Great products

Intro

One of the hardest tasks of marketing is to create unique content. You need creativity and writing skills to achieve that, but that’s not it. All the best writers know that you also need time to refine what you wrote. This iterative process can be very time consuming, and nerve-wracking.

Enter Copy.ai.

Copy.ai allows writers and marketers to create high-quality content. This includes blog intros, landing page copy, LinkedIn ads, and product descriptions. It leverages OpenAI’s GPT-3 AI model to create these unique copies.

Vision

Some innovative products appear from technological breakthroughs. Copy.ai is a great example.

Chris Lu and Paul Yacoubian believe that artificial intelligence can augment human creativity, instead of replacing it as some may fear.

We believe AI will be embedded in today's businesses and help people start tomorrow's businesses. Our product allows entrepreneurs, marketers, and copywriters to use the latest natural language processing (NLP) models to improve their communication and accomplish business goals.

Product

In Short, Copy.ai is a copy generator run by an AI, and human assisted. After you picked a template and entered a few keywords, you can generate your copies. It works like this:

When you’re building a SaaS product, you want to reach PMF with a smallest set of features. This means you built exactly what people wanted, and are willing to pay for. This also means less product maintenance on low value-added features.

Writing about Copy.ai feels special because it’s the case for them.

In this piece, you won’t see a long list of cool features. You probably haven’t noticed yet, but the flow you see above is well thought. Here is why 👇

Templates

You know my love for templates. They make even more sense for an AI product.

The strength of an AI product is that it can generate anything for you. The weakness is that without some guidance the algorithm has little chance to find out what you want.

Templates provide the context the tool needs. When you’re picking a template you’re telling Copy.ai exactly what you want. The product can then return relevant results for you. Ex: if you ask for an instagram caption, you’ll get a short text with hashtags in it.

Leading with templates is a great way to inspire people with new use cases. It works well in AI because, again, they’re so many things the intelligence can do.

Two use cases that surprised me were a product description and a brand mission. Two cases I assume a bot couldn’t do (it can!).

Choose a tone

Ok, templates are great, but they’re pretty common now. The one big thing that makes Copy.ai so handy is their tone picker.

Whenever you’re about to generate a copy, the product asks you to pick a tone you want for your copy. You get to choose between 8 tones: friendly, luxury, related, professional, bold, adventurous, witty, persuasive.

This seems like a detail but it’s not.

There are thousands of ways of writing. How can you understand and reproduce the style of writing that someone wants? How can you do that without asking them dozens of questions? In short: ask them the tone they want.

The tone summarizes how you like to write. It indicates the language you want to use. It defines if you want contractions (“you’re”) or not, and many other things. Yet, it’s one simple question that anyone can understand and answer.

The first time I saw a tone picker was in Grammarly. Th tone is less relevant there. Grammarly is a corrector and you already have a tone of voice when you started to write something.

Picking a tone can get you copies substantially different. For example if I pick….

For adventurous tone I get:

For professional tone I get:

Pretty different, isn’t it?!

“More like this”

Copy.ai streamlines the journey to their first “aha! Moment”. To get your first copies you’re only asked 3 quick things, to 1. pick a template 2. write a few lines your topic 3. pick a tone.

You may love the copy, or you may not, and Copy.ai knows that.

To fix this, once you get your first list of copies you can guide the algorithm on what you liked the most. It’s called “more like this”.

What I love about this feature is that it appears only after you generate your first copies. Since this is an extra step for you to take, disclosing it only when it’s relevant is a great idea.

The best AI models need assistance, and Copy.ai is no exception. Using an engaging and clear CTA, the product gets more chances to generate some value for their users. All fo that in a smooth way.

Editor

The product has an editor that lets you copy, paste and edit content even if you navigate in the product.

The native editor saves you some clicks and you won’t have to switch tabs to edit your content elsewhere.

Building a text editor solves a core problem. It prevents me from waisting time going back and forth between Copy.ai and a text editor. Even though a text editor does not seem like a differentiator, it is a smart move for them.

Great one!

Pin your favorite template with a star

The product exists to solve a problem that people have only if they write a lot. Probably also if they have a lot of different use cases. I am not a power user but I assume they can easily get lost in the long list of templates.

For this problem Copy.ai came up with an elegant solution. They built a way to pin your favorite template which adds it to a “favorite tool” section.

This is the first time I see a product letting their customers pin a template, which makes a lot of sense here!

Pricing

Copy.ai has a value-based pricing based on the number of words generated per month.

It's free for 1 user seat, 90+ copywriting tools, unlimited projects and 7-day free trial of Pro Plan.

Then it starts at 19$/month for 15k words / month and 5 user seat, priority email support, 25+ languages, and their blog generator tool.

This pricing based on the number of words is a great incentive for their company. Each word generated needs to create value in order for the free plan to be valuable. It incentivize them to improve the copies generated by the product.