Not giving up, going indie

The photo problem

The product came out of the job search itself. Every application wanted a profile, and every profile wanted a photograph. Before anyone properly reads a resume, they open your LinkedIn. Mine had no good headshot, and for a fresher applying remotely, that photo is most of the first impression.

The obvious fix is to go and get a photo taken, so I looked into what that would involve. Getting a professional photo taken assumes a few things about your life. That there is a studio near you. That you can pay for a session, which meant a couple of hundred dollars. That you can give up a morning. That you own something to wear that reads as professional in the way the person on the other side of the application expects it to.

In a tier-3 city, at home with my family and without a job, I could not clear most of those. So I did what almost everybody does. I used a photo I already had, knew while I was attaching it that it was not right, and felt slightly worse about the application than I had before.

Building the first version

I did not set out to start a company. I wanted one photograph, and then I wanted to know why getting one was so hard.

The first version came together with help from my brother’s college friends, who knew considerably more about training models than I did at the time. GoStudio went live in January 2025.

It was not good.

So I asked strangers to say so. I put GoStudio up on r/roastmystartup and asked people to tell me what was wrong with it. They did, in detail, and most of it was fair.

The faces came back close but not right, which is a worse failure than being obviously wrong. If a photo is clearly fake you delete it and move on. If it is almost you, something in it sits badly and you end up trusting the photo less rather than more. Most people could not name what was off. They just quietly did not use it.

Fixing that took months. During those months people paid me for something worse than what I had promised them, and I read every one of those emails myself. I thought about leaving this part out of this post. It stays in, because it is the reason I know what this product is actually for. The problem was never generating a nice photograph. It was generating one that a person recognises as themselves.

What it looks like now

GoStudio has more than two hundred packs now, and three or four new ones ship most weeks. I still write a short note every week about what actually shipped, partly so people can see the thing is being worked on, and partly because it is the only reliable way I stay honest with myself about how much got done.

None of that changes who answers the support email. It is still me, most days. The messages are rarely about anything grand. An upload failed. Somebody wants to know which pack suits an application they are nervous about. Somebody asks, usually very politely, why the photo does not quite look like them, and that is the message I take most seriously, because it is the one I started with.

Things break. When they do, the day stops being about the roadmap and becomes about the thing that broke, and it stays that way until it is fixed. That is a less impressive sentence than a roadmap, and a more accurate description of running this.

My dog sits through most of it, and is unimpressed by all of it.

Why it still exists

Nothing about why this exists has changed. Someone opens a job application, or a speaker page, or a profile they have been putting off updating for a year, and they need one photo that looks like them. That was my problem. It turns out to be a far more common one than I understood at the time. The only real difference now is that there is something to point people at.

What comes next

The near-term aim is narrow. More packs, better likeness, and video in the same place as the photos, so that nobody has to assemble a personal brand out of four different tools.

I am not trying to beat a good photographer. A good photographer with an hour and decent light will do better than this, and I would tell you to book one if you can. What I want is for the person who cannot get to that photographer to not be stuck attaching a cropped photo from somebody else’s wedding, which is exactly where I was.

The promise

One last thing, because it matters more to me than anything else on this page. Every image on this site is a real person. We do not generate fictional people and present them as customers. If you see a face on GoStudio, someone agreed to it being there.