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Hi HN! See the offer below to use Hotpot free. I'm the founder of Hotpot (https://hotpot.ai/ https://hotpot.ai/). Hotpot helps non-designers create profession
by panabee 6y ago
Hi HN!
See the offer below to use Hotpot free.
I'm the founder of Hotpot (https://hotpot.ai/ https://hotpot.ai/). Hotpot helps non-designers create professional graphics and differs from other tools because we focus on challenges faced by developers and indie entrepreneurs.
The company was born out of frustration over App Store screenshots — existing tools were too complex and talented designers were uninterested. If you enjoy rejection, I recommend inviting designers to work on app screenshots. :P
Over time, Hotpot has grown and now offers templates for social media, e-commerce stores, Product Hunt, YouTube, and more.
Many of our features were designed with HN in mind:
- ML features, including background removal, image super-resolution, image style transfer, and color suggestions
- API-based graphic creation, allowing integration with Fastlane and other systems
- Firefox/Chrome/Safari extension screenshots and graphics
- macOS app graphics and Mac Store screenshots
- Mobile app graphics and App/Play Store screenshots
- Automation of repetitive tasks like resizing iOS icons/images and localizing strings (we preserve the localization format for apps, websites, and videos while translating with Bing/Google)
While building a graphic editor is far from rocket science, it's also painfully far from checkers. Browser disparities (argh, Firefox), font rendering (Chinese fonts), smooth ruler performance, and other hurdles conspired to make Hotpot unexpectedly complex. If there's interest, I can elaborate.
Free offer: if you want free graphics, shoot me an email. I have learned a lot from HN and would love to give back.
- troydavis 6y agoI just tried it because I thought your comment was really thoughtful. My situation is that I recently made a Facebook group for a small not-for-profit, and figured I'd see how it did at creating a new cover. It did fine :-) I think my challenge is that I'd normally use Canva for this and Canva is ridiculously good, even with the free plan. Canva sucked the oxygen out of image customization, at least for SMBs with basic requirements. I don't know whether they even try to do automation, though, so that market may be unserved. Good luck!
- panabee 6y agothanks for trying hotpot and also for the earlier advice. canva is an amazing company and $6bn gorilla so rather than compete directly, we're in the short term focused on underserved areas like apps and graphic automation with ML and APIs. as thanks for the kind feedback, i would love to offer free access to hotpot plus our ML services. what's the best way to do that? there's no contact info in your profile.
- troydavis 6y agoI'm glad you're going for the underserved areas. Thanks for the offer, too! My needs are really basic so I don't need free access, but I appreciate that you thought of it.
- sokoloff 6y agoNB: The email field in your HN profile is not shown to other people. You need to put it in "about" in your profile in order for others to see it.