Hall of fame — no. 10

Aragon

Est. 2022

Wesley Tian shipped AI headshots so bad most users got nothing usable — then fixed them by hand.

Aragon in 2022ARAGON · 2022
Aragon in 2026ARAGON · 2026

Drag the handle — Aragon, 20222026.

They were atrocious. They were so bad.Wesley Tian, The Product Market Fit Show

The ugly part. The first site was a black page promising AI design that was "10x faster, 10x cheaper." When it narrowed to headshots, the output was terrible — Wesley Tian says most users wouldn't get a single usable photo out of 250.

What they shipped anyway. He charged anyway — $30 beat a $250 photographer — and covered the gap by hand, spending up to an hour per customer fixing and re-running orders so people got something usable. Fired from his job and rejected by 30 VCs, he had little to do but care.

Now. A profitable AI-headshot company at $10M ARR in two years, on no outside funding.

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