Copy.ai Founder Reveals His SECRETS to AI Startup Success | Founder Chat w/ Paul Yacoubian

this is the wave it starts right now where are the biggest opportunities right now for entrepreneurs if you're not building something today just like go build something real simple build and launch in any in the time frame needs to be under a week the last time we saw this was the phone

hello everyone and welcome back to the channel my name is Liam Motley your number one scores for AR entrepreneurship content today we're joined by a very special guest uh Paul Jacobian founder of copy Ai and one of the leading AI writing Platforms in the market today so welcome on Paul thank you so much for coming on I really appreciate your time today thanks it's great to be here first off thank you for coming on I know you have some great insights to share with the community and I would love to hear more about copy Ai and why it's so great so start off uh can you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to AI entrepreneurship as you are today sure yeah so my background's a little bit varied all over the place uh started out as a CPA doing accounting uh out of college uh one of the finance uh industry at a hedge fund and then learn you know about the finance stuff the bookkeeping stuff but that was really all kind of boring and uh wasn't quite as exciting as real entrepreneurship really operating companies and so I ended up moving into the startup World um helping a family member um grow one of her companies that she had started and left that for venture capital in 2016 and that's where I met my current co-founder we were helping employees exercise their stock options at Adventure backed startups and we were really interested in the next big waves we were trying to figure out all right what is the next thing what is the nature of these like technological changes that really Spurs you know rapid expansion and technological progress and we you know we'd seen a lot of AI companies unfortunately it seemed like a lot of the Technologies were pretty Niche for very specific verticals and so it wasn't like a broad-based technology that could be applied to all kinds of use cases really easily and then in late 2019 we got to test out gpt2 which was really the first um that generative kind of tech that I had used personally and what was really fascinating stood out Liam is you would type something in there and let it autocomplete and then it would come up like you could get it to come up with crazy stuff like crazy new stuff and then you'd Google it and you wouldn't find any search results for the thing that it created and that was really the aha moment for me I was like man if you could create anything then the ROI from this technology is um unlimited because that means that there is no capped amount of value it could create if you let it Loose it can go create really anything um like things you can't even imagine and so this idea that creativity would be the first real use case of it um to us was pretty clear the whole point of it is to get it to like do things that are interesting and creative and original and even now um this is still something that we want out of these generative models um we thought it'd be about seven years before it could be like commercially viable in a uh Enterprise context but uh fast forward six months and they launched gpt3 and in the 20 in the summer of 2020 and then immediately because the model you know was about a hundred times the size and they you know trained it with more data it did actually hit that Tipping Point and so it went from one in Ten kind of results being good to around nine out of ten um and then if you created you know multiple examples it'd be a prompting you could actually get it to do a task repeatedly pretty well and so at that moment in time um my co-founder and I we just kind of said all right we got this is it like this is the wave it starts right now and so we started um launching MVP little side projects we got instant access like we got access as fast as we could to the uh the gbt3 API and then um watch about five MVPs in two and a half months and then um each time we launch we learn something new and we figured out you know a better way to replicate what we were doing on the back end from an engineering scene so this was already going into the uh the call BI side of things or you were just playing around with anything you could get your hands on and seeing what you could do with the gpt3 uh that yeah so we you know it's just like fun projects you know you don't know where you don't know what it's gonna take off so it wasn't like we quit our jobs to do you know to do a startup it wasn't like that um but we got to do like five different things we built a summarization uh tool that got mentioned in the Long Street Journal I was like all right that's cool people use it like let's go do something else let's keep going um and then we ended up building a site called taglines. ai which was just a tagline generator that's all it did and so you just type in your product uh name or product description and it would just generate the tagline that thing took off we had over 2 000 people um try that on use that in like the first week or so and um we started to see people use it for all these different marketing and sales use cases um for email copy website copy and so it really validated that there were a lot of use cases that could use um some tooling like that and then we also found out you know we're thinking oh this is like a it's just for marketers and as it turns out you got all kinds of users using the tools and finding value in them and so that really validated and we also set up like a little stripe paywall highly recommend figuring out if anybody will pay you for the thing you built quickly and so yeah so within the first week we validated one people would know how to use the interface two that the use cases were varied like they're kind of related but there were a lot of use cases people are using these tools for uh three that all kinds of users would use it not just like the hyper Focus like copywriter so we went back to the drawing board and said okay we have literally one tool that's all this thing does let's go build like a suite of them we rebranded it as copy. ai we launched that and that took off uh relatively quickly and

so with the like tagline generator in terms of the a lot of these the startups right now a front running what the users are putting in with a sort of pre-prompt to gpd3 correct so a lot of the stuff on copy to AI is like setting up a preset uh angle that you've gone down with gbt3 and then users put the input on top of that right so is that how you do that to them that's how you get it started yeah you've been strapped your data set with prompts but then over time you end up taking the data feedback from users and fine-tuning tools for that use case yeah that's one of my big questions for you because as I see it there's this sort of direct usage of gpt3 and the API which is let's just use it for prompt and completion calls and then we're going to be a little bit cheeky about it and we'll do a sort of pre-prompt uh to gbt3 to get it to understand a certain scenario and then we're going to let users build on top of that preset scenario so um and then I guess is the fine-tuning side of things which from my own experimenting with seems quite um difficult to understand at what point it eventually becomes a flexible understanding of something so could you talk a little bit about your experience with fine tuning and your results and I guess experience with getting the training data fit into gbt3 it works all right you can get it to work you need a lot of data that's that tends to be a pretty safe assumption across every kind of generative AI use case um so the more data you get the more you can train it to kind of produce the results that your users find valuable um yeah they're all kinds of like techniques and things but it's that's a pretty standard

process right now um and I guess for the users who want 100 familiar with copy AI I've played around with it I love a lot of the tools I was particularly the sort of startup focused ones to help you with ideation and YouTube video stuff which is all great tools that I've been enjoying if you could just give a quick run through of sort of the core in your mind the core features that you provide and an example of the target users that you typically have using your platform sure so anyone writing sales or marketing copy so if you're writing emails if you're like sales emails to your users if you're needing to create like website content you can describe kind of what kinds of content you're looking to get you describe your product or your company and then it'll give you ideas instantly so it's like you type that in it'll generate you know multiple sets of results for you to review and find something that works for your particular copywriting use case so we've we started out you know with these preset tools and um over time you know we said okay there are infinite use cases right which you can't fit into tools so what is the path forward in a world where you can do anything with us I think you've seen this with chat GPT work out pretty well where it's really open-ended and really flexible so I do think that the chat kind of interface where you can have that feedback ex user feedback experience is going to be a really interesting interface Paradigm as well and so that's something that we're going to be uh implementing and building into the core of our product as well yeah um with uh gbt4 coming how much are you how's that affecting your strategy going forward and you gotta assume it's gonna be awesome right I mean um it'll be much more powerful than so it these models are going to end up eating both interfaces they're gonna need apis they're gonna connect the internet they're gonna eat up like you know uh index content I mean it's for real it's not just like oh you know let's carve this little niche out here it's not like that oh it's a um it's a very large ship sailing increase increasingly fast right and you really want to get on board that ship you want to look out as far into the distance as you can and even now people online are like oh you know AGI is so far away I'm like no it's 20 23. this wouldn't give it a couple months that's what I said I'm like 2023 all this stuff's accelerating we already know Google has uh better models than what's probably available now and you know Larry and Sergey just came back to Google to do this so coming back you're telling me that we're not going to see massive exponential progress in an arms race in a now in a competitive environment at the base layer it's enough to pull those guys out of like essential retirement and be like I'm back in the game I'm ready to make another shift

um I fully agree with you on that this is um sort of a new era of tick and it's a different breed and like you said earlier that it's when you noticed that it was a it's going to affect a lot of areas and I think for me I remember growing up sort of the past eight years as a high school kid and stuff I was looking around like yeah we've get we've got smartphones we've got this and we've got that but like I knew that these things weren't going to be as I was like we've had this big smartphone wait what's this next big thing and in my head I couldn't figure out what this thing was and as soon as I had my first go with chat GPT I was like this is yeah this house is the big one how old are you how many 22. 22 all right I'm 35 when you don't maybe remember when like phones first came out or the internet came out oh I mean that dude imagine the internet coming out you know like that was it one of those moments for you yeah the internet was for sure the internet was and then um after when you could get any song you download any song on the planet for free yeah I was using LimeWire that was LimeWire and LimeWire era I mean you downloaded it I downloaded every song it's on it like an external hard drive so yeah those are Paradigm shifts and your mind is exploding and then relatively quickly people just adapt to it and you're like oh yeah we have Spotify you know and it's like they just don't compute to have access to every song yeah sure of course right of course but it makes sense that we would and that's how technology works and Technology is a force for making things cheaper that's how you know you have technology if it gets if things get more expensive you don't have technology when we talk about like AI products being free or not or whatnot like yeah of course like they'll be free you look at Google is free and it's incredibly valuable right they don't try to charge you for that they just said somebody has to figure out the business model so if chat CPT is going to sort of play a role like a revolution of search how would these uh chat GPT tools like that be monetized and the current strategy that they just put out it's this new thing that you see with these AI tools like mid journey and stuff that you're paying for premium access to servers and first results and stuff but if it was yeah it's hard to imagine that that's yeah I've kind of made the search platform paid and a Charged per search initially right it killed the business overnight so it's been interesting seeing how they're going to get to that paid situation I think what they have is not a bad medium whether you can pay if you're using it for commercial purposes or using it as a serious uh Works person then you can get these faster access to the results I mean these models are going to be embedded into your iPhone like on the hardware so hard to imagine those business models last being very durable right with my business partner we're talking a lot about Wiz the like you said it's going to replace the apis and like personal assistants and the stuff and it's basically just going to connect to everything we were thinking it needs to be chat gbt but you can ask it things or you make a personal assistant and then you uh develop a program that will allow it to interact with Google Sheets or your calendar or this and this that's very basic stuff and like you said I think that's going to become mainstream yeah I mean we have some of that already exists and you can get those different connectors set up Google Sheets is going to get a massive Improvement like just the way that data gets organized is going to be incredibly it's gonna be an incredibly powerful product once they embed that in probably

this year um just for the viewers who aren't familiar with the history of copy AI could you give us a quick rundown of funding employees your users and all of that good stuff that I'm sure you're very proud of yeah I think we've you know we've done well we've gone the venture-backed route it was a decision that we had to figure out um like my partner and I we had got it up to like 50 000 a month and uh recurring Revenue before we hired our first employee and then um we ended up raising a total of 14 million dollars for like seed round and series a and then um we've grown the team to like 34 people and um past uh 12 million now in a revenue run rate and from a user standpoint we really we very much believe in free products freemium so we've had I think we've just passed five million users sign up in this product uh this past week so we're trying to really build very long-term uh distribution around the product of the platform and we wanted you know we want to make you want to make something that people want that's really critical to who we are as a company um I think you're gonna really like when you're at it's not like 35 people it's not a huge company right Google has I think 100 20 000 or something people it's a lot of people and they have a lot of funding so if you're gonna be nimble as a startup and lean you have to really play into your strengths and so when you're a lean team that means that we can be Scrappy we can build things quickly we can pivot um you know engineering teams to you know building what you know anything that gets released at the game changer you want to integrate that really fast and all of that really accelerates your growth engine as well because users continue to find increasing amounts of value in the platform what's going to be interesting is and um still I think a little bit early to see where the um how to translate distribution and growth and usage into like really powerful business models that win and again I don't I'm not sure that charging for chat gbt you know 40 whatever dollars a month is going to really be that competitive if Google just integrates that into they just integrated into search engines and then they're in every interface they're not going to need to be charging for it either no and they happen to Own Chrome YouTube Gmail pretty big search Android I mean they have sewn up so much distribution and then if it does end up at the hardware layer in the OS layer they um they own a lot of that too um and Apple's already you know throwing themselves in the mix as well so I think you're looking at hyper you're gonna look at a hyper competitive environment all eyes are on AI for big Tech and so I am anticipating you know very fast Improvement here

and what's your experience been like with VCS of speaking to my business partner about getting funding for different ideas and he's always been very uh sort of against going that route because he feels like as soon as we take the money then there's going to be people over our shoulder so what's your experience been like and uh what's your relationship like with your VCS your VCS our relationship's great because but we also were very fortunate to have the best species and best in our company um Venture cat there's nothing magical about Venture Capital it's just an investor right it's my investing money um as that industry has grown it's harder to bring in Founders to become investors and so if you haven't started thing you know companies before or been very early and you really see the process of company formation and making it's very hard um outside of a very like your core expertise area to provide advice so the things that you tend to get are like introductions which are really helpful the capital itself obviously very helpful um yeah you hear horror stories though some people have really bad experiences and then the more investors you buy invite into your company the higher the odds that you're going to hit one of those really bad investors so I always recommend doing back you know reference checks with Founders that have worked with that investor over a long period of time um so yeah I'd say be do your diligence don't think like oh I'm tricking this person into investing you know that you're just it's not gonna work it's really not going to work and you're going to end up in a bad position so play it like a long-term game um and do not lie ever in fundraising process yeah life is too short for that and people will figure you out we'll find out yeah a lot of it's reputation based so it's all reputation based because you have that's how the startup World works there's an insane amount of trust that you give to someone else um without doing reference tracks like that's how things are so efficient and move so quickly you don't need to like get a warm intro like you I think you just called message me I'm like sure I'll do a podcast you know so it's like that's how the world should work we should all trust each other and you hear these horror stories you hear these like about these startups blowing up and like you know just total outright fraud I do not want people to think that that's how it is done or should be done and that you should expect that or you should behave that way um so if you're um this is your business partner your business like if you're if you think that Venture capitalists are going to ruin your company you should not raise money because you will not give them the benefit of the doubt you won't trust them and that's really critical that you do that awesome

awesome um what do you look for in core team members and co-founders I think this is a very big topic and important for people who are watching to get some advice from you and your experience of how did you know that the person that you co-founded copier with was someone you could trust long term and that they had the qualities that you were ready to move forward with entrusted a business relationship because business is one thing uh friendships are another and they're often a bit of a great mix when they come together yeah I mean I'm just insanely lucky my car it was my colleague and then he and I became friends instantly when we met and started working together so we'd already worked together for four years and uh I trust yeah trust him with my life he's incredible and he's you know extremely talented um engineer and insanely like highly futuristic thinker so it's just beautiful match um I would not recommend it I know people ask like oh I need a co-founder for my company I would not recommend bringing on a co-founder you don't know or you met in the past absolutely two months the trust don't worry you gotta trust them 100 very deeply very deep trust and um so again would not recommend and in hiring your sort of key uh key positions uh what have you found as a co-founder uh what was your process of learning how to hire well and I'm sure you've um run into that a lot and what have what are your things that you could recommend to people who are in the position of having to hire some really crucial staff uh what are the things that you look for or what are the red flags that will turn you off someone uh who's looking to join your company yeah for like we're a software company so yeah finding great Engineers is like a key thing and um one of our friends was a like contract CTO so he had been CTO he'll do the initial interview screens really helped guide us through that process and then helped us find a really great head of engineering and that that's been amazing like our engineering staff is it's top top tier and then across the rest of the organization it is a little bit harder like it's somewhat narrow to Define um you know kind of the engineering skills you're looking for and it's pretty easy to do the to get a sense of culture on the other side like you know product design marketing we're looking for people that because we want to maintain a lean Focus they have had experience doing like lots of different types of things and have a really good sense of where to focus time and how to prioritize what's important so that's worked well for us um uncovering that would just go really you know go as deep as you can into the resume the projects they've worked on and understand how their brain works differences references and all that so those are really key I can't stress references enough um and then we've also been fortunate because we have like so so much of our companies out in the public you know online that we have a lot of applications when we post jobs job openings and so it's a very big Pipeline and it actually to find people that fit what you're looking for and match like culturally um like for us optimism's huge right we're a remote company that means every time I get on a zoom call with someone else we have to feed each other energy right and so that's really critical um in this remote world so do you know does the team have that chemistry because that's how you open up communication yeah online chemistry must be even harder to find it's interesting it's a tough job I didn't realize you were fully remote that's it's tough yeah my co-founder is not even in the same city as I am but we had worked remotely before so we were working remotely

yeah um in terms of uh as a startup founder if you're looking just to step into the AI space and start a business how important do you think technical ability is in a startup founder and is it 100 necessary do you need sort of a rough understanding because I know there's a lot of people looking to get into it and seeing that yes this is the future I want to try and build something here and build some value but they're so clueless when it comes to anything ml or uh machine learning or anything you know that they're just so blind on that side of things that maybe marketers coming in and they just they can't even grasp a lot of the stuff so what are your thoughts on technical ability for startup founders um well you've got kind of two periods one is before Transformer models like gpt3 and then the second periods after that so before yeah you needed like someone with data science skills machine learning skills because he had to go find models build the right models test them in production like that that's a whole at least a person that's just doing that after gpt3 it's literally low code so it's like you just describe what you need in this and the um you know you can Implement into an application so the technical requirement for building a company that uses AI to do something is much lower now than it used to be um so I would incur yeah I'd encourage people you do need to know you need to know what can what's possible like that's very important to understand technologically what is possible the hardest part is understanding it at a deep enough level to engineer your architecture in a way that makes it really flexible and modular so that would be the thing that you'd want and then if you're a founder and you're not technical you need to be really good at business and really understanding the business use cases and applications

awesome but in terms of say building on top of gpd3 would you say um directly building on top of it and just allowing people a nicer way to interact with it for some certain use case that's the sort of model people should be looking at or are there other areas that are also just exciting that people may not be aware of um well these models are gonna do work they're actually going to do work they're not just gonna it's a total transformation of software used to be just hear the rails like we set this up so that you can do this task pretty easily you just go through a workflow over these steps these models are going to do all that work so we are in a total transformation everything has to get rebuilt and redone and it's going to be in the next kind of two year time frame when that needs to happen so if you're looking out and you're like I don't know what to build you are not like you need to get in deep and in some kind of use case and get and start just building stuff and understanding how the technology works so I would not recommend like Hey we're gonna go start a business I'd much recommend yeah recommend it yeah build some side projects and launch them and see what happens awesome so would you say find someone who's if you're not necessarily technically capable find someone who is and then and sort of just get deep and start bouncing ideas for each other would be a good place to start yeah and it's probably wouldn't be a bad idea for you even if you're not technical to figure it out okay it's not a two-year thing to build something anymore and if you don't know what the stack is you need to go figure that out first I'm about to post just a basic fine-tuning guide for people to just get chat gbt to help them make a fine-tuning um script and then just put it through get a bunch of example data off kaggle that I grabbed and put it through and did a fine tuning process so I'm trying to educate people on the channel a little bit as well who may be blind um and just be able to I say in the video just that you need to know that at least the starting bit of information yeah how people are doing this and then you're going to be light years ahead of people who are um completely blind and don't know how a lot of the stuff works yeah company any company is gonna need people that understand how it works even at a base level they're you're going to be really valuable

can you discuss any exciting developments or planned for the future for copy AI I expect that the like we're approaching a singularity from a technology standpoint and a singularity means that you suck in everything right everything collapses in into one really tight mass of value the last time we saw this was the phone the iPhone right before the iPhone you had a digital camera you remember those did they have those when you were a kid okay yes do you remember the old camcorders right and do you remember what flashlights look like during a reflection yeah do you remember what watches look like they'd tell you the time yeah I go okay so what have I want an app watch too so the hardware ate everything up just ate all of it up like the old Telly you know like all of it it's literally everything is now on a phone same thing's gonna happen in software where everything gets eaten by the model all the interface is the front end The Works the problem's gonna be when you if you're a big tech company and you have a certain business model that's dependent on certain types of activities happening if there's a disruption in the way that activities happen which is what we think then the value of shifts like the value that you can capture and monetize shifts elsewhere and then you gotta hold new problem on your hands okay well uh one last question um what is your life outside work like uh what are your hobbies how do you stay sane as a Founder I've got two kids two kids yeah I think you're pretty busy they're great yeah I'm you know huge on family married happy awesome that's a great role model for grilling younger viewers grilling I don't know why but every algorithm on my phone is just now showing me like videos of somebody cooking a steak everything it's just constant steak cooking cook on my phone like what are they doing this like can I turn this off and it's like no you have to watch it they're listening to you of course I mean I suppose one last thing any uh general advice for an aspiring uh entrepreneur like yourself oh yeah you gotta be optimistic one because no pessimists don't do nothing they don't do anything nobody cares and they just depress everybody so I don't want to hear it nobody wants to hear it two if you're not building something today just like go build something real simple and just kind of build and launch in any in the time frame needs to be under a week so anything you're doing needs to be under week and if you can't commit to doing something for a week strength of time frame to like two days and if you can't do that then just like set a timer for like an hour build something and launch it awesome yeah Paul thank you so much for your time I appreciate it I'm insane I'm sure what the viewers do too um everyone watching be sure to go check out copy AI if you haven't already uh excellent tool um say the best writing platform you could possibly find at the moment so much better um and of course head over to uh Twitter and Paulo uh follow Paul I'm going to drop his uh Twitter down below so you can go show some love there and also keep up to date with what he's doing and what copy AI is doing as well so thanks thank you so much Paul uh have an awesome day I don't want to keep you around for too much longer but I appreciate your time and uh all the best