Six months ago, Diana and I launched Consistent Character AI in a tiny flat in the Greater Faro Area, Portugal.

What started as a simple, no-frills app to generate AI characters has grown into a 20,000-strong community of book authors, content creators, and creative design leaders.

Meanwhile, we have learned a deep lesson: it’s one thing to make an app. It’s another to build a business that empowers people to reach their own goals. And while we love building apps, we've found helping people achieve their own goals far more fulfilling.

Today, we want to share seven profound lessons on growing a business in 2025. If you want to leverage your expertise to start your own business, these will be useful for you.

By applying the below lessons, you will be able to:

• Evolve from individual creator to a business owner
• Find the freedom to do what you love
• Earn wealth while you sleep

Let’s get right to it.

1. Always Prioritize Customer Delight

This sounds like we’re preaching to the choir, but it's painful how many startups ignore it.

As soon as they taste some success, startups jump into fundraising, hiring, and press releases. In all this, they forget the entity that actually got them there: the customer. They use bots for customer service or make them wait weeks for a generic reply.

We’ve seen too many successful startups disappear overnight because of this mistake. That’s why, we never let our users come second to anything. The feature we’re excited to launch can wait, the bug that stops you from generating better images cannot. The vacation can wait, your emails cannot. (In fact, Diana replies to your emails even when we are on vacation.)

The result? We’ve not just grown in users, but also in loyal advocates who talk about us in their circles.

Takeaway: If you make everything you say and do about your customers, you’ll get rewarded with a lifetime of loyalty and growth.

2. The Real Feedback Comes From Paid Users

Free users tell you many things about your product. Paid users tell you the truth.

First-time founders assume the best growth strategy is freebies. It will become easier to gain initial users and show investors. But what happens is that the free users who flood in are the ones who don't actually need the product. Their feedback derails development because they give you wrong signals.

​We learned this the hard way when we made our first product free. Users happily engaged until we started charging… then every customer disappeared. That’s why Consistent Character AI is a paid tool. (That and reason #6.)

Our paid users’ feedback has given us direction, focus, and a roadmap.

Takeaway: Charge for your product from Day 1. You will attract users who value what you're building, get the right feedback, and generate revenue that helps you grow.

3. Don’t Build an MVP, Build a V1

The "move-fast-and-break-things" mentality is breaking more startups than it's helping.

Too many startups rush to launch half-baked products, thinking they can pass off bugs and poor experiences as part of a Minimum Viable Product. The result is often a damaged reputation that takes years to rebuild, if it ever recovers at all.

​We take a different approach with Consistent Character AI. We spend months perfecting a feature (a polished V1) before releasing it. Instead of asking you to tolerate our learning curve, we made sure our product delivers real value from day one.

Yes, it takes longer, but our users immediately find the benefit. (As we said, customer first always.)

Takeaway: Your first impression is often your only impression. Make it count with a product that's ready for the world.

4. The Current AI Models Are the Worst They Will Ever Be

Yes, AI has limitations. Lots of them.

Startups wait for the "perfect" AI model, constantly postponing their launch until technology catches up to their vision. But they’re missing the point entirely—today's limitations are tomorrow's competitive advantages. You just have to be brave enough to build despite them.

We've embraced every constraint of current AI models and found creative ways to work around them. Instead of waiting for better technology, we're building workflows, prompt formats, and more refined processes that deliver consistent results.

When AI models improve, we'll have months or years of experience that our competitors can't match.

Takeaway: Winners don't wait for perfect tools; they experiment until they master the imperfect ones. Good things come to those who sweat.

5. Let Your Values Become The Filter For Your Decisions

In a world drowning in feature bloat, we want to be the Pixar in your pocket.

Competitors add feature after feature, hoping something will stick. Meanwhile, we’ve committed to doing one thing exceptionally well—helping storytellers bring cartoon characters to life. This is the filter we use for every decision.

Every feature request, every partnership opportunity, every potential pivot gets measured against this question: does this help our users tell better stories with consistent characters? If it doesn't, we say no, even when the object is shiny.

This laser-focus has allowed us to build deeper, more meaningful relationships with our audience instead of trying to be everything to everyone.

Takeaway: Take the time to figure out what you stand for. Then, every decision becomes easier and every customer, every user, becomes more loyal.

6. Use Limitations to Your Advantage

Your biggest constraints might become your greatest competitive advantage.

Being a 2-person bootstrapped startup means we can't compete on free credits, massive marketing budgets, or venture capital-fueled growth hacks. But rather than moping over this “disadvantage,” we've turned it into our secret weapon.

We are thoughtful about every feature, every pixel, and every customer interaction. We can't afford to waste time on vanity metrics that don't directly improve our users' lives. Hence, we keep striving to be more creative, more efficient, more connected to what actually matters to you, and more hard-working.

And the results are there to see. A 20,000-strong organic community that keeps growing and giving us more love than we give.

Takeaway: Your biggest limitations can become your greatest strengths. Just stop fighting them and start leveraging them.

7. Make Curiosity Your Unfair Advantage

The moment you stop learning is the moment you start losing.

Many successful founders get comfortable with their early wins. They stop experimenting. They stop investing in understanding the evolving needs of users. They rely on past knowledge while their competitors are discovering new insights that will define the future.

We treat every customer conversation, every industry report, and every competitor launch as a learning opportunity. Diana and I regularly block time to study our users' workflows, understand emerging trends in creative industries, and experiment with new approaches to character generation.

This continuous learning doesn't just help us improve Consistent Character AI. Sometimes, it helps us anticipate what you might need before you even ask for it.

Takeaway: The day you stop learning is the day your business starts dying, so make curiosity your competitive advantage.

​

I’d love to know which of these lessons resonated with you the most. Reply to this email and let us know. We read every single email (though we may not be able to reply to each one given our tiny team 😊).

Spotlight: Children’s Book Author Naomi Goredema

A Zimbabwean who has currently settled in Switzerland, Naomi has written 200+ children’s books over the last 10 years.

She wanted to illustrated them too, since children love to read books with pictures. But this was her biggest obstacle.

Using tools like InDesign, Photoshop, Midjourney, she would take 3 days to illustrate a character.
Using Consistent Character AI, she now does it in 30 seconds.

Naomi has illustrated 20 books in the last 4 months alone. Since the time and effort has drastically dropped, she is now working towards a creative ecosphere: Nandi Books.

Stay tuned for a detailed post on her journey to bring ancient tales for the modern world to life through her books.

​

Talk soon :)

Sachin and Diana.

​

PS. This week, we conducted a workshop to show how to use Consistent Character AI optimally for generating high-quality cartoon characters.

Close to 100 of you showed interest, and many of you showed up too 😊

Sadly, we cannot retrieve the session's recording and share it with you. (Damn technical glitches 😔)

But we will keep conducting workshops like this in the future.

Watch this space for more 👀

​

​