Oscar Stories - Our path to 50,000 users

Meet Dima Rubanov from Vienna, Austria.

Dima and his best friend, Matthias Neumayer, turned what started during the COVID-19 pandemic into a growing business with multiple AI-powered products.

Dima and Matthias have been friends since high school, where they first started coding and ran a small internet forum about filmmaking and politics.

Those early experiments laid the foundation for what they doing today - creating tools that make learning, storytelling, and document interaction more engaging.

This story will focus on their project Oscar Stories. An app to create personalized bedtime stories for your children.

The story told by Dima Rubanov

Our projects/products

Our first major project was Oscar Stories, an AI-powered bedtime story generator that creates personalized stories, letting kids and their families become the main characters.

The core tech stack, built with React Native and Express, has mostly stayed the same but has become more complex as we’ve grown.

Oscar Stories was just the start. We soon saw that AI could do more than just create stories. This led to LORA, an AI app designed to provide bias-reduced, child-appropriate content. We even secured a government grant to help us focus on reducing gender bias in storytelling, which is a common issue in traditional training data.

We’ve also started working on building a startup studio. This has allowed us to expand our product lineup.

Besides Oscar Stories and LORA, we’ve launched FragDasPDF, a tool that makes PDFs interactive, and Branding5, an AI-driven competitive analysis tool. Our goal is simple: to lead in every niche we enter and create high-quality products while enjoying the freedom of working with people we trust.

Launching Oscar Stories

We launched the MVP of Oscar Stories in March 2023 on Product Hunt, and we got 500 signups on the first day.

At first it was just the Product Hunt launch but then we supported it with posts on X. People started upvoting and sharing us on Product Hunt and things went from there. We got the Nr. 1 spot and were featured.

Marketing Oscar Stories

Marketing products for children has been a major challenge. Unlike other products, it’s hard to track our audience, making data-driven marketing difficult.

Despite this, we managed to get media coverage, including a feature in Wired, which opened doors to startup fairs and other live events. These events allowed us to directly engage with our users and get valuable feedback.

At the moment most of our marketing/promotion is done via SEO and ASO (App Store Optimization). Once you get more and more downloads with good reviews you rank better. This is very important to us.

Previously we’ve been featured in many newspapers and even on TV, but again - hard for us to track what worked and what didn’t work with 100% certainty.

The current state of Oscar Stories

Today, we have 50k plus downloads of the Oscar Stories app!

At Oscar Stories you get two stories for free at signup and can subscribe annually or monthly for unlimited stories. Theres is also the option to share the app for free coins or buy 10 coins.

We currently have 700+ subscribers. But note that we also have one time purchases and not only subscribers.

Please reach out to Dima Rubanov for info.

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