When Fatima Yusuf decided to leave Shopify in the summer of 2022, she planned to spend more time with her family and think about what she wanted to do next. During her more than four years at the company, Yusuf led Shopify’s ecosystem business, working with third-party developers and partners who build tech for Shopify’s millions of merchants.
But it wasn’t long before Yusuf was ready to launch her own business. She ended up starting two businesses, one of which is ImagineCreate AI, an AI imaging tool that officially launches Tuesday with an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Precursor Ventures.
ImagineCreate AI was directly inspired by a brand Yusuf started shortly after leaving Shopify. She had decided to start a beauty oil brand for skin and hair, which she plans to launch this holiday season.
While building the beauty oil brand, she discovered a different problem: taking great product photos can be really hard. Founders have to make sure they have samples ready from their manufacturers, reserve a studio, book a photographer, allow time for photo shoots and editing, and customize the photos for the channels they’re selling on.
“What people don’t realize is that your photos are pretty much everything,” Yusuf told Insider. “It’s entirely the way buyers are choosing your product online.”
Yusuf said there was a delay in getting her beauty oil sample ready, which set back her brand’s launch. ChatGPT was released at the time she was beginning work on the beauty oil brand, and she was using some AI tools to speed things up.
That prompted the idea for ImagineCreate AI. The app can take in a product shot, remove the background, and generate a new background to fit a user’s preferences using AI. A merchant could say they want their product to be pictured on a vanity in a bedroom, for example, or in a kitchen with white cabinets and hardwood floors. The app can also tailor image captions and descriptions for the intended sales channel.
ImagineCreate AI is launching as a web app that can be integrated into Shopify merchants’ admin.
“This whole process takes weeks and months, and I wanted to bring it down to seconds and minutes,” Yusuf said.
Drawing on her Shopify experience
Yusuf has a deep background in e-commerce. Before she joined Shopify in 2018, she cofounded a home decor e-commerce company called Tressle.
But this is her first time building in the AI space. Though she doesn’t come from a technical background, she used AI tools to help her code some parts of the app before hiring a small team of developers. The app currently uses Stable Diffusion models, but Yusuf said the team is currently integrating more models that will be released soon. The goal is to give merchants choices so they can opt for the model that best suits their needs.
She said it was important to her to provide access to AI for anyone who might want to use it.
“A lot of merchants that I talk to are like, yeah, I totally want to use AI, but I can’t spend my day in Discord. I don’t know how to access this stuff,” Yusuf said. “What I really want to do is simplify the access that they have to the technology.”
Launching ImagineCreate AI on the Shopify App Store brings Yusuf’s entrepreneurial journey full circle. Her job at Shopify entailed working with the e-commerce company’s third-party partners. There are more than 10,000 apps on Shopify’s App Store, helping merchants with functions like marketing, discounting, and shipping.
Working on the ecosystem business gave Yusuf a front-row seat to all of the technology being built for e-commerce entrepreneurs.
“I wanted to build something that I thought could make a difference in the lives of a lot of people and get in the hands of a lot of merchants,” she said. “This is just me also validating that I believe in the opportunity that exists in the ecosystem equally as much outside.”
Yusuf is one of dozens of Shopify alumni who have gone on to pursue entrepreneurship full-time.
Working at Shopify, she said, requires thinking about how “you scale really important platforms where your customer is a business owner themselves, and has all these different problems, and they’re relying on your service for a key part of their business.”
“A lot of founder-type entrepreneurs are drawn to that company,” she said.
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