How Copy.ai grew from $0 to $1M MRR in just 2 years

Hi friends!

In today's issue, you will learn how Copy.ai grew from 0 customers to over 5K paying customers in 2 years 🚀

How it works

Copy.ai is an AI-powered copywriting platform that allows freelance writers and marketers to write blogs, emails, sales copy, headlines and social media posts - in a matter of minutes.

This saves time and increase conversion rates, bringing an end to writer's block and automating away tedious parts of the content creation process.

From 0 to 5K paying customers over 2 years

4 Key takeaways:

1. Build in public 🛠️

Because CopyAI is a built-in-public company, co-founders Paul Yacoubian and Chris Lu post all of the company's development and numbers on their Twitter profiles.

Building in public allowed the team to attract like-minded talents (especially ambitious engineers), gain community trust as individuals and as a product, you receive immediate feedback from your audience.

With that, you can quickly determine product-market fit (PMF) and how to iterate your product to better serve them. They would also feel invested in your product and they would get a sneak peek what they can expect from it.

There is even a hashtag called “#buildinpublic” on Twitter, and many founders now use the same go-to-market strategy.

2. Users get value fast ⏱️ 

Copy.ai features are user-friendly and there are no extra steps that create friction in user experience.

All the user need to do is to choose the marketing template, key in a title, a brief description, and the desired tone of the copy. The AI generates sample copies in a few minutes that you can either use as inspiration for other ideas or as-is.

World-class product-led growth companies take their users to the eureka moment without hassle.

3. Annual over monthly pricing 💲

The founders set up an annual pricing plan to reduce churn and obtain cash upfront to reinvest in the product to launch from 10 tools to over 100 tools quickly to cater to much more use-cases, which in turn attract a broader set of audience beyond marketers.

This was the intention of the founders from the beginning:

The best time to get customers to switch to annual plan is just after they first sign up. They are still enthusiastic to use it and that excitement can translate into annual subscriptions and boost cash flow for your business.

4. Building loyal community 👯 

Even after the initial hype went down, Copy.ai's kept growing its word-of-mouth sources, with the founders actively engaging current and potential users on Twitter and Facebook to create a community of like-minded creators to discuss new use cases of the product and get feedback quickly to improve the product market fit.

Copy.ai offers a generous 45% commission on every subscription referred for the first 12 months, incentivizing anyone on YouTube & Twitter to create content such as free tutorial, case studies to promote Copy.ai. This encourages new users to join Copy.ai's official Facebook group to learn more new features and maintain the buzz in the community.

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