Our own product: personalized photo puzzles for kids. A parent uploads a photo, picks a magical world, our AI repaints the child as its star, and a premium jigsaw prints and ships to their door.
The Curious Thing is our second in-house product, and it proves a different claim than Song Cage: that we can take an idea into the physical world. Personalized kids' gifts are a real category (storybooks, name art), but nobody was making the child the star of a printed jigsaw, with their real face somewhere impossible. A parent uploads a photo, picks a magical world, and our AI repaints their kid as its star. They approve a proof, and a premium puzzle prints and ships to the door. There was no prototype, no reference product, and no category playbook to follow. We designed the brand, the product, and the entire pipeline from a blank file, and went from first commit to a live paid pipeline in five days. For a product aimed at parents, the trust engineering mattered as much as the pipeline.
The pipeline runs upload to doorstep. A parent's photo lands in R2, a server-side prompt template for the chosen world drives the AI portrait, and the parent reviews a watermarked proof. Nothing prints until two gates pass, explicit proof approval and confirmed Stripe payment, in either order. At fulfillment, the render gets a print-resolution upscale pass, then Printify prints and ships the puzzle, driven entirely through its API with durable Cloudflare Queues in between, so any failed step retries without re-running the rest. Every external write carries an idempotency key, which means a retry can never double-charge or double-print. Every inbound webhook (Stripe, Printify, generation) is signature-verified and logged for replay-safe processing. And the privacy promises are enforced by infrastructure: photos auto-delete from R2 within 24 hours of fulfillment, models never train on customer images, and a child's name is never sent to a model.
The Curious Thing is live at thecuriousthing.com and taking real orders. Fourteen fantasy worlds, grouped adventure, fantasy, and seasonal, each with its own tuned server-side prompt template. Watermarked proofs with embedded checkout right on the proof page, format switching after the proof, lifecycle email from proof-ready through in-production, and a promo system that can run a site-wide sale from a single date-gated flag. The marketing surface shipped the way everything Notus ships: guides, a blog, and schema structured for AI engines from line one. The claims on the landing page (proof before print, photos deleted within 24 hours) aren't copy, they're enforced by the R2 lifecycle rules, the dual print gates, and the watermark that only comes off after payment clears.
AI-powered trading card platform with a custom multi-model image pipeline, nano banana powering the in-app editor, a 3D card-slab viewer, and a full creator marketplace. Built for its founders from an idea, no visual rough draft.