Before Midjourney, there was NightCafe — and it's still kicking
NightCafe, one of the first image generation platforms on the web, is growing and profitable -- and entirely bootstrapped.
Elle Russell, co-founder of Cairns, Australia-based NightCafe, which offers a suite of AI-powered art-creating tools, prefers to avoid the spotlight.
“I like to remain hidden behind my monitors,” she told me in a recent interview.
NightCafe is similarly low profile.
The company, which Russell helped her partner, Angus Russell, launch five years ago, doesn’t get the same publicity as some of its rivals, like Midjourney. Yet NightCafe — an entirely bootstrapped venture that’s profitable “most months,” according to Elle — has enormous reach. Its over 25 million users have created nearly a billion images with its tools.
To pull back the curtain on one of the web’s oldest generative art marketplaces, I spoke with Elle about NightCafe’s origins, some of the challenges the platform faces, and where she and Angus see it evolving from here.
A website for wall art
As NightCafe’s founding story goes, Angus had recently moved into a semi-detached house in Sydney’s Inner West area and hadn’t had a chance to decorate it with much artwork. “You should get some art; the walls are bare,” remarked one guest. And while Angus agreed, he couldn’t find any prints online that spoke to him.
So in 2019, Angus, who had a degree in design and who’d co-founded a few design-focused startups, began a side hustle: a website where people could buy and sell AI-generated art. He called it NightCafe, after Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Night Café.”