We are All-In — Building in Public #3
Yeah we missed last week so here you have a double take. Week 3 and 4 of building VAPAI Studio *(now renamed sideOUTsticks)* in public. We’re closing in on the end of our first semester.
Read here the next saga inside a chaotic startup using AI for original IP creation.
World, meet Low Clouds
We’ve just dropped the first content of our original IP.
Meet Lucy, she loves to explore her planet, a mix of desert landscape and humid clouds covering everything. Her mission? To discover and document every strange and magical creature she encounters.
Stay tuned to watch the micro-snack clips we are uploading, introducing Lucy, her world, the incredible people and creatures she meets. As the audience grows, so will the stories: longer, deeper, more ambitious. We are uploading 2 clips per week, just to start.
You can follow Lucy’s journey on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
Our Core Values
We just printed our first values manifesto — a small book that captures what VAPAI stands for.
We include stuff like Be Uncomfortably Excited, Obsess over Simplicity, Discipline Trumps Talent Every Time and everything else we stand for.
The manifesto is split in two: how we work (our culture) and what we create (our content).
Curious? Maybe you should come work with us.
More Commercial Opportunities [Near] Closing
Here’s the most important things moving in our pipeline:
Major client from LATAM about to seal a big project. This one can take us to have a whole other level and will shake up some things.
Conversation with a interesting international production company. Still early talks, but strong interest on both sides.
Conversation with two interesting local IPs. One more advanced than the other, both lovely.
We’re Growing the Team
As we close one of the big projects, and as more stuff comes our way we feel the need to grow the team. For that we’re looking for 1–2 strong creative AI experts, based in Uruguay or Argentina, to help us balance Low Clouds and new IP partnerships.
If you know the perfect fit send them our way!
Tool of the week — n8n
I know, I know. Not the flashiest tool. However we are loving how easy and fun it feels to actually useful stuff.
Some stuff we’ve automated with n8n + agents:
Marketing metrics → weekly Slack digest with all the key insights.
Remote turning of the PC. We have a beefy PC in the office. We all connect to it to use powerful ComfyUI workflows. But what happens if the PC is off? This happened a lot due to black-outs. So we connected slack to a ESP32 via n8n. Now you just write ‘ON’ on a slack channel and the PC goes brrrr.
r/comfyui, r/stablediffusion, r/artificial, etc. scout. It scrolls daily through all relevant sources and gives us the top 3–5 most useful posts for us.
Connection to a ComfyUI running on Serverless Runpod. Just a quick and fun interface for some powerful comfy workflows.
Automated slop content machine (don’t worry we won’t be part of the social network slop craze). It’s just fun.
Key lessons from the week
You need to put stuff out there and fast: Before sharing your work possibilities are endless, but the impact is 0. Having the courage to get out there is the only way of improving yourself. As a company and as an individual.
Be different, not just better: “If you do what everyone else is doing but better, you’ll only get an incremental return. But if you do what no one else is doing, you’ll find geometric rewards.”
Creation is collaborative by nature: You can hit the wall alone for 2 days on a problem and by talking with your peers reach a solution in 1 hour.
What’s next?
This Saturday and Sunday we’re joining Runway’s Gen48 — two intense days to make a short film from scratch. The whole team will be taking part in this challenge. We will be showcasing the result of this hackathon soon. More than anything it is a good excuse to leave our comfort zone.
Beyond that, we will start slowly going longer with our Low Clouds content. The plan is to combine this with a thorough marketing and analysis effort, learning what works as we expand. At the same time, we’ll keep advancing the commercial opportunities already in the pipeline.
Tools we loved this week
Claude Code: We’ve been vibe coding so much these weeks and by far the tool that worked best for us was this one. We’ve done all sort of integrations with Comfy and they work flawlessly. Also if someone knows a good MCP for the ComfyUI API let us know!
Qwen Edit: First impressions are promising. It’s giving Flux Kontext a serious run for its money.
Fluxgym: Personally I’m very happy we are training LoRAs again, now for Low Clouds. Fluxgym is our go-to for LoRA training. Works very well with our proprietary captioning tool.
Reading Recommendations
We can’t recommend enough the writing of Doug Shapiro and his Substack The Mediator. It’s such a fresh outlook on the future of media. Discussions around his work is one of the reasons that VAPAI exists, so don’t miss his stuff.
How you can help
Maybe you know the best AI-based filmmakers in town? Or ComfyUI engineers? Maybe not one of those boxes but someone who is a fit with VAPAI?
Watch, fall in love and share our Low Clouds content!!!
We always love to connect. Reach out!
Final thoughts
This past weeks were proof on how the actual potential of AI is augmenting human capabilities, instead of substituting them. We had such a hard time with two particular shots. The solution for both cases came from human ingenuity; even to the point of taking a trip to the beach to capture photos ourselves.
So the next time you hear tech bros on LinkedIn predicting the end of all jobs, remember that the real impact of AI is not substitution, it’s amplification.
See you next week.
