Founder · Story Genie AI LLC
Story Genie.
I founded Story Genie and run every part, design to build to growth. Parents turn their kid into the hero of a printed hardcover storybook.
storygeniebooks.com (opens in new tab)There’s a deeper version of this case. The engineering and business detail I keep off the open web is one unlock away, or ask me for the password. Unlock
Watch the short version · 55 seconds
Full custom, not templates: any story, any character, your own life lessons.
- Outcome
- Full personalized book preview in about 60 seconds
- Custom illustration on every page, no two books alike
- Your world and your life lessons, so kids get excited to read while they learn
- Live and delivering hardcovers across the US
- Problem
- Personalized children’s books take weeks to produce and can’t be seen before you buy, so parents don’t. Story Genie makes a custom-illustrated hardcover you can preview, complete, in about 60 seconds.
- My role
- Founded, designed, and built the product end to end
- Brand, UX, web experience, and design system
- Built the end-to-end system behind every finished book
- Growth: paid social, landing pages, conversion design
- Key calls
- Show the whole book before asking for a dollar
- Privacy-first photo handling over growth-hack data grabs
An AI-native company.
Story Genie is the company I founded to prove what AI makes possible for families: any parent can turn their child into the hero of a custom hardcover, any story, any character. The hard design problem was never the technology, it was trust, how do you make something this effortless still feel like a gift a parent is proud to give? Every decision served that. The demos below show the original preview flow and the current homepage.
Designed to feel effortless.
The hard part was never the AI, it was making something this powerful feel effortless and safe enough to trust. So I designed the whole journey around one promise: show the magic before asking for anything. Four steps, one clear reveal, no signup wall.
- 01A photo or a few questionsTwo low-effort ways in, so parents start where they are. No account, no friction.
- 02AI writes and illustratesThe child becomes the hero, with the reading level tuned to their age. I direct the system and hold the bar on quality; it does the producing.
- 03Preview the whole book, freeThe inverted funnel: see every page in about a minute and edit until it’s right, before a dollar changes hands.
- 04Order the keepsake hardcoverThe payoff, a matte hardcover at the door in 9–12 days. The uploaded photo is redrawn, then deleted, privacy as a design decision.
Everything, end to end.
Founding Story Genie meant owning every layer, not just the design. It started long before the first page existed: research with parents, competitive research across the personalized-book market, wireframes and flows, and the business planning to make it real. The hardest technical problem was character consistency: keeping a child recognizable as themselves across every page, scene, and art style, so the book feels personal and never generic. Beneath that, I built the production infrastructure that turns a few answers into a finished, print-ready hardcover, reliably and at quality. When a version was not good enough, I rebuilt it, more than once, until it was, and I taught myself whatever the next problem required so nothing could stall it. Three years in, I am still the one driving it. And it is a real business, not a portfolio piece. Standing the company up meant running the whole thing: the operations, the automation, the finances and filings, and the work of turning a launch into a business that pays for itself. Strategy, research, design, build, and the business itself, all mine, end to end.
Built like a real company, not a demo.
Under the magic is real engineering, held to a high bar end to end. It’s a real company that takes payment and mails a hardcover to a family’s door, and I run the whole thing myself.
The part I keep off the open web
There’s a deeper version of this: the engineering and the decision-making underneath the product. I keep the specifics off the open web so I’m not handing a competitor the playbook. If we’re talking, ask me for the password and I’ll walk you through all of it.
That’s not it. Ask me for the current password.
Preview before purchase.
Most personalized-book sites make you buy before you see it. Story Genie inverts that: from one uploaded photo, the child becomes the hero of a full, custom-illustrated book, previewed free in about a minute, in any art style. Flip through the transformation below. This is the preview experience I designed and built.
Turn the pages yourself.
The spreads above are stills. This opens the real thing: the live, page-turning flipbook on the Story Genie site, a whole book you can read start to finish. Go turn the pages.
Flip through a real one From a photo to their hero.
The magic that sells the book: a parent uploads one real photo, and their child becomes the star of a finished book cover, in whatever art style fits the story. These are the actual reveals from the live product. Drag any slider to watch the transformation I designed the experience around.
Branding exploration.
Before the wordmark you see today, the brand went looking for its soul. This is the actual exploration board: dozens of mascot directions, logo lockups, wordmarks, palettes, and app icons. We retired the literal genie for the clean wordmark we landed on, but the exploration set the tone the product still carries: warm, magical, hand-made.
Growth, designed to convert.
I run growth as a design problem, not an afterthought. These are paid-social ads I designed and launched, each leading with the transformation, a real photo into a custom-illustrated hero, under a clear, straightforward offer. Privacy-first throughout: we handle photos carefully instead of grabbing data for growth’s sake.
Want the story behind this one? Ask the AI me anything about it.
