How I Turned an AI Side Project into a Monetized App in 6 Months

Introduction

When I first started building, I searched everywhere for real, detailed breakdowns of how people got traffic or made money with their apps. This post is me writing what I wish I had found — a clear, honest look at what actually worked and what didn’t.

In this post, I’ll break down how I launched a monetized cloud AI app — ComfyUI Cloud — from scratch, with no team and no funding.

Quick Context: What is ComfyUI?

ComfyUI is a powerful, node-based workflow tool for running Stable Diffusion models. It lets you customize every part of the image generation pipeline, but it’s typically used by technical users running models on their desktops.

At the time, it was a relatively niche community. The ComfyUI subreddit had around 40k users and was one of the three go-to tools in the AI art generation space.

Initially I fell into working in this space because I wanted to run this app on my laptop but I have no GPU. Deploying on the cloud was a pain (I would have to boot up a server and configure), so I thought I had an opportunity to solve a problem for non-technical users.

My approach to solving their problem was:

1. Understand the user painpoints deeply. I wanted to know exactly what users cared about so I could solve it properly. I already know the general idea is limited by GPU, but exactly what were they trying to generate? Why were they trying to generate it?
2. Build a tight feedback loop. My ideal loop for building a solution looked like this: make a small change → get user feedback immediately → use that to steer the next step.

I built a simple demo and started this problem solving approach.

1. User Research That Helped

This community exists in a Discord community called CivitAI. In this Discord, people would help each other debug issues with ComfyUI, so I would regularly join the chat and helped people out.

During the debugging sessions, I would sprinkle in questions to learn more about why they are using ComfyUI and what they thought could be improved.

I learnt:

• Most users had mid-tier GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060/3060)
• Because some workflows that require models with heavy GPU usage, they start seeking for cloud solutions such as renting a cloud GPU.
• People preferred reliability over speed

After this, I tailored my message to attract users who were trying to run these heavy-GPU-using-models.

From my analytics dashboard, I saw an increase of % from my website visitors -> signups. Though this change did drop my general website visitor traffic, I assume this is because I narrowed the scope.

2. Feedback loop

The loop was simple:

• Build a small feature
• Post to Reddit
• Track conversions and get feedback

Incrementally, I would add features to my very bare simple demo I made. Such as, adding login/signup, payments, or just general bugfixes.

After each of these features, I would aim to get ~10-100 users to try the new app so I can confirm whether these features are being used or not.

If the features are not being used, I would continue perfecting it before building an new features.

My app’s success would depend on how quickly I could repeat this feedback loop. As an engineer, building the feature is easy. Initially I had no idea how to get users to try out my app. Luckily, I landed on sharing on Reddit and it provided consistent results for 6 months

In my case, I discovered Reddit was a great medium to drive early users and get feedback. I ran 8 cycles like this over the course of 6 months.

Here’s a timeline of launches and how they performed:

Learnings from writing posts that attract users

• Posts that piggybacked on community sentiment (e.g. right after a malware scare) got higher engagement.
• Entertainment-led projects like ComfyUI Pets drove unexpected traffic.
• Clear CTAs mattered more than polish — the more direct the post, the better it did.
• Surprisingly, the use cases were very diverse. even the workflows they used were diverse and I never was able to pinpoint a specific trait here. I think in the ideal world I should.

The hard reality

Being transparent, I had a hard time turning this into a long-term business. Even though people paid, retention dropped fast.

Main reasons:

• ~50% of users hit an error on their first attempt — debugging GPU edge cases solo is hell.
• There was no organic word-of-mouth because the experience wasn’t smooth enough. I wasn’t able to get users to share their positive experience after they used the app.
• I stopped from burnout when Google changed their SEO algorithm and my search traffic dropped from sharp growth to almost nothing in 24 hours

While ComfyUI Cloud didn't become a sustainable business, it taught me valuable lessons, and hopefully ended up being a good case study I others can takeaway from⁠. My key takeaways are:

• Launch fast, if you confirm the whole user journey is there (visitor -> signup -> paying customer -> retention & shares), then you can polish after
• Find what your customers think is urgent. You can do this by talking to your demographic

Let me know what you think and what your takeaways are!