Highlights of the discussion:
- Copy.ai is the evolution of Taglines.ai, which was the initial test and validation of the idea. With Copy.ai they've invested in good design from the beginning from a talented designer (who is also a friend!)
- The solution is very human-centric and it is not replacing copywriters but rather giving them super-powers and empowering!
- The future should be optimistic and cool, make a better future and more exciting and creativity is a great way to do that.
- They considered creating an early education company to teach young kids how to create.
- When GPT-3 came in, both Paul and Chris saw AI being the creativity enhancement tool.
- Business is the ultimate form of creativity and expression. Telling people why you exist and what value you provide is not easy.
- Help people live more meaningful lives, and many people live more meaningful lives when they build their own businesses & projects.
- You need to start a business 29 times to have a 95% chance of success. You can increment your chances by trying more or increase the probability of success per try. Building in public helps with that.
- Almost all the hiring came from people that met on Twitter - that's the power of building in public! They are fully remote.
- They are trying to bring the mission as big as possible: that's why they've raised $2.9M and make this as big as possible.
- Chris Lu built a very powerful AI solution and he doesn't consider himself an AI expert by any means. He applied existing technology in a very smart way.
- AI is very good at pattern recognition.
- They hired ML engineers to improve the AI, there is so much that can be done and they are just scratching the surface. Copy.ai started to build their own models.
- At the time of the interview, they have 142k users, most of that growth was done with just two people.
Tech quotes:
- Copy.ai is more low-code vs No-code, it required some coding for the backend even though it could have been done entirely with No-code hacking with tools like Zapier and using Bubble.
- Their AI is based on GPT-3 and access was very restricted with a very long waitlist at the beginning, they did the meaningful application, and being in the Twitter community helped them to learn about the potential of GPT-3 very early on.
- The front-end is Webflow, the database is Firebase, Authentication is Magic.link, and Stripe for Payment - EASY!
- The back-end required coding but at some point, the prototype had a No-code backend using Zapier.
- No idea what to expect from GPT-4! Just excitement
- The vision of OpenAI aligns with Copy.ai, everyone should have the opportunity to create things with AI
- Copy.ai is free some weekend, free for .edu
- They are working on a re-build of the platform so it scales better.
