One Big Family
A hardcover storybook starring everyone your child loves. The whole family adds photos and stories, AI writes and illustrates it, and it arrives as a printed hardcover.
One Big Family turns a child's real family into the cast of a premium picture book. Parents build a living family tree and invite relatives by email; each relative claims their person, uploads photos, and tunes their own illustrated character; AI writes and illustrates the story; and the finished book arrives as a printed 8.5×8.5-inch hardcover.
The Problem
Personalized children's books usually mean one child's name pasted into a stock story. A book that stars the whole family (grandparents, cousins, pets, real likenesses) has to solve much harder problems: collecting photos and personality from a dozen relatives, keeping every character visually consistent across pages, and writing a story that is actually good rather than a fill-in-the-blank template.
The Solution
The family builds the book together. A staged writing pipeline produces the whole manuscript first (story design, a structural gate, a free-prose draft, mechanical linting, editorial critique, targeted revision, and a read-aloud polish) so the family can read and edit every page before a single illustration is rendered. Each person gets a canonical character sheet generated from their photos and checked by a vision model, and the whole book previews free as a watermarked flipbook before anyone pays for a printed copy.
Key Features
- Living family tree with email invites: kids, grown-ups, pets, and memorial members, each claimed and maintained by the relative themselves
- Staged AI story pipeline instead of one giant prompt, with a structural gate and critique-revision loop between stages
- Character and object consistency via canonical descriptors and rendered reference sheets attached to every page render
- Vision-model QA on every generated character, plus a parent approval gate before rendering
- Print-true layout: the preview is the printed page, with press-ready interiors and wraparound covers generated to print spec
- Free watermarked flipbook preview; paying unlocks the hardcover print and reorders for the whole family
- Mock-mode service layer: AI, storage, payments, print, and email all have mock adapters, so the entire product demos end-to-end with zero credentials
Stack
Next.js 15 + TypeScript + Tailwind. Postgres + Drizzle ORM, object storage with presigned direct uploads, and Inngest for durable background jobs. Anthropic Claude for the story pipeline and moderation, Google Gemini for illustration. Stripe Checkout + Stripe Tax for payments, print-on-demand hardcover fulfillment, and Puppeteer + pdf-lib for press-ready PDFs.