Ilan (00:00)
All right, so where do we start David? think I'm answering my own question. Three, two, one. It's gonna be one of those mornings.

David (00:14)
Alright, I wanted

to ostensibly seem like you're involved, but let me drive this entire...

Hey everybody, this is Prompt and Circumstance. My name's David. And the holidays are just around the corner. So why don't we create a clothing shop for that?

Ilan (00:29)
and I'm Ilan

Amazing. Can't wait.

Alright David, so what's the idea here? This is a product management podcast. We talk about AI tools. So where's the angle?

David (00:59)
Yeah. All right. So there's several. Well, first of all, ⁓ I previously had looked for funny product management or tech related ⁓ shirts or clothing, and I couldn't find any. so there's seems there seems to be a gap in the market for that. Secondly, you know, with all of the AI tools that are out there, ⁓ never has it been this easy for people to

create a store, right? So to create a whole business, right? So you can generate, ⁓ you know, the image that you might want to put onto a ⁓ piece of clothing. And then you can connect all of that with spinning up a store and then ⁓ automating whatever you got to automate, say around marketing and sales. ⁓ And then it can be a drop ship business.

Ilan (01:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's super cool. I'm excited to start on this journey. I don't know if we're gonna get all the way to the last part, but definitely by the end of the episode, we will have a store live with products that you can buy and ship to your customer's homes.

David (02:06)
Let's do it.

Ilan (02:07)
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Ilan (02:37)
So where should we start, David?

David (02:38)
don't we start off by thinking of say a brand. I think that'd be really fun. then why don't we think about

All right, how is it that we would actually create these ⁓ shirts or clothing ⁓ and explore that a little bit? And then maybe why don't we actually go through the process of ⁓ generating maybe some images and ⁓ seeing what that whole process is like. I think we're going to learn a lot.

Ilan (03:04)
Yeah, by the end of this, we will have a live store with products to ship. So we're going to take you through the whole journey here and we'll save the marketing and flywheel to get your customers for another episode.

David (03:20)
That's right.

Ilan (03:21)
right, David, you took on the branding. So what did you do to get us to our store's name?

David (03:25)
So I thought it would be pretty funny to call it Devil Wears Product. Just throwing in that product management connection there. And so I was thinking, well, why don't we ideate on some potential logos? So what I did was I have a Notebook LM.

Ilan (03:29)
Mm-hmm.

David (03:43)
where there's information on there on how to generate a good ⁓ imagen prompt. And so I'd use that to generate some ideas. Let's have a look.

Okay, so here's some examples where I provided this generated prompt ⁓ and here's what it came up with. I think it's trying really hard for it to be product related. Like I think it's trying to show a JIRA board here or a Kanban board, ⁓ but ⁓ it's not bad. So, you know, we've got the options over here to generate four different versions of it. We also have options to

Ilan (04:10)
Mm-hmm.

David (04:20)
to set the aspect ratio, I set it to be a square. I think that would work best. So I tried a few different iterations on here. Here's one with the 1960s aesthetic with pop art style and so forth. And I think that's way too

Ilan (04:38)
What to you makes a good logo? Like what are you going for here?

David (04:42)
I don't know, it's just fucking random. Hang on, let me, I...

Ilan (04:44)
Regenerating

until until you get something that inspires you hey nothing wrong with that

David (04:48)
Yeah, yeah. So,

so, you know, I think it's one of those things where maybe this is being in the spirit of agile, where it's like, I don't know what I want until I see And I'm not sure that I like what I'm seeing so far. with two data points, we can make a line.

Ilan (04:58)
Mm-hmm.

David (05:09)
So down here with the pop art style, that's too busy. And up here, I appreciate that it's simpler. And so maybe why don't we trend in that direction? Why don't we continue to move in that direction of keeping it simple?

right, so trending in the direction of being more minimalist, I gave Imagen a Prompt a minimalist logo for Devil Wears Product, where the V has red horns and the font is modern. And so we have three decent logos here that I think we can probably go with. ⁓ Like for example, this third one here, that's not bad. If we full screen this, you can see how that looks.

I think it's usable for now. I'm sure we can tweak it later. But it does match the sort of minimalist aspect that I was hoping for while still being modern.

Ilan (05:59)
Love it. Let's ship it.

David (06:00)
Let's ship it.

Ilan (06:01)
All right, so now we have a brand and a store name. Now we need to create a product to go into that store.

So you and I, ideated offline and we settled on an ugly Christmas sweater for the season. And we came up with what we think is a pretty funny ⁓ product related slogan to put on the sweater. So let me show you where we ended up and how we got here.

Ilan (06:25)
David, what I'm gonna show now is how I got to a design for our product in the store. This was difficult the first time, but what I can show here is how in about five minutes you can get to a working product that you can have live in your store.

David (06:47)
All right, sounds good. So you're in ⁓ GPT and you're using

Ilan (06:50)
I'm in

I found between ChatGPT and Gemini with Nano Banana, GPT actually had better performance for creating just a raw design for a sweater where Nano Banana really thrives is keeping people's faces or images like that static while changing other aspects of the image. So I'm gonna put in

David (07:15)
Got it.

Ilan (07:17)
actually a very simple prompt just saying we need a product management themed ugly Christmas sweater that says Agile in the streets, Waterfall in the sheets. And I let it know that I just need the image pattern to upload it to Printify.

David (07:32)
Okay.

Ilan (07:33)
And even if we're not gonna use Printify, it's fine, it gives GPT the context that this is just the image that it needs to create that's gonna be uploaded onto the clothing.

All right, and here we are. So GPT made us an ugly Christmas sweater design. It's got some patterns on there as well as something that represents our image. And so now we can take this, we'll download it, and then the next step is to remove the background. And have learned AI is not the best tool for this. This is a deterministic step.

So we're actually going to go over into

David (08:16)
And, you know, for, for those watching, I mean, you'll notice that the words are all spelled correctly. ⁓ you know, the type is, is all like sized. Well, there's no sort of smudging or blurring. you know, this sounds like it's normal now, but, you know, it wasn't too long ago that people would, chuckle at AI image generators and say that, well, they can't do text very well.

Ilan (08:43)
All right, here we are in Canva and I like Canva as a tool. I use it pretty frequently for just basic image editing. You can use Adobe Express as well. There are a lot of options out there, but we're gonna go into the photo

All right, and here we are. So we're gonna edit this image. We're gonna use the background remover. And there we go, it pretty

We're gonna get the pattern out of the dropship service. So no need for the pattern at the top and bottom. We're just gonna crop this.

David (09:13)
And the background removal feature that's available for free. Is it?

Ilan (09:19)
The background remover feature I think is a pro feature. I signed up for a 30 day free trial.

David (09:25)
I see.

you know, for those who might not have a paid Canva subscription, the alternative, as Ilan mentioned, of using Adobe Express, that app allows you to remove backgrounds for free.

Ilan (09:41)
All right, so once we downloaded that image, we can go into our Dropship service. In this case, we're using Knitwise, which is a service that can create knitted sweaters and their pricing is pretty reasonable. So we're gonna go ahead and create a product template here.

and we'll upload our new image here. And what I like here is that you can also just select from a template that they have where you're able to drop in your image to a pattern that they already use. So what do you think David? This... ⁓

David (10:19)
That's cool. I like I like

that one right there. Yeah. Yeah.

So somebody had the job of coming up with like 30 ugly sweater designs. That's something.

Ilan (10:30)
That's right.

And you get four colors. So we're going to update the colors like this. Solid. And we are good to go. Continue to the next step.

And here we are. So one thing I'll mention is that you should go through a process of updating each individual template to make sure that it's sized exactly right. We're going to skip that for today.

but you end up with this great little mockup that now exists.

David (11:12)
Hey, look at that.

Ilan (11:13)
And then we created a second design as well with a slightly different image for the same text.

Ilan (11:20)
All right, David, we were really intent on using the new lovable Shopify integration to get our store up and running. And ⁓ what words would you use?

to describe how well that went.

David (11:36)
⁓ I'm reminded of some Greek mythology. Sisyphus comes to mind. It was a bit Sisyphusian.

Ilan (11:39)
Yeah

Yeah, so ⁓ what we're going to show ahead is a few clips of what we went through trying to put together the store. And if you hang on, you'll understand why it didn't work and then what we actually did do to launch our Shopify store.

Ilan (12:03)
With that, the next step was to create a Shopify store. And we haven't done anything here. This is not customized at all. The only thing we did was give it a name and link the product to Knitwise through their Shopify app. And I'll prove this by showing you that this is a bone stock.

Shopify store with no customization at all. It even has fake products in here. So we're going to see next how we're going to create a store experience through lovable.

David (12:34)
Let's do it.

All right, so let's move on to something ⁓ more AI powered. You know, we made the logo, we made the ⁓ design of the sweater. Here's another AI powered tool that we're gonna use, Lovable, ⁓ and we're gonna use this to create the actual storefront.

Ilan (12:51)
That's right, and we specifically chose Lovable because they have announced an integration with Shopify. So we are very curious to see how this will create our store based just on our logo.

David (13:03)
All right, let's go. have provided a very brief prompt, which is create a Shopify store for a brand selling product management themed clothing line using the attached logo. We're challenging, we're challenging its language understanding. Okay. the store is called devil wears product matched the modern.

Ilan (13:15)
You

David (13:26)
playful theme and we've attached the generated logo.

So thought for 26 seconds and has come back with a plan.

Ilan (13:33)
So this is where we're running into a roadblock, which is that we cannot connect to our existing Shopify store. It appears that each time you want to create a store with lovable, you have to open a new connection, create a new store, basically. And for a peek behind the curtain,

This is our second attempt at creating the store and we were unsuccessful in following the instructions that Lovable gave us. ⁓ One might even say it hallucinated some instructions for connecting an existing store.

Alright.

David (14:17)
It, it, you know, lovable, I think because lovable is picking up on the product management aspect of it, it's trying really hard to include a and charts in the background.

Ilan (14:26)
You

David (14:29)
Because nothing says, what does that say? Because nothing says I prioritize the backlog like winning a sweater with Gantt charts at your holiday party.

Ilan (14:38)
Yeah, doesn't make much sense.

David (14:40)
I think, ⁓ I think this is,

this is certainly an improvement. ⁓ so at least the background is white, which matches the logo. it's got the right kind of font, right? A sans serif font. So that's all right. That's an improvement.

Ilan (14:54)
Mm-hmm.

go with this and then we'll add our product and see if we can start selling.

David (15:03)
Yeah, sounds good. We can always tweak this design later.

Ilan (15:07)
That's right. As we always say, if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you've launched too late.

David (15:16)
All right. So we just spent half an hour trying to figure out how to connect Lovable to an existing Shopify store. And here's the answer. You can't. Sorry. You got to make a new store. ⁓ that just what's MVP? What's that? ⁓ so

What we are going to do now is claim the store and ⁓ then modify it so that it's going to be how we want that store to be. Thankfully, we did not do a whole lot of work in configuring our store. I can only imagine those who might be going through the same process and ⁓ spending a couple hours making the store just perfect, ready to then make their site, only to be let down by Lovable.

Ilan (16:01)
That's right.

Okay, we're gonna claim our Shopify store.

Booyah. All right.

well here we are. I've claimed the store. We've added our product through the Knitwise integration, confirmed that the product exists. Not showing up here in our main screen, which is a little suspicious, but we can go back into Lovable now and see what it does.

David (16:26)
Alright, let's go have a look.

Ilan (16:28)
So we're gonna tell Lovable that we wanted to create a rich product page for the product that we have added. Let's see what happens.

David (16:36)
Okay, so it says that it has created a rich product page. good.

Ilan (16:39)
Of course

it's also told us there's no products found.

David (16:42)
Yeah, amazing.

So you're on the paid plan, right?

Ilan (16:45)
for lovable yes, I'm on the paid plan. Thanks to Lenny.

David (16:47)
Okay. Well, I'm glad that this is a paid plan on Lovable because of all these iterations that we're going through. We might very well have burned through what's available in the free tier.

Ilan (16:59)
That is true. Okay, interestingly.

Lovable is telling us this should already be working.

And let's see. This is what happens when you try to access the storefront from Shopify.

David (17:14)
Okay. All right. Well,

Ilan (17:17)
Yep, it's just a blank page with an error.

Ilan (17:19)
But while I was trying to debug this, I was like, I wonder how long this would take if I just did it myself using Shopify.

David (17:26)
⁓ look at that! my god!

Ilan (17:29)
And hey, look at this.

David (17:35)
That's amazing!

Ilan (17:37)
So my learning here is that...

AI may seem like the perfect tool for solving most problems, but in this case, is a problem that's better solved with deterministic ⁓ functionality. Yeah.

David (17:55)
Just go old school.

so can somebody actually go onto here and buy one?

Ilan (18:00)
Here ya go David, I'm sending you via Signal the Shopify

David (18:05)
⁓ okay.

Here ya go all right. Look at that.

Ilan (18:09)
You're in.

David (18:10)
I'm in. Sweet.

Ilan (18:12)
Look at that.

David (18:13)
Ha! Nice!

Ilan (18:13)
So

we're here, can add, I'm like a 2XL these days. On a good day. Add it to cart.

David (18:21)
I could.

Ilan (18:25)
Check out. There's some issues with the currency conversions, so I'm gonna fix that in Shopify, but...

general, hey, we got a working store here and...

the AI portion of it was really related to creating the branding and creating the image for the product itself, as well as, you know, this hero image that's in the store, obviously AI generated as well. And all that took

David (18:48)
Mm-hmm.

Ilan (18:56)
Apart from the product itself, which I mentioned earlier, a knit sweater is maybe not the ideal product to choose if you want to make a quick buck by ⁓ creating an online store. But apart from that, the whole thing could be done in under an hour.

David (19:14)
Yeah, ⁓ this is a great lesson learned. were really some surprises as we went through this. look, we now have ⁓ an official side gig right here.

Ilan (19:25)
Yeah,

that's right. So join us next time when we talk about how to create that marketing pipeline with AI. And I think that's where we're going to be able to find more success with AI tools is how do you generate images, generate copy, have create a flywheel

With that, that's this week's episode. Thank you all for joining. Do you have any ideas for us for how you've used AI to help start up a side hustle? Let us know. We'd love to hear. Otherwise leave us a rating and a review and we'll talk to you next week.

David (20:01)
See you next time.