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Digital Twins and Virtual Models: The BetterPic Revolution You Didn't See Coming
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What happens when an entrepreneur with no background in photography or AI sees an opportunity in the headshot market? In this conversation, Ricardo Ghekiere, founder and CEO of BetterPic, reveals how he transformed a small startup he acquired for just $1 into a multimillion-dollar AI imaging company.
Ghekiere shares his remarkable journey of growth, from setting what he thought was an ambitious goal of $50,000 monthly revenue to actually reaching $114,000 monthly in just one year. This dramatic underestimation of the market reveals just how hungry consumers and businesses are for AI-powered imaging solutions that eliminate the hassle and expense of traditional photography.
Ghekiere also explains his newest venture, BetterStudio, which creates digital twins of real models for fashion brands. Unlike controversial fully AI-generated models, BetterStudio works with actual modeling agencies to digitize real people, allowing brands to dress and style them virtually for e-commerce and marketing campaigns. This approach not only preserves jobs in the modeling industry but also addresses ethical concerns about AI-generated people.
Particularly fascinating is Ghekiere's insight into identity ownership in the AI age: "You own your eyes. If the eyes change, the person changes, but if the eyes remain the same, that's you." This principle has helped shape how BetterPick approaches the creation and licensing of digital content in a rapidly evolving legal landscape.
The geographic differences in AI adoption also play a crucial role in BetterPic's strategy. Despite being based in Belgium, most of their headshot revenue comes from the United States, with Europe typically adopting AI technologies "two years later." For their fashion industry product, however, they've taken a "Europ
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Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Edited by Olivia Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.
Gary Pageau:Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Ricardo Ghekiere, who's the founder and CEO of BetterPic, and Ricardo is coming to us from Belgium. Today, Ricardo, you've got some actual news. I mean, not only are you a startup in the AI portrait space, but you just got some funding. Before we get into that, let's talk about you and how you started this company.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Yeah, hi, and thank you for having me, by the way, calling in from Belgium, where we have beautiful weather, as usual. But yeah, the company started before me to be transparent, so it was already started in July 2023 by my co-founder and CTO Miguel, 2023 by my co-founder and cto miguel, and then in december 2023. Uh, funnily enough, or just before that, I got a newsletter from uh side projectors. I've been following this company for a while. They basically announce companies for sale in which you can acquire basically because I'm a horrible coding guy, like I tried coding, it's bad. So so I was like I'm never going to be able to, like, compete in this space. I need to do something else.
Ricardo Ghekiere:So I saw it passing by and it was AI headshots. The company was for sale for about 20,000 euros and I was like, okay, you know, I still got that in my pocket, let's have a look. And you know, once I started digging deeper into the space, I was like, hey, if the technology does, or says, does what it says it does, which is taking professional headshots for just a couple of selfies for 30 bucks, this is massive. It's a massive opportunity, right? Because everybody in the world at some point needs a headshot and we all know the hassles of going to a photographer trying to dress up for ladies. You have to do the makeup. You know there's a heating lamp in front of you.
Gary Pageau:I did a photo shoot yesterday.
Ricardo Ghekiere:That was like trying to not do this awkward smile. I was like, ok, I have no idea what I'm doing here. I saw that. I was like, wow, this could be a massive opportunity coming in. I think I met Miguel. He was in Spain, I was in Spain, we drove two hours to each other. We actually, you know, had a great connection and from there I just made an offer and said I want to purchase it for $1 and see if you're up for it. And of course, his first reaction was like, hey, wait, I said $220,000, not $1, basically. So yeah, I just explained my philosophy, saying hey, you know what, if you join me and join me as cto and I'll, you know, lead the company, I'll make sure that your shares are worth a lot more than the 20 000 euros that you're asking me today. Uh, which I think, with the fundraising that we just did, is that it's proven.
Gary Pageau:I would say so what was your background before getting into this? Were you in the imaging industry or were you more of a?
Ricardo Ghekiere:Absolutely not. Like every single business that I found it. I had no prior experience to it, so the first company I found was renting out student furniture, so I failed. Then I started a coffee bar. I didn't even know how to make a cappuccino. I had to teach myself on YouTube how to actually make a proper cappuccino. Basically, I launched cocktail boxes. I knew nothing about cocktails, so that's why I was like, hey, let's make a cocktail box. So every single business that I ever started, I knew nothing about the space and you know, back in the day I saw that as a "h my God, I can't do this kind of thing. Nowadays I see it as a massive competitive advantage, because you're having this outside look into the space versus having this very post-minded look is like this is how it's supposed to be and it's always how it how it has been done, basically.
Gary Pageau:So now I see there's a competitive advantage growing up in that sense so did you do any research into, uh like the corporate headshot space or was just an instinctual gut level thing? You saw that. You know, you've been around. You see everybody's got it on their home pages and on their linkedin and all this, so they think, oh, they need that was that what came from or did you like? Do you know the the market is such and such in europe for headshots.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Yeah, so I did two things right, or two major things. One is, of course, I call it in Dutch they call it boerderverstand, which is farmer's brain, for some reason, which translates very weirdly if you put it that way, but it's like gut instinct, you would almost translate it. It's like you have a gut instinct of like, okay, just basic calculation would say there's, you know, that many billion people in the world, there is that many people graduating, applying for cvs where you'll need a headshot for you have linkedin being a massive platform. So, you know, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to think about, okay, this is actually a big market in that sense. And then, of course, the second thing which we've done is, um, I had a marketing agency up till, you know, two months ago, which was recently sold, and so I had a marketing agency and asked my people like okay, by the way, I want you to research this market. I want you to do, uh, keyword research about how many people are looking for this, how fast is this market growing?
Ricardo Ghekiere:Like, if ai headshots is about, I think back in the days, it was 2 000 people looking it for every single month. Before the year before, it was like 200. So it's like, okay, that's a 10x. And to give you an idea, today that's about 54,000 keyword researches or keywords that are being triggered. So I'm like, okay, wow, this market is growing, but it's still very limited. And if the technology says what it does, it says I limited. And if the technology says what it does, it says I was like, okay, that's great, then we have something that we can sell. Uh, in that sense, so we did a lot of research but not, you know, we didn't hire a firm to do like market research about what could this market be?
Gary Pageau:in that sense, so how did your perception of the market change? Or did it from your initial research? Did you think it was bigger, smaller, slower, faster moving?
Ricardo Ghekiere:Or did you reaffirm what you already knew? So I bought it the 1st of December 2023. And you know, I come from a, you know, leading teams of like a hundred people and it's like I need to put some OKRs and some goal settings. It's like, okay, what's the big ambition that we want to do? So we said, okay, 2024, we want to hit 50,000 per month by the end of the year.
Ricardo Ghekiere:And everybody's like, ah, you're crazy, because we were doing 1.5K per month, right. So we're like we're at 1.5K. The big heavy goal is 50,000 per month. And then somewhere October 2024, uh, we're like, okay, we're already hitting close to 70k. This is crazy. And so by december 2024, we actually hit around 114k uh goal per month. I was like, okay, I definitely underestimated this market way too much and and so I was like I'm not going to make the same mistake for 2025. I'm going to put the goal at 2 million, 2 million yearly revenue. And I was like, oh, that would be crazy. And, to give you an idea, we're now projected to do about 3 million and even more than that. So it was like I underestimated it again. So maybe 2026 will be different.
Gary Pageau:Well, that's great. So before we get more into the market, can you describe a little bit about what BetterPick is and what the product offerings are, Because you kind of have a couple things right.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Yeah, so the first product we launched was BetterPic, which is quite straightforward product to you, product you. Instead of going to the photographer back like you would do back in the days, you come to a website, you upload some random selfies you have from you going to the bahamas or, uh, to, you know, any location you want, or you can take them on the spot. You give us about eight selfies and within 30 minutes, we are going to give you professional headshots back, around 60 or 220 that you're going to get back. You select a few and that's about it. That's a very simplistic product which is very hard to manage, but it's a very simplistic product to explain mostly.
Ricardo Ghekiere:The second product we just recently launched is the exact same technology, but then for a much larger market, which is the fashion industry markets, because the fashion industry market has the exact same problem as we've been trying to solve for two years, which is well, I've got this product now, uh, but I'm waiting for my photograph to come in. It's quite a cost that a makeup artist needs to come in. I need to book a model that comes in. So we're just replacing the entire flow with real models that we take digital twins from. So that means like an ai version of them, but from a real person, and we're going to address them on the fly, so you don't actually have to fly your model in anymore to New York. You can actually have that person digitally so far.
Gary Pageau:So I think one of your competitors for that product would be the AI generated people. Right, there's a couple people out there who are doing that or saying you don't have to have that digital twin, we just create it on the fly. And if you want to adjust the features and on the fly you can do that. What is the advantage of your product versus going with a generative AI route completely?
Ricardo Ghekiere:100%. So, by the way, we also do the AI generated. So we do both, but our main strength and focus is on translating real people, real models, into the digital world, and so the advantage is that actually came very clearly last week when Vogue actually launched in their paper version they launched an AI model inside the book, basically and the whole world actually went crazy. It was all over the news and even into Belgium. It was like going crazy. And so we actually got interviewed through the media in Belgium because of like what the hell is going on here? And the whole world was exploding and there was a huge backlash against Vogue around that. And then suddenly brands were like okay, we want the efficiency of AI, but we don't want the backlash of these AI-generated models.
Ricardo Ghekiere:And so now we've got a huge amount of influx of big companies like, okay, we want this efficiency, but we want the real models and we want to compensate them in the real way, basically. So that's the advantage of working with us in that sense.
Gary Pageau:Because that's an interesting point is, you know a lot of people think of AI as a, you know, one-to-one replacement for people or it's going to, you know, drastically eliminate jobs and you know it will, obviously for certain things, but it's certainly, you know, for certain things that are high profile fashion covers. You know you wouldn't want to see open up Vogue and have the big fashion spread, have it all be AI generated, but you know, for a, for a catalog of people you're just selling, you know, shirts and things.
Ricardo Ghekiere:It's just an e-commerce application that may be an absolute appropriate 100 percent, like for the that's the best example I always give is like we have, so, funny enough, our main investor, one of the larger angels, is actually a model agency. So a model agency invests in us and she's digitizing the 2000 model that comes in, which is always weird. When she jumps on the call with a prospect that we have is like but wait, we're, you're the model agency owner and we're talking to you, we're trying to get rid of you. So it's a very funny conversation, but uh well, I don't know.
Gary Pageau:I mean honestly I think the agency will will morph into more of a technology broker, probably oh, 100, 100.
Ricardo Ghekiere:So this is the the funny part where, like now, we're just collaborating with the model agencies. It's like, okay, they see them as like an add-on versus like a threat, and that's also how we want to be perceived is like we're here to help the model agencies and help the brands actually push things forward. And her best example, which I always remember, is every single week there is a guy going from Belgium to Berlin, flying in, trying on 120 to 150 clothes on in about two hours window and just goes on off, on off and he's like he just gets rats rashes on his skin because of that. And I was like that's exactly what you don't want to be doing. What you want to be doing is having these models create the experiences, the events, all of these really cool stuff. Not that I'm going to take off a swimming short every single two minutes and getting rashes on my clothing.
Gary Pageau:Sure, and also you know the face of that model can actually become a digital asset that they can monetize 100%.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Yes, it's just like in the real world. You book a model, you get the licensing fee for about a year. So all of that stuff is now just digitalized in our world.
Gary Pageau:Because I think the appetite for images is only going to increase. So the logistics of flying that person from Belgium to Germany or wherever is not going to be able to keep up with the demand for images. That's going to be happening 100%.
Ricardo Ghekiere:And we also have some clients. That's like you know what, back in the days we had to choose for certain products we will not do images, and for certain things we will not do images and for certain things we will do images um, and nowadays you can just do the entire. You know, you know entire e-commerce with images at scale at you know a half of that cost, basically.
Gary Pageau:And that's where it becomes interesting to to operate now there might be some issues with the use of images. Have you run into cases where a model doesn't want their image used with a certain product or anything like that? How do they control that?
Ricardo Ghekiere:exact same way as it is controlled in the real world. So in the real world, it's not the model that chooses the brands, it is the model agencies that handles that. That's also why they're part of the fee in that sense. So we're actually in direct contact with the model agencies that then will associate the brands and they already know like, hey, you know, this person's not made for this brand, so it's mostly the model agency that know the exact same workflow. That's also why we collaborate with them, not the models. Well, we also collaborate with the models to get the digital twins, but it is actually our contracts is with the model agencies in that sense. And so the funny thing is, the legal framework is a very tricky one, and especially because of Europe handling, and so we actually had to work with a huge amount of law firms, and now we have these contracts in place to run that playbook, because it's a very touchy thing like who owns the rights for how long.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Exactly so we've actually legalized the entire thing, and so when clients work with us, they know that they're working in a legal framework that fits with them.
Gary Pageau:Because that is one of the things that you know, at least in the US. You know they've determined that AI doesn't can't own anything, right. So the question is, if you're using a composite image with, you know, a digital twin, but you're generating everything else, or vice versa, how much of that is copyrightable or ownable or trademarkable or whatever the phrase you want to use. I don't know is the question.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Actually, there is rules around that, and one of the rules is that you own your eyes. That is actually one of the rules. So if the eyes change, the person changes, but if the eyes remain the same, so it's your eyes, that's you basically. So there are certain rules that are attached to this, and this is why I went through this whole legal thing to discover. This is that when the eyes is one of their bigger assets, that is owned to you. Basically, even in Denmark right now, there's laws passing by that you know that you are the owner of you.
Gary Pageau:I don't think you have that yet in the states, but in denmark you actually have these laws, and I believe these laws will come a lot bigger in europe over the coming months, even so let's talk a little bit about that the difference between european sensibilities when it relates to this and north american sensibilities when they came with us, because north america is a little bit especially the States, is a little more of the Wild West in this.
Gary Pageau:Whereas you know, the European community is definitely a little more cautious and a little more legislative we'll use the word for that. So being based in Europe, does that give you an advantage, do you think?
Ricardo Ghekiere:I'll give you a backstory basically. So when with BetterPic pick, currently our revenue is 90, let's say, 85 is coming from the states, five percent is like, uh, canada and the uk and australia, and like maybe five percent is european, basically, and it's very funny because we're like, okay, is it just because we don't run campaigns there or is it something else? So we got the research and we're looking at the keywords that people type in, which is ai, hedgeholds, and then I kind of map that across the globe and it just correlates exactly with the amount of people looking for that specific keywords towards the revenue, basically, and it's just because ai is just much more adopted in the states. And then it kind of flies over to europe like two years later. And then it even depends on the country. We always, always make the jokes that America is five years ahead in terms of AI, and then it comes to like Holland and France later on and the UK and then Belgium is, like you know, two years later. So that's always the funny joke that I always make. And so that's exactly what's happening on the AI Hatchels thing.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Now for the second company, better Studio, we said we're going European first, because if you can tackle Europe, you can conquer the rest, not the other way around. If an American company would come in, they would have to get all these questions about OK, what about the legislation? Have you thought about the Belgium legislation? But in Belgium we have French legislation and Dutch legislation. So there's all these things like oh yeah, never mind, let me stick to the States. So we went first like European first, legislation first, and from there we're expanding.
Gary Pageau:And you guys have better taste over there when it comes to fashion, so that's probably a better place to start.
Ricardo Ghekiere:That is actually very true as well. Don't want to shout anything, but it's just kind of proven based on the amount of brands that are coming from Europe versus the States.
Gary Pageau:So let's talk a little bit about the funding piece, because that's really been the big news in the last week or so is that you just got a big scene round. Can you talk a little bit about what it took to get that into place, the story you had to tell to convince folks that, hey, this is not just another one of those kind of AI advancements that you know? It seems like there's a lot of those out there, right, that's where the money is going in AI and people are just looking for it 100%.
Ricardo Ghekiere:So, funny enough, I tried raising around one year ago exact timing one year ago and that was for the product. Better pick back in the days. And still you know like, okay, I want to raise some funds with it. Um, this is, you know, this is needed, this is the graph. So I made the whole slide deck and, uh, I actually didn't succeed. So I was like, oh damn, it's like everybody's just telling me no, basically why was that?
Gary Pageau:where did they just not see the market potential, did they? Or there's a thousand other choices, so why bother? Or what was that? So I?
Ricardo Ghekiere:think there's two main reasons that we always got, let's say, rejected on, and the first one is this is a one-time purchase, so you only get a one-time headshot seal. It's a one-time purchase, so it's not recurring behavior, so it's very unpredictable in that sense. And then the second thing is, like every investor always asks but what about in five years? Well, how will this business be in five years from time? And what will chat gpt do if you can just upload a few images there and get your headshots there, basically, so that was the always the comeback that we got, which is a very legitimate question in that sense.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Yeah, and then, of course, when we started the second business, which is very much b2b, high tickets, uh, working with these bigger brands is like, okay, well, here you have something recurring, you have something that you can actually build a long-term business with because you're integrated into their system. So the moment we actually had more of the B2B layer to it, that's when the investors actually got excited about the future that we're building, basically. So hence where the funding is going to, because for BetterPic we didn't need the funding. We were growing every single month, we were profitable, we were fully bootstrapped, so we didn't actually need the funding for BetterPic, but we decided just to accelerate on the B2B offerings.
Gary Pageau:And how much did you have to give up in terms of equity or whatever? I know you don't have to go into a straight percentage, but did you have to have a board formed? Or what's the relationship with the investors?
Ricardo Ghekiere:Yeah, so it's all raised through safe notes in that sense. So we didn't have to like spend a lot of money on like a series A and lawyers and all that stuff. It was just a safe note which we had to negotiate and that's about it basically. That's also why it went quite fast in that sense.
Gary Pageau:So how did you select your investment partners? What was the criteria you were looking for?
Ricardo Ghekiere:Yeah. So we were looking for a partner that believed in a team not the product in that sense, and so of course it's important to understand what you're building and is it aligned with the future. But what I really liked is so we got MOC Capital as the first larger investor. They invested about a million and so they were like I just believe in a team.
Ricardo Ghekiere:The guy even like one of the investors actually flew in into Italy. We were there with, like, the whole team. We do six months, every six months we actually catch up. Now we're going to Barcelona and he flew in.
Ricardo Ghekiere:He spent a day with us just to get to know the team, understand the dynamics, what were happening, what we're building, and the day after he actually said, okay, this is the team that's going to make it happen, basically. So we were really looking forward to somebody that said, okay, I really believe in the team that is going to happen and the execution you'll see along the way you'll make pivots, you'll make changes along the product. You're like, okay, that doesn't work, let's make something else. But he really believed in the team and that's also why we decided to first go with MOC Capital, because we could see that they were really team players. They even like called five of my closest friends and ex-colleagues to like say, hey, is this guy legit or not? So you could really sense that all the questions were pointed towards how is this person really versus? What are they building in that sense?
Gary Pageau:Did you think your track record of having done some prior businesses had a some success, had some failure? Do you think that helped you in building a relationship with the kind of investor you wanted?
Ricardo Ghekiere:um, I would say yes, um, and not just from a. Hey, this is my track record, but your track record says a lot about your personality, that you have at that moment, and so you could tell that we just had a conversation about, okay, failure, things that didn't go well. How do you adapt to that? How do you crunch through like bad situations?
Ricardo Ghekiere:Um, having failure, that I think is a good thing uh, so I think it really helped, and we always I, my mother, is always like as long as you don't give up, you can't lose, and so that has always been a cave, and they always see, like better pick as like this overnight success. It's like, hey, they went from like zero to like 3 million 18 months wow, crazy. But I'm like this is like an 11 year journey. My first business was 11 years ago and so there's no overnight success here. There's just like grinding and keeping it going until you hit the spot. Basically, it's like going for oil, right. It's like you know there's no like let's dig here and see it's a septic six. You can just keep digging for 11 years, you'll find something so do you see better, pick with both products do you see it as an?
Gary Pageau:ai company or as a imaging solutions company, because I think that perspective helps bring you to the future yeah, so I think there is.
Ricardo Ghekiere:So we're an ai company in that sense or an AI image company. The reason why I'm saying not AI company and AI image company is because we don't build foundational models Like there's these foundational models like ChatGPT or you know Flux, like there's all these foundational models. They cost millions. We're not that. We are what we call a base layer. On top of that, we're thinking about use cases Like okay, how would a person use this? What's the interface look like for that? So we're basically building on top of these foundational models with our tweaks. Let's call it like that. An example tweak could be hey, you know, these foundational models don't think that when you shoot an e-commerce image and the person wants to have clothing all the way to the bottom of the, so you don't see the shoes a financial model doesn't understand that, so we need to build that into the product.
Gary Pageau:So these are like small tweak example that you need to do to operate in this scale because it's always, I think, especially with what you're doing, the little things that matter, right, if you're doing, you know, if you're inserting a head onto a sweater like that's got to be precisely accurate.
Ricardo Ghekiere:It's a little bit off.
Gary Pageau:Oh, that's 100%.
Ricardo Ghekiere:That's the biggest struggle of all these foundational models. Like in AI headshots, it's like, okay, the face needs to look exactly like you, but if the clothing is a little bit off, it doesn't matter. In these AI headshots ai like photo shoots every single detail matters, like how many buttons do you have? How does that button look like? How does the fit look like? It is crazy how that world works and I think that's I think it's the hardest challenge I've ever worked on and a team has ever worked on. But it's such a grateful thing when your products that you shot go online like we have some online right now.
Gary Pageau:It's like, oh, that was us great do you ever like walk through a downtown and see something that your technology has done, like on a, on a bus or a or a billboard, and go kind of?
Ricardo Ghekiere:you know, feel proud about that but have you had the offline billboards? Because most of the time they were still like, not ai generated. I don't think we got to that stage yet. Um, I do see, like, if you go to reviews for better pick. I love that because it's like people just say, hey, I did this for my dad who didn't have a job for five years and I was building his cv and I got the solution. I was finally able to get a headshot for them because it was too expensive. My country. It's like that's the beautiful moments. We're like, hey, we're really making an impact into the world of people right.
Gary Pageau:So if people are interested in checking out your company, the better group is the company right and getting more information about, uh, what it is you do. Where can they go online to find out?
Ricardo Ghekiere:awesome, uh. So yeah, for the AI headshots, definitely go to betterpic. io. That's where we do all the AI headshots. And then the second company is called betterstudioio is where you can actually, you know launch campaigns for your you know fashion e-commerce brands.
Gary Pageau:Awesome. Well, thank you, Ricardo. It's been great meeting you and talking with you and kind of picking your brain about AI and the potential of it in the photography and the fashion industry, and looking forward to hearing more.
Ricardo Ghekiere:Thank you very much. No worries, thank you very much, gary. Have a beautiful day.
Erin Manning:Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.
