In January 2024 I quit everything to learn to code. Two years later, I'm putting my first product out there: https://LongStories.ai

It's a tool to generate long AI video stories (up to 15 minutes for now) with character consistency. Real examples: https://longstories.ai/feed

Background: on January 1st, 2024 I moved from Barcelona to the north of Vietnam (Ha Giang), rented a flat for $300 and barely went outside for 4 months. I wanted to learn to code and build my own thing. That summer, I started playing with AI video generation and fell in love with the creative process. I realized I could use my new coding skills to make it easier for myself. "Maybe I'll pay the bills with YouTube revenue", I thought.

I checked different platforms, but I didn’t like how most were focused on “going viral” or “getting rich quick”.

So I started building my own for people who want to make actual stories, not engagement bait, and who are not necessarily experts in video editing or AI.

LongStories is still early and very much a work in progress, but 4,000 people have tried it in the last 6 months. Today it supports: - videos of up to 15 minutes - character consistency (upload your reference image: dog, son, toy...) - building animated universes (for advanced creators who want to make a series, not just one video)

The hardest part is getting the scripts to be long and good, and constantly adapting to new AI models (doing evals on things like script quality is especially hard, since some models are good at certain genres and bad at others).

Character consistency is another hard problem. Models that accept reference images (like Nano Banana, Flux, Seedream, etc.) have been a big help, but it still requires fairly complex multi-step workflows to keep characters consistent at scale.

One thing that’s been unexpectedly rewarding is seeing some users actually make money with it. YouTube monetization still favors long-form content, and several creators are already earning from stories made with the tool.

PS: about the name. I chose LongStories.ai because at the time it seemed clear to me that the biggest challenges were: A) making long videos, and B) telling good stories. It is technically hard to do both, and the market pushes you elsewhere (ads, viral ai slop, UGC, etc). Having those constraints in the name has helped me stay focused on what I'm trying to build.

Show HN: I built a tool to make 15-minute AI videos with character consistency