Sparktale
Illustrated, personalised children's books, printed and shipped.
Why I built itI wanted children to learn by seeing themselves as the hero of a story, from a two-minute form instead of weeks of custom work.
- AI can now make that book well enough to print.
- Live since Jan '26, built with a partner developer.
Live at sparktale.ai
- Status
- live
- When
- Jan '26 to now
- Type
- B2C web, print
- My role
- Two founders: I own product, marketing and legal coordination
The product question
Can we reach parents who will pay for a personalised book, and what does one sale leave after every cost?
Scope
- Jan '26 to now
- from the first commit in the code repo to today
- 5 languages
- English, German, Hebrew, Spanish and Portuguese, all live in the app
Screenshot of the live site, taken Oct '26.
What I tried
Custom children's books take weeks to make, so Sparktale turns a child's name, a photo and a two-minute form into an illustrated storybook with the child as the main character.
- Books come as a printed hardcover or softcover through print-on-demand, plus a PDF, in five languages: English, German, Hebrew, Spanish and Portuguese.
- A 5-step wizard collects the child, the book type, the theme, the art style and a custom touch.
- Sign-up comes after the reader has seen the book.
- The character stays consistent across pages and single illustrations can be regenerated.
- A page-flip reader supports right-to-left for Hebrew.
- I own product, marketing and legal coordination. A partner developer leads engineering.
- I wrote a kill test before spending.
- Prose lives in a knowledge-base repo, code-coupled docs in the code repo and binaries in Drive. Decisions and reviews are dated documents.
- The compliance review was multi-jurisdiction. It was built from repo audits and jurisdiction research and red-teamed by separate agents.
Decision timeline
Started with a second founder. I own product, marketing and legal coordination. A partner developer leads engineering.
Wrote a kill test.
Built the multi-jurisdiction review from repo audits and jurisdiction research. Separate agents red-teamed it.
Checked live at sparktale.ai. It has paying customers.
Questions I asked along the way
Should the book jacket preview be on by default?
- Option rejected
- Default off, which would ship the old preview of painted sample pages and make the jacket opt-in. Any environment that forgot the setting would then run the old path without anyone noticing.
- What happened
- The brief recommended on by default, with a server-side switch that brings back three painted sample pages without a code change. The switch lets me restore the old preview; the brief records no conversion result.
What happened
Still running. Sparktale is live at sparktale.ai and has paying customers.
- Reaching parents was the hard part.
What I took from it
- A kill test written before the first euro of spend. It went into step 4, Make a decision, of the nine steps.
- Dated decision records and a two-repo split for prose and code. Both are in the nine steps and their templates.
- Work handed to a partner developer as issues that say what and why. That is the distill-to-gh-issue skill.
- Growth depends on reaching parents, and one sale has to leave something after every cost: principle.