The Story
Nico built Neural Frames, an AI-powered platform to create music videos. He left his career as a physicist to build this tool, and it now makes $100K/month with a team of five.
As Nico shares: "I've been a physicist in my previous life and was also always an active musician. And in the end of 2022, I started building Neural Frames. It was kind of my first full stack software project ever. And the first year I built it as a solopreneur and now we are a team of five and last month we made $100,000."
Key Insights
The Career Change
"Deep down I must say I was never ultra passionate about physics. I was good in it and so I kept on doing it. But I always had the feeling that there would be more for me somehow and I wanted to build something that affects people in the real world."
"In 2018, I ran the first scientific simulations and discovered that I really like programming. When I was done with my PhD in 2020, I joined a deep tech startup working kind of at the intersection of computer vision and physics."
What Neural Frames Does
"Neural Frames is a tool to create AI music videos. If you're a musician, you need lots of visual content. For every song that you put out, you need visual content to go along with it. And traditionally, visual content is actually kind of hard to produce. So, we try to make this easier."
"Most of our users are hobby or indie musicians, some professional musicians, too. And then there's a lot of people actually that create music now with AI music tools and come to Neural Frames to make music videos for these songs."
Finding the Idea
"I believe very strongly in the 'around find out' principle. So meaning just do many random things all across the board. Then something magical happens actually when multiple of these things that you've done in the past combine. For instance, in my case, I was doing computer vision and then music a lot. And turns out that these two can meet in the field of AI animation for music videos."
SEO Validation Tip
"What I find useful to spot ideas is I use SEO tools such as Ahrefs. If you have an idea, try to find a keyword that people might be looking for this idea. If it has a certain volume, let's say more than thousand monthly searches or something and a low difficulty, it means you're on to something because people are searching for something and there's not already thousand solutions for it."
The Power of Niching Down
"Niching down was a huge unlock for us actually. I had no clear use case. The tagline on the landing page was 'text to video for everyone' which is really not great to be honest."
"Imagine the following scenario. You're a musician. You come to a site, it says 'text to video for everyone' or 'AI video generator' and then you already need to do a mental step. 'Hm, maybe I can do music videos here,' right? Some people will not do this. So, you lose already some people versus you come to a site, it says, bam, 'this is the platform to create music videos.' This is what you've been waiting for, dear musician."
Growth Strategy
The Hacker News Launch
"The first internet money I made with a post on Hacker News. I posted on Hacker News kind of a week after I set this live. The whole product looked terrible. I think this actually resonated with the crowd on Hacker News who are kind of, you know, a bit nerdy and it didn't look like a commercial product at all."
"It reached, I think, top six on a Sunday which just blew up my phone. I was having dinner with friends and saw 350 people in the last 30 minutes on the site and ran home to try to keep the GPUs alive."
The Indie Hacker Card
"I played the indie hacker, solopreneur card aggressively. In the footer of the site that says 'no VC money, just a tiny company in love with text to videos.' I tried to keep it very personal. My photo was everywhere. I recorded the YouTube tutorials and I think there is some value in that. I think people buy from people and not from companies."
Business Numbers
- •$100K/month revenue
- •~1,500 paying customers
- •~100,000 monthly active visitors
- •1.5 million videos generated on the platform
- •Team of 5
Tech Stack & Costs
- •Cursor (coding)
- •Python (backend)
- •Next.js (frontend)
- •RunPod (GPUs)
- •Fal (text-to-video APIs)
- •PostHog (analytics)
- •Slack (communication)
- •Linear (task tracking)
- •Notion (documentation)
- •Ahrefs (SEO)
- •Intercom (customer support)
- •Email Octopus (newsletters)
- •Custom Telegram bot (server alerts)
Monthly Costs
- •GPUs and text-video APIs: ~$45,000/month
- •Servers, storage, hosting: ~$5K/month
- •Cursor: ~$1,000/month
- •Email Octopus: $300/month
- •Fal: $200/month
- •PostHog: $120/month
- •Ahrefs: $110/month
- •Intercom: $100/month
AI Opportunities in 2025
"Customizable media at the moment is very interesting. I would love to have an AI podcast generator."
"Voice mode and audio interface is very interesting. I would love to have an executive coach who I can talk to on my way to the office and just it has access to my calendar and knows what's up."
Key Advice
"Don't be scared. There's really no reason to be scared to be honest because there's nothing to lose. You will learn so much by switching careers, by building something your own that you will easily make up for it later on, even if it doesn't work out."
"People should also not be scared of the technical challenges. It's never been easier to build something. It's incredible. With these AI tools, you feel like a superhuman."
"The most important part is try to solve a problem and just focus on solving the problem for somebody. Somebody pays for a problem solved. They don't pay for the tech around it. They don't care about this."
Resources
- •Neural Frames: https://www.neuralframes.com/
- •Follow Nico on Twitter