focus more energy and resources on the B2C offering, we will trial several Level-1 direct distribution strategies, primarily leveraging design marketplaces, either through promotion or partnership, to distribute the application to those audiences, in addition to direct, product lead growth. Additionally, we will deploy a small, dedicated sales team to reach out to design agencies as well as go through freelance marketplaces such as Fiverr or Malt.
Marketing and Promotion Strategy
Marketing and promotions consist of 5 channels optimized to reach as wide an audience as possible, targeting digital thoroughfares highly trafficked by our core demographics.
Digital Marketplaces and Online Platforms
Effectiveness: Many freelance designers frequent digital marketplaces and platforms for tools and resources. These platforms are already a part of their workflow, making it a strategic point to introduce our product
Implementation: Listing our product on popular marketplaces frequented by freelance designers, such as Adobe Exchange, Creative Market, or Envato Market.
Content Marketing and SEO
Effectiveness: Freelance designers often search for tips, trends, and tools online. Having a strong online presence through insightful content can attract this audience to our product.
Implementation: Develop a content marketing strategy focused on topics relevant to freelance designers. This can include blog posts, tutorials, design tips, industry insights, and case studies showing how our platform solves the unique problem of designer’s block. We also plan on creating a YouTube channel to share tips, tricks, and best practices to leverage our product as much as possible
Social Media and Community Engagement
Effectiveness: Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and community among freelance designers who often rely on networks for support, inspiration, and marketing. These people are generally active on social media and likely to enjoy quality content about our product.
Implementation: Use platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest to showcase our software’s capabilities, share user-generated content, and engage with the design community. Regularly post engaging, visually appealing content that resonates with freelance designers. We also want to be very active on designer-specific networks such as Behance or Dribble, sites on which designers very often rely to find inspiration or share their creations
Design Contests
Effectiveness: Major promotional tool to create a buzz around our platform
Implementation: Leverage our social media presence and make partnerships with designers to participate in our contest to boost attendance and general
Design Blog
Effectiveness: Standard operating industry procedure to generate and maintain a presence on the web and establish the brand as a thought leader in the space
Implementation: A rotating schedule of authors write and publish posts to a dedicated blog platform with an email mailing list to let enterprising designers know when a new post is released
Customer Support Strategy
Our customer success strategy can be divided into 3 buckets: education, success, and engagement. Our philosophy is to let the user explore, without letting them fall. To do this, we will emphasize quality education materials and resources that are easily locatable so designers can easily find the answer to any question they have. Additionally, we will provide them with immediate help if they experience an issue while using the platform, as well as engage them outside of the design tool to solicit feedback and offer them rewards and thanks for choosing GSPhotoCo.
Additionally, once we launch the B2C enterprise tier for customers with a business account, we plan to offer dedicated help resources to further enable their professional success. This includes a dedicated account executive with a dedicated chat line directly to them.
Education
Description: Focus on providing tools and resources to users so that they can learn, understand, and master the visual studio on their own
Execution:
- Guided Onboarding: A guided onboarding process during a designer’s first use, including a tour of the main workflow and core features
- Help Center: A curated blog of concise entries to frequently asked questions as well as features and
- “Hidden Tricks”: A fun blog cross-posted to social media that highlights hidden features, tricks on how to perform popular yet difficult designs and even product easter eggs
Success
Description: Focus on maintaining open and prompt lines of communication with all our designers so when they encounter a problem, a question or a wish, it is easy to get ahold of us
Execution:
- Chat Support: Immediately chat with customer success representatives via an onsite chat widget
- Email Support: Ask a long-form question by emailing the shared customer success inbox
- Social Media Support: Shared social media accounts designers can reach out to via DM or public post, to request help or insights
Engagement
Description: Focus on reducing the dissonance between usage and excitement by sharing tailored messages directly to users; bringing the excitement (and updates) to them
Execution:
- Feedback solicitation: Solicit feedback via in-app forms and email surveys to understand how designers feel about the product and identify additional pain points
- Education webinars: Weekly and monthly webinars hosted by the customer success team detailing what’s new, bugfixes and usage training
- Recognition/rewards: A reward and badge system that incentivizes users to use the visual studio, the more they use, the more perks (and free creations) they get with added gamification elements of badges (ie. “Your first creation!”, “10+ creations!”, etc.)
References
- https://gomedia.com/insights/10-tips-avoid-designers-block/
- https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-fight-creative-block-as-a-graphic-designer
- https://www.quora.com/Do-graphic-designers-use-templates
- https://www.quora.com/How-do-graphic-designers-create-their-own-templates
- https://my.ibisworld.com/homehttps://www.dreamstime.com/blog/why-do-stock-photos-exist-55973
- https:/www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2ctxh4/what_are_stock_photos_and_why_do_they_exist/
- https://jumpstory.com/blog/stock-photos-will-never-be-the-same-again/
- https://www.canva.com/pricing/https://journal.everypixel.com/ai-image-statistics
