In the last few weeks, I've shipped two AI-powered products. One generates nail art designs. The other creates custom children's images. Both are live, both have paying users, and both taught me something interesting about where AI product opportunities actually exist.
The nail art thing
It started as a weekend experiment. My friend Melissa showed me her Pinterest board full of nail art inspiration. Hundreds of saved images, organized by style, color, occasion. She spends hours scrolling through these before every salon visit, trying to find the perfect design.
"What if you could just describe what you want and AI generates it?" I asked.
Two days later, NailArt AI Studio was live. You upload a photo of your hand (or use a default), type a description like "elegant french tips with small flowers for a summer wedding," and the AI generates custom nail designs on your actual nails.
The tech is straightforward. I use a combination of image segmentation to isolate the nail areas, then inpainting with Stable Diffusion to generate the designs while preserving the hand. The tricky part was getting the designs to look realistic—not too "AI generated," if you know what I mean. Lots of prompt engineering and negative prompts to avoid that uncanny valley look.
What surprised me was the response. Within a week, I had people sharing their generated designs in nail art Facebook groups. Someone posted a screenshot of a design they'd shown their nail technician, who then recreated it in real life. That was a weird feeling—seeing AI art become actual physical art on someone's hands.
KI-Bildergenerator
The second product came from a similar observation. My sister wanted to create a personalized children's book for her daughter's birthday. She'd seen those services where you upload a photo of your kid and they appear as a character in a story. The problem? They're expensive, the customization is limited, and the art style is often... questionable.
So I built kibildergenerator.de. It's specifically for the German market (hence the .de domain and German interface). Parents can generate custom illustrations of their children in various styles and scenarios—as astronauts, as fairytale characters, as superheroes, whatever they want.
The monetization is credits-based. You buy a pack of credits, each generation costs some credits. Simple, predictable, no subscriptions.
What I learned about niche AI products
The generic tools are already built. ChatGPT exists. Midjourney exists. DALL-E exists. If you're building "general purpose AI image generation," you're competing with companies that have billions in funding. Don't do that.
Niche = less competition + better understanding. I'm not an AI researcher. I can't out-model OpenAI. But I can understand nail art enthusiasts better than a general-purpose tool can serve them. I can build specific workflows, specific UI, specific prompts that make the tool perfect for one narrow use case.
Distribution is everything. Both products got their first users from niche communities. Nail art groups on Facebook. Parenting forums. These aren't places where "general purpose AI" gets discussed, but they are places where people have specific problems that AI can solve.
Local markets are underserved. The German-language children's image generator works because there's less competition in non-English markets. The big AI companies focus on English first. If you speak another language and understand that market, you have an advantage.
Workflow beats technology. Neither of these products uses cutting-edge AI. They use stable, reliable models with good UX wrapped around them. The value isn't in the AI itself—it's in making AI accessible to people who would never open a terminal or write a prompt.
The SaaS template I keep reusing
After building a few of these, I noticed I was copying the same code over and over. Authentication, Stripe payments, user management, credit systems. So I extracted it into a template.
It's Next.js-based (I know, I complained about complexity, but for SaaS apps the ecosystem is genuinely helpful). It includes everything you need to go from idea to paid product: auth with NextAuth, payments with Stripe, database with PostgreSQL, and a clean admin dashboard.
Both products were built on this template. The nail art one took two days. The children's one took three. Most of that time was spent on the AI-specific stuff, not the boring SaaS infrastructure.
What's next
I'm keeping my eyes open for more niche opportunities. The pattern seems repeatable: find a community with a specific visual need, build a tool that makes AI accessible to them, charge a fair price. Not every idea will work, but the experiments are cheap and fast.
If you're thinking about building an AI product, my advice is to go narrow. Really narrow. "AI for X" where X is a specific hobby, profession, or community. The generic tools are already good enough for generic needs. The opportunity is in solving specific problems that the general tools can't—or won't—address.
