AMA w/ Paul and Chris from CopyAI: How we grew from $0 to $1.2M ARR in 7 months and raised $2.9M, all while building in public

[tornagainchristian]

Paul Yacoubian (CopyAIPaul) and Chris Lu (Chris_CopyAI) are the cofounders of CopyAI! We have been fascinated by entrepreneurship and turning ideas into reality. They met at the ESO Fund, a niche venture fund that helps employees exercise their stock options. We noticed that even today the barriers to entrepreneurship are still way too high.

As a result, they started CopyAI, an AI powered copywriter for businesses. Thousands of businesses use CopyAI to simplify the task of creating engaging marketing copy for their website, blogs, emails, and social media.

Our journey began with a single tweet:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1316773387268653056

Thus began our journey of building in public! Since then, you could track our progress via Twitter:

Nov:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1322944407247740929

Dec:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1345057143913910274

Jan:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1356280714736660480

Feb:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1366460168637190145

Mar: https://twitter.com/paulyacoubian/status/1378023507079143435

Apr: https://twitter.com/PaulYacoubian/status/1389978445157908489

Along the way, we share what we're learning, struggling with, and our vision of the future on Twitter!

We believe that building in public creates a roadmap for other entrepreneurs to follow. By being authentic in our journey, we hope to inspire others to take the leap and start their own side projects/businesses.

Proof/Verification: https://twitter.com/PaulYacoubian/status/1395033255896825857

We'll be around for the next 3 hours until 2 PM CT (may have to step out at points)

Feel free to ask us anything about CopyAI or Building in Public!

Make sure to follow us on Twitter as well for more updates:

https://twitter.com/PaulYacoubian

https://twitter.com/Chris__lu

Congrats! You got to the bottom of this long post!

We're currently offering a free 7 day trial for CopyAI and after the trial expires, you can use the promo code REDDITAMA for an additional month off!

EDIT: Thanks y'all for an awesome time! We hope to be back and to share much more about our journey! I'll be checking this thread periodically over the next day so feel free to keep the questions coming!

 

[louid]

@tornagainchristian How did you get your first 2000 users in the first 48 hours? Was it really just you sending out a tweet that people liked and 2000 people decided to try it out? Was there an underlying strategy?

I can't imagine just tweeting about a product on a new twitter page and 2000 people show up at the front door.

Thank you!

 

[tornagainchristian]

@louid Great question! Both Paul and I launched a few projects on Twitter in the past! When we launched our first project, it got us a few users. The second launch got us a few hundred. Then the CopyAI launch went much larger!

Paul had built up a small 2k follower base when we launched Copy.ai! We think the wording on the tweet was pretty compelling and also asked friends we've made on Twitter to retweet it!

Here's a screenshot of the analytics of that tweet as of today:

https://imgur.com/a/usUnyat

We got 7k link clicks and were lucky enough to get 2k sign up from that!

 

[skilletboy]

@tornagainchristian Hey! I really like how transparent you guys are. I like BIP but can't get myself to do it.

With BIP you're removing natural moats. What about someone copying your startup? Inviting more competition?

If people see you're doing good (which is in your case) you're bound to invite competition.

Adding on : What's your strategy around this? or even your experiences since your space is crowded.

 

[tornagainchristian]

@skilletboy We believe the benefits outweighs the risks/downsides tremendously!

The hardest part of starting a startup/company is getting people to care. Early on, the product won't be extremely special because the company is young. The best way to make people care is by being authentic about the issues you're working to solve and sharing information that can be helpful to your audience.

Building in public helps attract early customers, employee, and investors! From our time in venture, we learned that startups rarely die from competition. Rather, they usually die from people just not caring.

Our tweets attracted almost all of our customers, almost all of our employees, and almost all of our investors. Without building in public, we would not be nearly far along!

Oops, forgot to answer the second part:

We plan on continuing to build in public and then use our platform to support more entrepreneurs. We believe there should be 10x the number of entrepreneurs in the world and we want to build the tools and roadmap for anyone to create a business and succeed!

 

[skilletboy]

@tornagainchristian Wow this is a great answer. It's a great point on startups dying because people don't care.

 

[tornagainchristian]

@skilletboy It's sometimes hard to see this as a founder because we care so deeply about the problem!

We learned a lot from Paul Graham's essays here: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

 

[skilletboy]

@tornagainchristian Right, It's just BIP is in stark contrast to founders building in stealth.

What are your top 3 pro tips for building in public? (With the goals of gaining max engagement and converting people to users)

 

[tornagainchristian]

@skilletboy Completely agree! To be a bit more nuanced, there are businesses where building in public doesn't make as much sense!

My tips:

1. Make sure to be building in public where your customer are! Twitter worked for us because a lot of startup founders and marketers are on Twitter
2. Be authentic! People can immediately tell if something feels a bit more scripted
3. Consistency in posting and engaging! Fans and audiences are built one person at a time. Build a genuine connection and engage with your audience!

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income is an expert here! This is a livestream we hosted with him around audience building and personal brand:

 

[skilletboy]

@tornagainchristian This is awesome. You have earned a fan

I'm working on a few products and will be BIP soon for this. I'll need to see if the majority of my users are in twitter first (some market research)

I wish more people said this "there are businesses where building in public doesn't make as much sense!" .

 

[misdemeanourthomas]

@tornagainchristian what role did social media play in your growth?

 

[tornagainchristian]

@misdemeanourthomas Social media (specifically Twitter) represents almost all of our growth!

From our initial launch tweet (

https://imgur.com/a/usUnyat

) to our monthly updates, almost all of our users hear about us from Twitter or from a friend who heard about us from Twitter!

Beyond just top of funnel, Twitter has also directly brought us our first 3 hires and has played a significant role for the rest of our hires as well! We announced each hire on Twitter and asked each employee to create a thread about why they're joining!

 

[armour1984]

@tornagainchristian Any tips for building a Twitter following from scratch?

 

[tornagainchristian]

@armour1984 Yes! This advice will be less about Twitter in particular though

If I were to start a following from scratch, I would focus on a few things first:

1. Who am I and what do I like? --> Find a niche to focus on
2. Where would other people who are interested be? --> Study the platform you're creating on (usually studying how the algorithm works)
3. Consistently create and test content --> This one just takes a lot of time, energy, and patience!

You can study recent successful examples like:

https://twitter.com/heyblake (our CMO, 0 to 31k in less than a year)

https://twitter.com/JoePompliano

https://twitter.com/growth_student (our former intern 3.6k in less than 5 months)

https://twitter.com/anthony_j_zhang

 

[clmorgan]

@tornagainchristian So happy to have you guys here, thanks a lot for coming onto our lovely community. Hope this’ll be a productive and informative AmA for everybody reading thisMy Q: Your website is very simple, no fluff, no fancy-pantsy animations etc. I believe one of you confirmed it was all made in Webflow and even the CopyAI app has been designed there. Absolutely love the fast pace, no-bs approach, and the results ($1.2M ARR already) prove once again the lesson: you don’t need to optimise prematurely

How do you two decide what’s value?

How do you decide what’s worth spending attention on, besides the classic ‘just make a great product’. Walk us through the most important part: your thought process. What made you say “no, over optimising the aspect of the website is not where it’s at” and rather had you focus on what got you to such a fast-growth product.

I feel like something like this helps people the most! Thanks again for coming here guys

 

[tornagainchristian]

@clmorgan Thanks for having us Daniel!

We really subscribe to David Sack's approach: You have to focus on things that can improve the product/distribution/etc. by 10x!

This means everything we work on has to move the needle significantly. We focused very much on user value and unless we can really deliver there, no amount of copy/landing page optimization will improve the business!

And yes, the entire website and app were built in Webflow (but we are in the process of migrating to a more standard stack!)

 

[sadie08]

@tornagainchristian Most down to earth entrepreneur I ever saw. I would like to ask How are you managing your time in busy schedules to see each and every tweet and reply to that and even DM? How much time you spend a day in copy..ai?

 

[cheung]

@sadie08 I batch my Twitter time throughout the day and browse mentions and DMs and just try to answer them quickly. That takes 15 minutes or so. I spend probably another 30 minutes staying up to date on a lot of topics that I want to learn about relating to startups, fundraising, marketing, copywriting, and AI. Also made a bunch of friends on Twitter so its fun to take a break and chat with them too! Time not spent there is spent at copy.ai on building out and aligning our team on the product and strategy.

 

[sadie08]

@cheung Great to hear that Paul. Have a great year ahead with copy..ai. Best wishes!

 

[cadams2]

@tornagainchristian When you raised capital did you consider bootstrapping/ something like Pipe or did you know you wanted to go the VC route?