Ricardo Ghekiere bought BetterPic for $1 when the product was still rough, the AI struggled with consistency, and very few people believed AI headshots could become a real business.

Less than three years later, BetterPic had grown into a multimillion-dollar company. But while everyone else was celebrating AI image generation, Ricardo was already thinking about what comes next. That thinking led to BetterStudio, a $2.2M venture-backed bet on AI fashion photography that ultimately failed—and to Runflow and Patricia, the companies that emerged from everything the team learned along the way.

We talked about growing BetterPic through affiliate marketing, why they moved from closed-source to open-source AI models, what actually happens after you raise venture capital, why product-market fit can't be bought with headcount, and how a non-tech ...