Wondybook: Your child as the hero of a real storybook

Hey PH 👋 We built Wondybook because we kept thinking: why do most personalized kids’ books feel generic? It’s usually either the name swap, or the face swap, or "select a character" like it's a video game from 90s. So we set ourselves a challenge. Two people: one senior backend engineer, one senior UI/UX designer. Build AI-powered children’s books that actually feel personal. We started by generating simple AI children’s stories per prompt, but soon realized that approach wouldn’t work. The real problem wasn’t writing text — it was maintaining visual consistency. The idea sounds simple: take a single photo and generate a consistent main character across an entire illustrated story, not just on the cover but on every page. In practice, it took a lot of iteration to build an AI pipeline that works reliably — not just for one child, but for any child. We tested a wide range of AI models that initially seemed promising but ultimately didn’t meet our standards. At one point, we built an entire workflow around a single core model, even though it was connected to several others in the pipeline, only to scrap it when we realized it wouldn’t scale the way we needed. We even rewrote a full visual story after recognizing the art direction wasn’t working. We set a high bar for ourselves and kept pushing to find the best possible solution. From the beginning, we knew we wanted the book to feel genuinely special and truly personal — not just something that “works.” On the surface, Wondybook is a consumer product: personalized children’s books you can gift, keep, or read at bedtime. Under the hood, it’s our experiment in what AI-powered publishing can look like when quality and character consistency actually matter. We’re starting with The Magic Canyon, and we’re already planning the next books in the collection. We’d genuinely love feedback — especially from anyone building in AI, creative tools, or print-on-demand. Happy to answer questions about the process or what worked (and didn’t)