Fernando Pessagno did not begin aiCarousels with a polished startup plan. He was an Argentinian product designer living in Sweden on a work visa, and one day before a vacation he learned he might lose his full-time job. Instead of relaxing or applying for jobs, he gave himself the length of the vacation as a constraint: ten days to build and launch something in public.

The idea came from domain experience. Fernando had worked with marketing teams and knew that social-media carousels were time-consuming even for designers. For non-designers, template tools often created a second problem: too many fonts, colors, layouts and manual resizing decisions. aiCarousels focused on the opposite promise. It would help creators make a good-enough LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok carousel quickly, with AI draft text, simple design controls and auto-resizing layouts.

The first version was intentionally narrow. Fernando used Outseta for authentication, billing, Stripe payments and support, and concentrated his coding time on the carousel editor, slide controls, templates, AI content generation and export flow. He documented the build on X and YouTube, then launched on Product Hunt. The product finished ninth product of the day and, more importantly, five people paid on launch day, creating about $50 MRR from the first release.

That small paid signal turned into a real SaaS. Starter Story later reported aiCarousels at $5,000 MRR with roughly 95% profit margins, beating Fernando's original 12-month goal by the six-month mark. By 2026, his broader portfolio had expanded to ResumeMaker.Online, GeneratePPT and related free tools, but the useful lesson from aiCarousels stays simple: domain knowledge plus a brutal launch constraint can beat a bloated roadmap. He sold time saved, not design software for its own sake.