Introduction: The Artist in Residence
The world has a dinner party to thank for the creation of NightCafe, an app that harnesses the power of AI to recreate any photo from your collection in virtually any art style, pattern or texture you can feed it. When NightCafe founder Angus Russell invited a few friends to his house in Sydney, Australia and one of them commented that his walls looked a little bit bare, he decided to take action.
AI generated art had been around for years, so Angus assumed he’d quickly be able to find a service that could take his favorite family and travel photos and produce cool, attention grabbing art that he could then have printed, delivered and up on his walls in time for the next barbecue.
However, after spending hours looking through online art galleries and not finding anything that seemed personal enough, he was surprised to find that no good option existed.
Unwilling to leave those walls bare or impersonal, Angus set out to build a solution. He did the hard work of finding an Open Source algorithm, getting it up and running on a cloud computer with a GPU, creating a handful of arresting artworks and sending them off to be printed by various online printers so he could inspect the quality first-hand.
After ironing out the process and adding the first four original NightCafe creations to his once bare walls (a render of the Sydney Opera House, a stylized Eiffel Tower from a photo he took in Paris, a Van Gogh version of Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon and a very early, not-very-good render of the Golden Gate bridge in the style of an old oil painting) Angus recognized an opportunity.
He decided to build an interface, make it a business and NightCafe was born.
OOM…G!!
Initially, finding a perfect platform to run the NightCafe algorithm on was a challenge. With NightCafe’s early platforms, out-of-memory errors were common and customers would often click “Create” only to wait 15-minutes and receive an “Error” message.
One of the original platforms also experienced an outage that rendered NightCafe unavailable for two whole weeks. During that time, Angus fielded loads of messages from unhappy customers who’s creations continuously failed. Undoubtedly, everyone who tried NightCafe Creator for the first time during those two weeks never returned and others who may have been regular users gave up and switched to a different service – creating a huge speed bump to NightCafe’s growth.