loraiii
so this is what i worked on during the summer of 2023. it was my first actual “startup” ig, i was in talks to raise a small check of $25k for it before joining my friend on comfy workflows and got it to a little over $300 MRR (first internet money!!).
right after graduating hs and during buildspace‘s three month sf program, i found out abt this new **very efficient** way of fine-tuning models called Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) - basically instead of re-training the entire model (expensive!) like in classical fine-tuning, one can freeze the model’s weights and instead inject these matrices that reduce the amount of params you actually need to train, then you save / download only these trainable params after you’ve trained them, and finally when you want to use this LoRA you just inject it back into the model and run inference on it (an oversimplification but that’s the gist of it).
the end result being that fine-tuning the model in this way is less expensive and takes up way less storage.
the problem was that to actually train these LoRAs you needed to either run python scripts (+ setup env, pip install hella dependencies, etc.) or use some jank site so i was like why not build an actual good site where you just drag in some training samples (just images like brand assets, art style u want the model to generate, etc.), edit a couple of settings, wait a few minutes, and then get back your LoRA .safetensors file you can use on other GUIs like Automatic1111 PLUS be able to use your LoRA on the site itself after you’ve finished training it.
i built the first version in a weekend and posted about it on reddit, and it went viral lol which is how i got my first paying users, the image above is just all the push i did to distribute my site, a ton of twitter demos, r/StableDiffusion reddit posts that continued to go viral, etc.
there were some dark times here but looking back this era was so fun i was just building something i liked and i had actual people paying for it.