Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of function, it was still operating as a UI to OpenAI.

Chris Lu: Right. The early models were not as easy to use compared to the models today. There was still a good amount of work required to get good results.

Sramana Mitra: With the timing of the development of OpenAI and ChatGPT, you were coming in to a window where all of that wasn’t developed and you were offering usability.

Chris Lu: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: How long does this continue and what did you do on the marketing side? You said you brought on somebody from the marketing point of view. What did you do?

Chris Lu: We took a long-term view on the marketing side. We started investing on SEO and social channels. We doubled down on Twitter. We started posting a lot on LinkedIn. We started writing blogs. Ultimately, this is an entirely new market. There are a lot of keywords that we could start capturing. We targeted those.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics did you raise Series A on?

Chris Lu: We raised it in mid-2021. We got to $1.6 million ARR. We raised $11 million.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after you raised Series A?

Chris Lu: We built out the team even more. Today, we’re at 30-something people. That was mostly with the Series A money.

Sramana Mitra: What are their functions?

Chris Lu: About a third of them are engineers. About another third are marketers and salespeople. The last third are the data team, recruiting team, and customer support.

Sramana Mitra: On the engineering side, ChatGPT has improved greatly, usability-wise. What is your value proposition to the market given the the gap has closed on the usability?

Chris Lu: We have our own chat version that can do a lot of the things that ChatGPT cannot do such as searching the internet and scraping websites. Where we’re going with this is helping you deploy AI into business processes. For example, for every webinar you want to summarize and turn it into a LinkedIn post. We can help you build that workflow. We’re constantly iterating on that. We are starting to help people get their work done at scale instead of doing a one-off.

Sramana Mitra: Have you started working with large enterprise customers?

Chris Lu: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: This webinar workflow is already deployed?

Chris Lu: The webinar one is one that we use internally. We use about one webinar a week. How do you transform that content into usable snippets for other teams or other channels? The more interesting ones for large enterprises are the marketing and sales use cases. For example, writing personalized cold outbound emails or helping people write social media content. It could be about recent events.

Sramana Mitra: Your webinar product, is it ready for primetime?

Chris Lu: Yes. The way we’ve built our system is, it’s more of a platform. The webinar is just one thing it can do. This platform can almost do anything. It’s really powerful. The webinar is one example. Our goal is to help you deploy a lot more. Our entire thesis is that businesses are super inefficient today. There’s a lot of friction in communicating all the new knowledge. We’re going to build a platform that will bring all this together so that you can run your business efficiently and quickly.

Sramana Mitra: Are you familiar with On24?

Chris Lu: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Are you doing anything with them?

Chris Lu: I can’t speak to that, but we are familiar with them.

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