Whixic
Technologies
Pvt Ltd
www.writee.in
www.writee.in
Writee AI, legally incorporated as Whixic Technologies Private Limited, is an AI-based copywriting platform built for marketers, founders and freelancers. Writee was incorporated on 9th March 2022 and it's my first start-up. In this article, I’ll take you through our story – from inception to acquisition.
Writee AI is an AI-based writing assistant that helps people write more engaging content faster. In a world that is increasingly becoming digital, words are more important than ever. They are the foundation of communication, connection, and understanding. They have the power to build bridges and break down barriers. They can inspire and they can ignite. Yet, very few people have enough power over words to convey their messages let alone persuade others to follow them.
With this thought in mind, Writee AI was born. Writee is not just another AI copywriter or a writing tool; it’s an enabler for people who want to write and express themselves. It’s a friend always at your disposal to help you write better, bolder, and faster. We aimed to create an assistant that empowers your words instead of replacing your thoughts.
In just 1.5 years since Writee was conceptualized, it gained significant global traction. Writee was used by people from over 120 countries during its journey. The product saw over 15,000 unique visitors and generated 700,000 words of content for users in a short span of 4 months.
At the time of acquisition, Writee had over 1000 sign-ups demonstrating product-market fit. We had a steadily growing base with 8-10 daily active users who loved the product. Although the overall user base was still small, the product showed great promise with the validation received from thousands of early adopters worldwide. The acquisition happened at a point when Writee was ready to scale and supercharge its growth. The acquisition resulted in a 20x return on investment for the founders.
Countries from which users visited Writee
On 30th January 2022, 3 students from Jadavpur University were on a call at midnight discussing ideas that could revolutionise the world. It was apparent that they had an intense desire of starting-up. This was the third continuous day of discussion. Ideas from Neobanking and AI-powered investing to a social media for food bloggers, they had discussed it all.
Having had the experience of building things in the past, we knew better than to jump head first into an idea without doing our due diligence. There was a detailed process followed while selecting the idea. The process was as follows:
We used this framework to sift through business ideas all night for 3 consecutive nights. On the third night we came across the idea for an AI-content writer. Having an AI researcher in the team, we were intrigued with the concept of AI writing content for you. Here’s what we found when we went through our framework for selecting an idea:
An AI-Copywriter passed all our test parameters. This sealed the deal for Writee AI. It was now time to incorporate our company. Little did we know, this is a tedious process with little to no information on the internet. While the government has simplified a lot of the archaic systems, ease of doing business is still far from reality in India. There are a number of formalities to be completed, from getting digital signatures for the directors to drafting a memorandum of association, it is next to impossible to do it by yourself. This is when we started scouting for agencies. We had meetings with 5 chartered accountants, and after being given outrageous quotations, we fixed our service provider and the process began. After 3 tenacious weeks, Whixic Technologies Private Limited was officially registered with the Government of India on 9th March 2022.
Signing Board Resolutions on college ground for opening Company's Bank Accounts
Board Meeting in College Classroom discussing future plan
In an effort to "move fast", we launched a one-page prototype to test out our thesis and learn more about industry needs from potential users. The prototype was as simple as it could get but it helped us validate the potency of our idea.
First version of Writee AI - a single page form
Having performed all the required inceptive tests, we started working on our Minimal Viable Product (MVP). After weeks of meetings, potential client calls, and research, we narrowed down our MVP to a simple tool which would let users generate blogs, captions, and quotes. Our research showed that long-form content such as blogs are what most users struggle with while captions are things users need on a day-to-day basis for social media posts.
Minimum Viable Product to test for market validation
Using Writee to generate content for Internship Report
There was a secondary objective of our MVP - fine-tuning our LLM to perform better. AI becomes better as more data is fed into it. With this in mind, we needed relevant and real-life content to train and optimise our model to be more performant and precise. With the beta running for 3+ months, Writee wrote more than 1,72,000 words for 100+ users. This gave us enough data to come up with accurate insights into the needs of our users and to fine-tune our model.
As college students, we intentionally avoided external funding in Writee's early days. There are a lot of traditionally cool reasons to do so, but there were 2 primary drivers for us -
Apart from that, we also wanted to go at the challenge ourselves first. We were 19-year-old kids who had not a single working experience and we wanted to prove that we could do it. It is often important to make mistakes at the beginning so that you can grow and learn. Having the mind space to fail and fail miserably at that is very important for someone who's still learning the ropes. Building a company without spending a single penny taught us lessons we'll never forget. The most important lesson was that the success of a company is not determined by the amount of money you spend, but instead how much effort and dedication you put into it.
In a moderately competitive market there is just 1 thing that differentiates companies - Understanding of the market. There is a common saying that if a market is crowded it means that it’s a market ripe for disruption. There is no product out there that solves all of the user’s problems, hence there is no clear winner in the user’s eyes. This was the case with the AI Copywriting industry. We spent about 2 months talking to users, going through product reviews on websites like G2 and trustpilot, while studying relevant marketing trends. This built our philosophy for our final release. We had the necessary knowledge to finally bring our clients the product they were looking for.
After this detailed market research, we got down to planning the product for our final release. Having learnt what the users needed, we set out to build the mightiest and juiciest product ever. We failed miserably in the first 2 weeks itself! We had set out to build a product which needed the power of an engineering team working full-time for 4+ months. Ambition is something which start-up founders are not bereft of. We sized up our expectations and chalked out an achievable plan of action. It did take more than 2 months to execute but we ended up with an incredible product we could ship.
Dashboard of Writee AI
Writee's Flagship Document Editor
It was during this time that AppSumo, one of the leading product marketplaces in the US, reached out to me. They had a special program called AppSumo Select where they market your product on their platform and social for a commission on every sale through them. It was a great opportunity. There were some kinks to be ironed out but our meeting went well, they were excited and we were excited too. But the deal fell through. Writee's landing page hadn't been updated in a while, and it undersold the level of services we were offering at the time. Being a 2 member team, we were so focused on building the product that we forgot to update the landing page. A senior member from the AppSumo team reached out to us, and let us know that this was the main reason for them not working with us. They assumed, even though we had an amazing product, that the level of services that we were providing was low. This was a big lesson for us - Your projection of the world is more important than what you are actually doing. what you are actually doing. We needed to make sure that our messaging, website and services were all up to date and in line with what we were offering. I spent sleepless nights creating the most beautiful landing page I'd seen. I crafted every graphic, every text and every animation myself. This landing page converted more users than ever before and we reached thousands of people all over the world.
Writee AI came out of beta on 27th November 2022, with the launch of our powerful writing assistant. It was now time to start selling the product to potential clients. We decided on a freemium model, where users could try out the core offerings of the product and also receive 2,000 words to generate using AI. Our marketing channel of choice was Search Engine Optimisation. Being bootstrapped college students, we were working on a very tight budget - thus organic sources of traffic were the only way to go. Any form of online advertisement was too expensive and social media marketing helped more in top-of-the-funnel marketing which isn't the most optimised traffic source for an early-stage firm. Apart from that, our product was targetting small and medium-sized businesses, thus the only social media with an engaged target audience for us was LinkedIn. For this, I started working on creating a personal brand - which is also the reason for this website. I wasn't successful enough in creating a brand that converts, but the journey was fun. That left us with SEO. Traffic from search results can fall into any part of the funnel and a long-term SEO plan focuses on capturing traffic for all levels of intent to create as many touchpoints with a potential user pre-sign up as possible. While SEO doesn't show a 10-20x increase in the number of visits immediately, a consistent plan does show an appreciable increase regularly.
Presenting Writee at Bengal Global Business Summit
Now that we had zeroed in on SEO as our go-to channel, it was time to get down to planning. Things got a little complicated here. No one in my team had experience in this field and it is one of those fields that is filled with incorrect and misleading information. I spent 3 to 4 weeks going into the nitty gritty of SEO, creating detailed notes, reading blog posts and understanding concepts. (You can check out my notes on SEO here). Getting the knowledge was not the end of it. To effectively create and implement an SEO plan, you need access to expensive tools for research. Some of the tool's monthly subscriptions cost more than what we spent in 6 months. We had to figure out a way to circumvent the need for these tools.
This is where an idea struck me, it's one of the ideas I am most proud of (more so than the acquisition too perhaps). Competitor analysis is a big part of any marketing plan, SEO was no different. The problem with manually doing market research in SEO is that content (read blogs) is the driver for almost all SEO activity. It is impossible to scour through blog after blog to understand common trends. But, I am a developer and I've spent a considerable amount of my time building bots and scrapers for the bedrock of India's Financial System - the Bombay Stock Exchange. I picked up the top products in my category and created scrapers that not only scraped all the blog headings but also scraped the entire content of the blog. I had 200+ blogs from 5 different companies in an Excel sheet ready for analysis. I then used some of my machine learning knowledge to run a couple of models to get the keywords used commonly, reoccurring trends, sentiment analysis and so on. This formed the bedrock of my SEO plan which increased our traffic from 4-5 visitors a week to 50-70 visitors a week in 2 months. The approach might seem unconventional or even borderline wrong, but not a single word in my blogs was plagiarised. I had to come up with a scrappy and cost-effective way to create my SEO plan, and this forms the essence of early-stage entrepreneurship where resources are limited and problems are abundant.
Exponential increase in impressions on Google Search Console
Simultaneous increase in impressions and clicks
The product hunt launch of Writee is one of those stories where the good systems and processes that you set up when no one was watching help you not just to survive but thrive and conquer. I'll be honest, I was not planning on a product hunt launch. The manpower and manhours required for a typical PH Launch far outweigh the benefits from it. A typical product hunt user is an early adopter in the sense that they will register and try out every product that launches, but they will rarely stick to any of them. I am myself guilty of doing this on product hunt a number of times. While this is good for generating awareness for the product and getting some traffic, it isn't very useful for building a paying user base. Being bootstrapped and college students, it was important for us to prioritise our efforts.
Having said all of it, for some reason, on a random Sunday, I decided to launch on Product Hunt. I have absolutely no idea what ticked in my head, but I did it anyway. I knew the basic strategies to optimise a launch from some research I did a couple of months prior but I was in no way an expert. One insight for anyone who just wants a PH badge and is not very concerned about the traffic - launch on a weekend. The bigger players with deeper pockets typically launch on weekdays and the competition is more fierce. Things are easier on a weekend. As soon as my product was live on PH, I went into a message overdrive. I texted more people in that one day than I probably did in a month. I reached out to every connection, acquaintance and community that I was a part of. I made sure that the message was personal and clear. The response was overwhelming! Distant connections were reaching out to congratulate me and offer help. The power of community at work moved me more than the actual rank that we received.
We ended the day with the Top 5 Product of the Day. We lost the 4th position but a single upvote, but nevertheless, receiving a badge from the product hunt was a surreal experience! In the process of reaching out to people, I also booked a couple of calls with VCs and potential clients. I wasn't looking to raise funds, but you do not say no to meetings with partners from Venture Capital firms. We also got featured in multiple newsletters including the world's largest newsletter - Superhuman.
Product Hunt Launch Page
ChatGPT, from OpenAI, launched in December 2022 and it took the world by storm. It in a matter of days became the fastest growing consumer app in history. ChatGPT made AI accessible to the masses and as luck had it, the world caught on to the impact that an AI can create in the workforce. AI as a field has always seen tremendous research interests but not as much commercial interest. Before December 2022, there were just a handful of pure AI companies, most companies either used AI to optimise their internal functions or had AI in some part of their product implementation. Artificial Intelligence as a service (or core offering) was relatively much rarer. After the announcement of ChatGPT, a gold rush began. Given how powerful the technology was, people thought that just about anyone could make a fortune with the power of AI. The gold rush brought in hundreds of investors and entrepreneurs, eager to make a quick buck off the new technology. This crowded the market and made it almost impossible for users to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The absence of VC funding and a frugal approach almost ensured that we could wither the storm but just because you can survive does not mean that you should. Writee, in early 2022, was an innovative product that solved a very specific and pertinent problem. Writee, in mid-2023, had, in the eyes of AI-hyped users, become yet another AI tool that could do magic. Artificial Intelligence is the future of our world. It will drastically change the way we live our lives, but the point of any technological advancement is to solve a specific problem. Using AI, for the sake of using it, can lead to added complexity which is what most AI platforms have started doing.
As a 20-year-old, I preferred would prefer working in an industry with tailwinds and not one with a never-ending storm. With all of this in mind, around the end of April 2023, we decided that it was now time for us to EXIT. I've gone into a lot more detail regarding the acquisition process in my blogs but to summarise, it took us about 3 months to find a buyer we'd be comfortable handing over Writee to. We closed the deal rather quickly and on one fine evening in July, I was no longer the owner of Writee.
The experience of parting with a company you built is always intense, but the intensity is a lot more when that experience taught you more than most things in life. In the one and half years at Writee, I developed the utmost patience for situations, gained a deeper appreciation for uncertainty and volatility, and learned how to balance my ambitions against the reality of a new venture.