How to create SEO-optimized and plagiarism-free content faster
About Writesonic
Chaitanya: Writesonic is a generative AI company that started about nine months ago, we’re close to a year. Officially we are in Alpha for about four months after that, we did our release. The tool helps everyone automate things near content, be it your long form or short form. And other forms of content writing, from Google Ads and Facebook Ads to other forms of content, your email scripts, your video scripts, podcast scripts, and anything you can do with the content. I think the limit of the use case is how well and efficiently you want to use it. It’s not built on the product, but we still are trying to innovate a lot in terms of what we are.
We want to help those small and medium businesses. Let’s say you have a mom or someone in at mid-forties or fifties who don’t have access to the technology as we do. Or they want to build a side hustle, or they want to build businesses. , using technology, and we want to bring technology to the forefront so that they can build their businesses more easily without taking a lot of help from other people. We are not killing resources, we’re trying to make people more efficient and more productive using technology.
What are the most loved features of Writesonic?
Chaitanya: We have a bunch of great features which we are coming up with. We have two products right now. Writesonic is our main flagship product, but we have another product called Chatsonic, which is similar to ChatGPT. Still, we train them with other models, integrations, and other stuff. There are 150 million users that access Opera, and we integrated with them. I think Chatsonic is a great feature on steroids. Mostly for long-form content, we are writing your blogs or automating hundred-page words and all of that. Chatsonic is contextual and also factual with the data which you input, I think that is what keeps us different. We are trying to build a multimodal on top of that.
You can say that I wanted to write an email where I want to have a gift of a puppy, and the puppy should talk about the particular image or the kind of meme or something you want to add. These are multimodal search queries, in which you can’t find information quickly and are not accessible easily. Or maybe you want to have information saying you like HubSpot emails. You can say that – hey, Chatsonic, can you write an email by learning the emails of HubSpot and rewrite that in the context of the factual information with a specific gift from Chargebee or Stripe, which I got in the other email? Can we combine these two? That’s what Chatsonic can do.
How do you generate unique content, plagiarism-free?
Chaitanya: We have many self-trained models, which we use, and we have a research team that works on training the models on top of other open-source data sets and all available on the market. We’re built on open AI still, but we do have other data sets where we train our data with the information which we see in our systems. We’ve generated over a hundred million copies at this point, right? With the 5 million copies, we have a lot of information we process. We use that to train our models and provide more accurate information. And we do also have integrations with Google Knowledge, which keeps us apart from OpenAI. With OpenAI, you have data till 2021 with Google Knowledge Graph, and we are almost in real-time.
Will AI-generated content damage your SEO?
Chaitanya: If you just Google a ChatGPT alternative, Writesonic ranks first, and all of that content are written by AI. We’ve scaled the traffic from, let’s say, over 300,000 visits to almost 2.1 million visits using AI. That’s a great case study for anyone to understand what we did.
Writesonic pricing plans
Chaitanya: We do have a premium plan. You get 10,000 words of credit to start with, which you can try. I think that is enough for you to test out at least like three or four blocks for the first month and after the first month. It’s a decent size, and you can maybe do a landing page maybe a couple of emails. But if you wanted to do more with the scale, have more versions of the content, have AB testing or multiple ad copies running a small business, then you might have to start with a $19 plan.
We also have a $50 plan with team options where you can have multiple team members. And the $999 plan comes with a GTP- approach, and other models are on the GPT-3. You choose based on your usage, figure out as. We have special pricing for students, 30% off on the plans because we want to help them.
What is the difference between GPT-3 and GPT-4?
Chaitanya: What we understood, I mean, personally, when I tried GPT-4, is that it’s more contextual. I was doing a webinar with Craig Campbell. I want to write a tweet thread by using the information on the landing page, which is built, and combining that with information or what is available on his past webinars with Semrush and other different places. It combined stats and numbers from all this information and wrote me a five-minute thread on six various stats. With GPT-3, it doesn’t know the context of the webinar, what we spoke about, and when we spoke.
Writesonic Chrome extension and other integrations
Chaitanya: We have a Chrome integration that’s like Chatsonic on steroids all over the place. Every website, every app, everything you open, Chatsonic is there. We have a mobile app on Android, and we are the first to have a Zapier integration. That combines Notion, Slack, and all the productivity apps, or if you want to automate Google Sheets, Google Docs, or anything. Anything which is there on Zapier. We opened our API six months back, even before OpenAI launched their API. You can tweak it, play around with the API, and explore other ways to explore things independently.
How dangerous is AI now that everyone can access it?
Chaitanya: It’s not as dangerous as people think. It’s the perception of people and how you want to use it, right? If you are to break it down from a marketer’s perspective, AI can only access the information publicly if they want to scrape data from a particular website and stuff. AI can’t access information not there on Google or anywhere. It’s optimizing your way of searching for things. Instead of searching for the top 10 information about a particular itinerary, it’s saying this is the best itinerary and how we must do it. It’s like adding steroids to Google search. The AI is only accessing the public data, it’s not accessing the data in your emails, and it’s not accessing your WhatsApp.
How do you differentiate from your competitors?
Chaitanya: Someone like Microsoft is saying that we are the first ones we are scared of. Microsoft recently released a stability map saying that Microsoft Bing and Google are on one side while Chatsonic is on the other side. That’s a difference that we are creating. We are building a content ecosystem like Salesforce did with the CRM market. We wanted to venture into other things and ensure you’re always using Chatsonic at your part of your content life.
What are some surprising product use cases?
Chaitanya: We also have a marketplace called a prompt marketplace. Do we ensure that there is zero plagiarism? Sometimes we see that there is a bit of plagiarism, like 3% or 5% because that depends on prompts. That depends on the kind of input users do. We recently saw a prompt by one of the users who said – hey, I want to write a thousand-word blog on this particular topic. Can you also make sure that it is not plagiarized and not detected by any AI? And Chatsonic did it. This is a kind of example that we never thought of.
What are the benefits of using AI?
Chaitanya: If you’re building a business and you want to hire a content writer with five years of experience, he might be able to write three blogs a week. But can you do 10 posts? Can you do a hundred? I know people who are using OpenAI, Chatsonic, and other kinds of forms to build thousands of thousands of landing pages in a month. If I want to build a Booking.com or Airbnb where I want to build a landing page for every city, and every country, I could do that in 15 days now. If I wanted to do that back two years, I might ages.
I see this as a place where you have to keep on innovating, you have to keep on doing things to increase the scale, speed, and velocity of what you do. That keeps us apart, right? AI is always there. A content writer is a content writer. A content writer knows what works for him, and a content writer always knows his pedigree of how to rank for keywords. There are still processes that we can’t automate using AI. Let’s say you wanted to distribute, right? You wanted to build backlinks, or you wanted to make sure that there is a technical SEO and all of that. You might have to do some kind of manual intervention.
AI is not replacing there, it’s just increasing the scale and speed of what you can do so that you don’t have to work on tasks like the data entry part of stuff and other normal things which you could do. It’s more related to how you can build strategies where you can use AI and make things achievable, which might take a lot of time. Can we shorten that? If I don’t have money to hire a concentrator where I have to pay $70,000 annually, can I hire a couple of freelancers to do certain jobs and save $50,000 and use the $25,000 to build a business out of it instead of spending it?
Why Google will allow AI-generated content
Chaitanya: Google released a recent update focusing on AI-specific SEO. If they’re talking about AI-specific SEO, they know this will change the game forever. And they’re adapting to AI. Initially, there are only possibly two or three players. They went against it because if you’re not talking about that, that’s not what their product does, right? Now everyone starts talking about drizzles, and we’re talking about numbers, we’re talking about data, which proves that AI works. They have updated their algorithms with the new AI trends and how AI looks at things.
For me, SEO, AI, and all of these combinations are about the context. Suppose you talk in a language that a human understands with AI. In that case, if you talk in more natural language, saying that having the right pay structure, having the right content techniques in place, and the other forms of content and the right length with the image, which is updated information, not with old inform mostly accurate and factually correct, AI can’t even replace that, right? It’s all about how you combine your human intelligence with machine intelligence, leveraging both AI and your human intelligence.
When did you join Writesonic?
Chaitanya: I was there for about nine months now, I was there when the company started pretty early, with the first few people. I was the first marketer and started building the marketing and growth team. Right now, we are close to 20 members at this point. We work in multiple countries, and 70% of the team is based in India. A few members are from Romania, and we have a few from London, so it’s spread along the world, and we expand our waters wherever the good talent is. We are a YCombinator startup. We passed out of the YC batch in 2021 we did a pre-seed of $2.5 million, but after that, we completely bootstrapped, and it’s going well in terms of revenue.
What has been your biggest challenge since joining Writesonic?
Chaitanya: The whole industry as an AI is changing faster than ever. What I see today before sleeping, I see something else tomorrow. You can’t even imagine how things changed. Keeping up to that pace and trying to do things because we focus on too many things. At this point, we are focusing on Chatsonic, then we are focusing on Writesonic, we are also building something for the enterprises, marketplaces, and integrations. Keeping up to that pace is a bit of a learning curve, which I had trying to multitask at the core trying to strategize things. The team has been good because the team is quite young. Most of them are still studying as undergrad students. We have 75% of the team under 25 years old, and it’s great energy.
Competing with Microsoft and Google
Chaitanya: Right now, our focus is on building Chatsonic, a much bigger brand. We see that we are competing with Google, Microsoft, and other players in the market, not with other players, which we normally hear of the generative AI because we’ve come along the journey of competing from the smaller players, from the players like Jasper and Copier AI to competing with Google and Microsoft. That’s what we aim for in the next one or two years. We want to expand to more markets in terms of enterprises. SMBs have more integrations. One of the features which you have right now is we natively also integrate with Semrush and Ahrefs, which means that you don’t have to go out there to do your keyboard research.
You can do that inside the Writesonic when you’re writing a long-form article. These are the kind of products and the kind of innovation that you want to bring in a scale Android app. And then, we are coming up with an IOS app and other integrations. I think integrations play a key role in what we are focusing on. The more integrations, the better. Imagine having a Booking.com integration on Chatsonic or doing an Airbnb search inside Chatsonic, right? I think these are the kind of talks about volume, I think with our Opera integration right now, which we did, we got eyes on 120 million active users with a single integration. If someone wants to do that, this is the reason why Opera integrated with us.
What has been your most successful growth technique?
Chaitanya: The culture which we’re trying to build at Writesonic is mostly the data first. Where we wanted to understand data to the core where using tools like Mixpanel to get us a good sense of data and how we wanted to use data. I think studying those patterns and understanding them, and taking decisions based on them is the biggest learning for me in terms of growth. If you ask me when do you see that there’s a bump in revenue, I can say that Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday are my good days. Friday and Tuesday are my bad days. If there is a reason why I do go and understand what’s causing that hype and what’s causing that bump. Based on that, I can strategize my campaigns, test my pricing, test my other forms, and do localization.
If you’re trying to understand data to the core and make sense of data, there are hundreds and hundreds of data points. But you have to drill down on what to look at and ignore at a point, make sense of the first key metrics, and then expand slowly on top of that. If you are looking at a data metric, make sure that that is related to a company-wide goal. Let’s say revenue, right? Let’s say your attribute retention, let’s say these three are important at the company level. If you’re looking at these three metrics, they’re very high-level. And then boiling down the further metrics will give you a lot more information, and you can expand on that.
Why do you love Product-Led-Growth?
Chaitanya: I’ve been in multiple industries before Writesonic. I have been consulting for a good number of companies in the Valley and back in London and worked with the larger companies where security is a core security company, and other big companies found things fascinating. PLG, for me, is about how you can innovate in terms of marketing and also on the product pretty self-serve. You don’t have to have a sales team, or you don’t have to think of having longer sales cycles or having mostly handholding people or handholding companies. It’s pretty much self-service.
Just put a card for $50, and you just get it done, and how you can add PLG layers on top of your existing PLG layer. Then you have extensions like chrome plugins, you have integrations, and other stuff which you can play around and have fun with. You always have to look at do you have the audience to play around and try different things. Is the audience okay with accepting the kind of things which you wanted to do? The acceptance in the PLG is great, compare it to the B2B or other segments like security and data or other forms of autonomous vehicles, green energy, and all of that.
If you have green energy and autonomous vehicles, you can’t do a chrome plugin, I can’t do integrations and all of that. And there’s a language I have to use, climate change and other things, which only a few people care about. Many might not care about it, but the relatability of what people could do with PLG is huge compared to the other markets. That’s why I see it interesting. If I talk about the numbers which are grown with PLG, adding layers and layers on top of our existing PLG on top of multiple infinite loops, collecting viral loops, it’s massive. In the last six months, we’ve grown almost 900%, while people talk about growing 10% month on month.
What do you think was the most crucial factor for your growth?
Chaitanya: Believe in your product and talk to your customers about what they need. If they’re not using the product, understand what’s causing them to drop off. It boils down to data. I keep talking about data, data but don’t get bored with that, it’s important. And look at your computers, what they’re doing. Be aware of the space. Identify use cases always. One of the things for marketers right now is when you want to talk to customers or you want to look at what other companies are doing, don’t be scared of talking to a company trend saying that exploring. You can ask them – hey, how did you do this? They might answer, or they might not answer, but it gives a sense of what is the thought process when they’re looking at a problem and how you are looking at that particular.
Have a good initial set of customers. Be lean, and don’t overhire people in your team. Keep it as lean as possible with really smart folks who can do stuff and make things done. When you’re building an initial product, don’t hire specialists, let’s say the performance specialist or the SEO specialist, or the specialist roles. Try to start building the team from the generalist who can do multiple things. Be a multitasker, figure out his niche and what he wants to do, and let him expand on that. Once he knows that, bring in a senior person with more experience and let him train, and they will build things further.
What is your vision for Writesonic?
Chaitanya: Our vision right now is building a company that’s in the eyes of Google and Bing. We are not a search company, we are an AI company. What we want is to bring technology to the forefront of everyone. We have a Discord community where we see folks who are 10 years old, 11 years old, and 12 years old building things with Chatsonic API and writing code. They’re using Chatsonic to write certain lines of code and other things from their knowledge and what they could do. It’s not limiting your age or what you can do. This is for everyone who understands how to use the internet, for everyone who understands how to use basic Google search. That’s how we want to keep it, how you want to play with it is what we give it to you.
We are launching our upcoming new Chatsonic Enterprise AI product, which is like a no-code chatbot. You heard of Intercom. One of the problems we see is that you have a good UI /UX and all of that, but if you want to build the content around it, support questions, and lead generation templates, someone has to spend almost two to three months. What if the AI could do it on its own by training based on your data, you just have to feed your existing data, which is on multiple sources. Build integrators, then it just builds up your own AI specifically designed for you, and it keeps learning whenever there is new data flowing into the system. That shortens the time to go market ready from 30 to 45 days of having a complete full pledge chatbot to less than two.
What is Photosonic?
Chaitanya: For Photosonic right now, we took a bit of pause on that. We’re trying to integrate that in Chatsonic natively. Chat Sonic will now be powered by images and text, being multimodal. That’s what we are trying to do. We took a bit of pause on that, our development team is working on making a relaunch.
What is your story, Chaitanya?
Chaitanya: I was always fascinated with technology as a kid, I worked with a good friend of mine to build the first company. It was a branding and designing agency back then. We did it, and tried a lot of things when I was still an undergrad. And then worked with a couple of good startups, I had a lot of good experiences and traveled to good countries with my work, and with the companies with which I associated, I had a chance to travel a lot. I love traveling so I can understand how people think about different problems.
And as a marketer, understanding people’s psychology and how they look at things is important so that you can understand the sense of it. My previous company was one of the fastest-growing startups in the security space. Before that, I worked with a company called Tera. And Darwinbox is a big unicorn right now, it’s called the Workday alternative for Asia at this point. Backed by some of the pretty good angels like Snapchat and Microsoft.
Being in the startup ecosystem, helping multiple people build startups on my own bootstrapping, helping the bootstrapping founders take. I was helping the Microsoft teams and companies where Microsoft is investing. I used to help them with the GTMs solving very early-stage problems. Below $10k ARR helping them to figure out the market fit. Those other specific areas where I spent my good two and a half years identifying the many problems at the early stages.
What’s your best piece of advice for somebody that’s just starting?
Chaitanya: If you’re 18, 19, or 20, don’t go with big brand names that you wanted to work with at the initial start of your career. Don’t focus on making money in the first few years. Have a clear idea of this something which you really like doing? Try to experiment with multiple things, be it marketing, sales speed, technology, or data design. Always try to stay at the forefront of technology where whatever you should do, be it sales, marketing, community, or content writing, always try to involve technology there. Try to automate as much as you can, that’s how we find good solutions for a lot of things. At some point, you might crack an idea of the build the next big company out there. Being right in front of the technology, experimenting a lot.
What’s your favorite software apart from Writesonic?
Chaitanya: Right now, I’m crushing heavily on Notion. My team uses Notion aggressively. Discord is always my go-to thing. I am part of good communities there, a lot of good stuff there. Be part of good communities. I think that’s another thing which I would give to anyone. Be picky. I have 60 communities on my Slack and Discord, but I actively contribute from my end only to a handful of 15. I always try to keep picky, but sometimes I also have to expand my knowledge into other areas. There are a lot of communities of which I’m part.
Be open on LinkedIn, be open on Twitter, whatever you do. Always keep side hustles, though. You’re working at a company when you have time to do some side hustle. It could be as simple as writing something a blog and putting it right out there on Indie Hackers, building a small e-book about a particular piece of technology, tips or techniques, or writing content on how to write a blog effectively, which can rank and putting it on Gumroad. You don’t have to think about how you can distribute when you think about these spaces. I think that will help people when they’re starting things on their own.
Why the potential of AI is huge
Chaitanya: Being in the part of the industry since when they started picking up, what I see right now is AI is a space which is gonna change now. Keep your things active in the AI space, start learning at least. You don’t have to be a developer or anyone to build things. Just keep things active. For me, it will be AI before Google and AI after Google. That’s how I could see how things are changing now with the fast-paced companies. There are possibly 100 companies I can see inspiration from, directly competing with us or indirectly competing with us in bits, forms, and pieces. The market size of AI, which we see right now, is billions of dollars. It’s just that you have to understand how simple it’s to do and try to innovate and make things happen.
