Yesterday, Pomelli turned one!
One year ago, on October 28, 2025, we launched a Google Labs experiment, built together with Google DeepMind, with a simple goal: help small businesses create on-brand marketing content, faster. You gave it your website, it figured out your brand, and it gave you campaigns you could actually use with gorgeous looking assets.
I posted about it on X yesterday, but a tweet doesn’t really do a year justice. So for this week’s Thursday Thoughts, I wanted to stop, look back, and celebrate - because when I actually laid it all out, even I was a little surprised by how much we’ve shipped.
A Year of Launches
Here’s what the last twelve months looked like:
Demoing Business DNA, Campaigns, and Photoshoot
October 2025 - Pomelli launches. Drop in your website and Pomelli builds your Business DNA - your colors, fonts, tone of voice, imagery - then generates tailored campaign ideas with on-brand creatives you can edit and download. Available in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
January 2026 - Animate. One click to turn static creatives into on-brand short videos, powered by Veo.
February 2026 - Photoshoot. Start with a single (even genuinely bad) phone photo of your product and get studio-quality, on-brand product shots, powered by Nano Banana. The announcement went viral - over 24 million views - and I wrote about what it took to ship it.
March 2026 - Going global. Pomelli expanded from four countries to 170+.
April 2026 - Europe. Pomelli in English for small businesses across the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein.
May 2026 - Product Catalog. Add your products once and build personalized campaigns around them.
May 2026 - Google I/O. Three launches in one event: the Pomelli Agent, which builds your Business DNA from scratch (no website required), Brand Books, and Websites.
May 2026 - Google Marketing Live. The very next day: we launched the ability to push assets straight from Pomelli into Google Ads - no downloading and re-uploading.
Summer 2026 - Instagram sharing. Connect your account and send posts, Stories, and Reels straight to Instagram.
Fall 2026 - Animate your Photoshoot. One of our top user requests: bring your Photoshoot product shots to life as on-brand videos.
The Photoshoot launch, and one product image turned into three on-brand shots
And along the way, people have used Pomelli to generate millions of campaigns, product shots, and ads.
Every one of those launches has a story behind it - debates that went right down to the wire, loss buckets, a few too many hands, an eight-hour planning session the week after I/O. But what strikes me most, looking at the list all at once, is the pace.
Ten Years Ago, This Would Have Felt Dizzying
Ten years ago, this number of launches in a single product - in a single year, from a small team - would have felt dizzying. Honestly, it probably would have felt impossible. A roadmap like this would have been a multi-year plan, and you’d have been considered ambitious for writing it all down ahead of time.
Today, it’s just... what a year looks like.
It’s wild how fast things are moving. Models get better every few months, and every jump unlocks something that wasn’t possible when we scoped the last feature. Photoshoot didn’t exist as an idea a year ago because the models couldn’t do it well enough yet. Building a brand from nothing with an agent was a stretch goal that felt ambitious. Now they’re things a small business owner can do on their lunch break.
I’m incredibly proud of this team. They’ve shipped at a pace that would have been unthinkable not that long ago, and they’ve done it while keeping the bar high.
What’s Next (and Why It Will Look Different)
We’ve got some exciting things cooking - you’ll find out exactly what soon enough ;)
But we’re also doing something I think is just as important: we’re taking a moment to step back and look at the bigger picture.
The landscape of what’s possible to build has changed significantly since we first launched. The models are different. The way people work with AI is different. What our users need - and what they now expect - is different. (If you read The Overbuilding Trap, you’ll recognize all three drifts.)
That means looking critically at what now exists, the gaps we see that we can now build (or build better / different), and thinking about what comes next in a different way than just another series of sequential launches. Year one was about proving the demand and moving fast. Year two is about asking the Barn Test of our own product: knowing everything we know now, what would we build?
More coming on that soon...
Now, I Want to Hear From You
In the meantime, I have a question for you.
I’m realizing there is so much I could write about - and I want to make sure I’m spending my Thursdays on what’s actually top of mind for you. So I’m going to start asking for your input more often, starting today.
What do you want to hear from me about next? A few things I’ve been thinking about:
Deeper lessons from launching Pomelli. I gave a talk at SF Tech Week on exactly this (it’s up on talks.google.com). I’d do what I’ve done for my other talks - record myself walking through it and share the worksheets that go with it.
Raising AI-native kids. How I’m thinking about this as a mom of a five-year-old and three-and-a-half-year-old twins - what I let them use, what I build for them, and what I’m still figuring out.
Decomposing one of my AI-native workflows. Taking one of the new ways I work day-to-day and breaking it down step by step - what I hand off, what I keep, and why.
Something else entirely. Tell me in the comments! What are you wrestling with right now that you’d like my take on?
And to the Pomelli team, our users, and everyone who has tried it, shared it, or sent us feedback this year: thank you. Happy birthday, Pomelli. 🎂
Here’s to year two!
