Aesty: From Manual Wardrobe Entry to $10K MRR

$10K MRR · $70K total revenue · 680 paying customers · 1.7M organic views

Nadia Zueva kept looking at a full closet and thinking she had nothing to wear.

The problem was that every wardrobe app she tried wanted her to photograph all her clothes first.

She didn't want to do that.

As a deep learning engineer she knew the phone could do that part itself.

So Nadia and her husband Andrei built the app they wanted to exist.

What is Aesty?

Aesty builds a digital closet from your camera roll in about two minutes.

It then creates outfits from clothes you already own.

The app also includes try-on and an AI stylist.

The main idea was to remove the biggest problem with wardrobe apps: manually adding every piece of clothing.

The First Version

The current product wasn't the first version of Aesty.

The team launched an earlier version in 2024 then learned what didn't work.

They started building the current version in March 2025.

The first version was built without vibe coding.

Nadia trained the segmentation and classification models herself while Andrei wrote the Swift code manually.

"Could you imagine haha"

They initially built the styling core first. Outfits, try-on and the AI stylist.

The automatic closet import came later.

That turned out to be the most important part.

Getting the First Customers

The first customer was Nadia's sister.

The first 10 customers came from organic posting.

Nadia shared the building journey on social media. She thinks many of the first customers were builders trying Aesty.

The team tried X, Reddit, SEO, Product Hunt, paid ads, communities, cold outreach, Pinterest, referral programs and Telegram.

What Worked

Building in public worked.

Nadia posted every day for 200 days before they had the feature that eventually went viral.

Then they released the feature that automatically builds the closet from the camera roll.

It generated 1.7M organic views and some of their best revenue days.

X worked well for the build-in-public audience.

TikTok and Instagram brought actual users.

Micro-influencer collaborations also worked.

Eventually they turned paid ads off completely.

Revenue stayed flat.

Organic content and creators were carrying the growth.

What Didn't Work

Paid user acquisition didn't make sense at their scale.

The ads worked mechanically but the economics were much worse than organic.

Free trials also didn't improve conversion.

The biggest mistake was spending months polishing features while ignoring the first two minutes of the app.

Users were leaving before seeing any value because filling the closet was manual.

The Timeline

2024

Launched the first version of Aesty.

March 2025

Started building the current version.

June 2025

Got funded by Antler and launched on Product Hunt.

August 2025

Started UGC marketing with an agency. It didn't work.

November 2025

Started paid ads. They didn't work either.

February 2026

Fired the marketing contractors and took everything in-house.

Aesty got a viral spike but also saw crazy churn.

September 2026

Back to $10K MRR.

A new launch generated 1.7M views.

Now the team is focused on retention, churn and acquisition.

The Biggest Lesson

Nadia's biggest lesson is that distribution is something founders need to learn themselves.

"Distribution is a skill you build and absolutely not a task you outsource."

The team also learned that virality without retention doesn't mean much.

They had one viral spike with crazy churn.

After fixing the onboarding they got another viral wave that actually converted into revenue.

"Nobody can want your product's success as much as you do."

Nadia says they are not the fastest growing app and she still makes a lot of mistakes.

But she genuinely enjoys the process.

"I believe this will work! Let's go!"