🗞 What's New: Is AI copywriting useful for founders?

Have you tried AI copywriting?

• We tested Copy.ai to see how useful it actually is for founders. Turns out it's pretty helpful, but only for generating ideas.
• Cold outreach, hot response. If you want people to respond to your cold DMs, get straight to the point and present a clear, compelling offer.
• Built in just a few weeks. Riding the wave of a trend, Stacy Siz turned people into anime heroes with AnimeAI, and recently got acquired.

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by Darko

AI copywriting. Some swear by it, some hate it. Copy.ai is the most popular tool in this space, but is it useful for indie hackers?

We tested the free tier to find out.

Audience refiner

Copy.ai allows you to describe your audience, and it refines the description:

We typed "indie founders who are trying to start their first online business." Here are some of the results:

It gave us 12 results total. Not bad.

Value proposition

The "Choose a tone" option lets you instruct the AI to give you something in a specific, non-boring tone. We chose "Bold" in our example. Let's see some of the output:

To make this tool really work for you, you probably want to put in the name of your closest competitor under "Business name," since AI may already know what the company is, as it did here.

Growth ideas

Copy.ai has an interesting tool called "Growth Ideas," which brainstorms tactical growth strategies for your product. Some of the ideas were pretty interesting:

Some were a bit silly:

But overall, around 70% of the growth ideas made sense.

So, is Copy.ai useful for indie hackers?

We'd say yes, but mainly as an idea machine. Also, it can help if you're stuck in a loop of:

• Serving the same audience and looking to test a new one.
• Changing your product's value prop.
• Brainstorming ideas for growth channels, and what to post on them.

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🏷 Instagram is testing automatically adding product tags in brand story posts.

💰 Spent $20K on Google Play pre-registration ads. Here are the results.

✍️ 10 literary devices to improve your copywriting.

🔗 How many backlinks do you need to rank?

🔁 Repetitive ads can damage your brand's reputation and purchase intent.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

by Sveta Bay

I'm not a fan of cold outreach, and I don't use it to sell my products or services directly. I just don't like this approach.

My cold outreach chain is more complex.

Cold outreach context

I have paid products around marketing, and I launched a free weekly newsletter in the same niche: Marketing case studies from indie founders.

It's much easier to grow a free product. Once you have people's attention, you can mention your paid product and get traffic. I mainly reach out to founders to write guest articles for my newsletter.

My cold DM formula

1. Focus on quality instead of quantity.

I'm not trying to reach 100 people. Instead, of mass DMing lots of people with stock messages, I reach out to 10 people with highly personalized messages. This is easy to do when you familiarize yourself with the person's work.

2. Write straight to the point.

I'm not engaging in a ton of small talk before sending the offer. I don't want to waste the person's time.

3. Present a clear offer.

I describe what I need and what I'll give in return in a straightforward, clear way.

4. Focus on stats instead of shiny words.

Nothing is more persuasive than numbers. They instantly catch attention and help persuade your prospect.

5. Know the main objection.

If you close the main objection, your offer instantly becomes better. Understand what your prospect's objection will be, and address it upfront to remove their doubt.

6. End with one question.

If you want to get an answer, add an easy-to-answer question at the end. This prompts people to actually respond, as it doesn't take much time for them to do so.

Discuss this story.

from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry

Use conversational copy to connect:

Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.

Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.

by Stacy Siz

My first AI project, AnimeAI, found a new home this year. It got successfully acquired!

The project

Launching an AI project doesn't require top tier AI expertise. It's not about fancy AI wizardry, but about finding an idea that fits the market like a glove, then executing it seamlessly.

The product turned people into anime heroes. Users uploaded photos of themselves and AI trained on the photos. It then returned results where the user was presented as an anime hero!

It took a few weeks to build the product, but the longest part was getting approval from the payment system. The verification process took a whole month.

I didn't have any intentions to sell, as it was my first shipped solo project. But later, growth was a bit slow and I needed to focus on my other SaaS, so that led to the decision to sell!

The tech stack

Backend: Java and Spring Boot.

This might sound as wild as pineapple on pizza to some, but here's why it worked for me:

• Familiarity: This tech stack is something I've frequently used, which allowed for quick development.
• Versatility: The Spring ecosystem provided easy data extraction from the database.
• Code recycling: I utilized code snippets from past projects, which helped expedite things.

Database: PostgreSQL.

I used PostgreSQL because I knew it, it played nicely with Spring, and there's a sea of resources about it online.

Frontend: React.

Here's where I messed up a bit. I went with pure React, which is a fantastic framework, but not the best fit for a landing page.

AI: Third party API.

Training AI models can be resource intensive, and given my limited expertise in this area, using an API allowed me to quickly validate my idea.

I found a popular third party Stable Diffusion provider, then dedicated time to adjusting the AI and developing the backend communication channels.

Takeaways

Two major things helped get this project seen and acquired:

1. The domain name hit the trend at the time. Everyone was Googling "anime AI," and my site would come up.
2. The Product Hunt launch helped push the domain to the first page on Google Search.

Now, I'm working on a new AI project, CustomQR AI, and building in public on my Twitter!

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Darko, Sveta Bay, Harry Dry, and Stacy Siz for contributing posts. —Channing