Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you offer?

Chris Lu: When we first started, we were more of a copywriting app. We help write your email copy or sales copy. However, that has transformed over the years. Our entire vision has always been the business’ business. How do we become the product that helps your business assemble and run itself?

Today, we help you get stuff done. We can help you get your research done. We can get your writing done. The next step to that is we want to start integrating deeper into your business. How do you build out the best practices for different workflows?

Sramana Mitra: You are currently doing over $5 million in revenue?

Chris Lu: We’re over $10 million now.

Sramana Mitra: What product fetches that revenue?

Chris Lu: The copywriting app brought us to most of that. However, it’s transforming now. We’re starting to grow revenue rapidly on the workflow side, which is more of process automation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s back up. We’re in 2020. At what point do you start this company?

Chris Lu: We started a few months after we got access to the AI models. We got access around July 2020. We launched four apps in the course of three weeks.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get access?

Chris Lu: We got on the waitlist and we were tweeting about it. We messaged the CTO and pitched our idea.

Sramana Mitra: You were still at the venture fund at this point?

Chris Lu: We were still working at the venture fund.

Sramana Mitra: This copywriting app that you created was in 2020?

Chris Lu: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it out to the market?

Chris Lu: We tweeted about it a lot. It was such a new technology. We knew that it was going to be transformative. Paul would share his insights about where the world is going to go with this. We’re really public about our numbers. We grew rapidly at the beginning.

For the first 10 months, we would send a monthly update out on Twitter. This is a monthly update that you might get as an investor. We shared it with everybody. We grew a Twitter following rapidly and that helped with our early distribution.

Sramana Mitra: The use case for this is marketing copy?

Chris Lu: Yes, marketing, sales, whatever copy you need to write.

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of customers were you getting traction from?

Chris Lu: Many of them are the end users – the people who have to write copies. We’ve got freelancers and bloggers. More recently, it’s people who are working for larger corporations. They’re not traditionally copywriters, but they need copywriting in their processes. They would use Copy.ai to elevate their own skills.

Sramana Mitra: How did you charge?

Chris Lu: Monthly flat-fee subscription of $49 a month for unlimited copy.

Sramana Mitra: In 2020, how long did it take you after you launched this to get to your first revenue?

Chris Lu: We got it on the same day of our launch.

Sramana Mitra: On Twitter.

Chris Lu: Yes. That first day, we got 2,000 signups and we got our first customer. We’re freemium. People would just use it a lot. When they run out of credits, that’s when our paywall would go up. After two weeks, we were getting hundreds of signups a day.

Sramana Mitra: What was the freemium mode? What was available for free?

Chris Lu: It was a seven-day free trial. I believe you had a hundred runs. Either seven days or you used up your hundred runs.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai
1 2 3 4 5