Remember the PTSD of cropping 100+ headshots with the Pen tool? Aaavatar is a new AI tool automating the whole flow for HR. Here is the dev takeaway.
Remember the dark ages when we used the Pen tool to extract 100 employee headshots? Gives me PTSD just thinking about it. Well, it's 2024 and automation is finally here to save our sanity.
The maker of this tool, Thierry, shared a painfully relatable backstory: 12 years ago, he spent a summer doing grunt work—cutting out 100+ Shutterstock photos in Photoshop. Simple shapes were fine, but hair was the ultimate test of patience.
Fast forward to his current gig: the team is scaling fast. Every new hire needs a branded headshot. And he noticed Lily from HR was burning €80/mo on Figma seats just to manually standardize these photos.
Sure, background removers exist everywhere now. But none of them fit a complete, end-to-end HR workflow. So, like any fed-up dev watching inefficient manual labor, he built an app for it: Aaavatar.
What this bad boy does:
Pricing? Freemium. 6 free cutouts (split between heavy and light models), and Pro gets you unlimited. The only catch is that it's MacOS only right now.
The launch quickly grabbed over 200 upvotes. The comments were a mix of trauma bonding and tech curiosity:
Look guys, background removal isn't revolutionary. There are thousands of AI tools for that, from free APIs to built-in OS features. So why did Aaavatar get traction?
Because it solves an end-to-end workflow. Lily from HR doesn't give a damn about your neural network architecture. She just wants to drag and drop 10 messy photos and get 10 perfectly aligned, web-ready portraits by 5 PM.
The Bottom Line: You don't always need to invent a groundbreaking algorithm. Just find a highly specific, annoying corporate chore, wrap some existing APIs around it with buttery smooth UX, and sell it to the folks who hate doing that chore. Find the pain, secure the bag!
Source: Aaavatar on Product Hunt
