AI Writing - a trend

We’ve all heard about AI writing tools. (I’m an investor in Lex, which is a great one).

But the trend for ‘AI writing’ as a whole is HUGE. (10x the search volume).

One writing tool, Jenni, changed its focus to students and writing research papers. It’s made $2M (the bulk in the last 9 months). They have a small team (less than 10), all bootstrapped.

And it’s essentially an AI writing tool with some specific features for its niche (citations, research library etc).

Look at the website focus from a year ago to now:

He found his first 100 paid users from Facebook groups (a great way to spot engaged groups around a topic).

Leveraging YouTubers to bring in $15k of new business. And focusing on short-form platforms bringing in millions of views.

Adding simple features users will like helped retain hundreds of customers (plus students don’t want to pay over summer break!).

Being smart about what would reduce churn.

There are already plenty of SEO-AI tools out there, which are making money until Google’s algorithm can figure out if they’ve been written with AI (they can’t really right now). 

AI writing is here to stay. So what are the opportunities?

Opportunities:

Courses are a big one. You could create a course around how to use AI to write for a specific niche. People sign up for tools all the time thinking it’ll solve their writing problems but you still need to know a bunch of stuff before the tool makes your writing good. So how do I use the tool? What are the right tools? How do I get it to write in the style I want? I’m a gardener, how do I write for other gardeners? Etc.

• A cool way to structure the assignments in the course could be to ask learners to come up with an idea for a piece of content on a topic they know, write the post with AI as their copilot (because they would anyway), and then to use AI to get feedback - but from the perspective of other people. So they ask the AI to simulate being people they admire e.g. Steve Jobs or Sheryl Sandberg, and to give them feedback in the voice of those people. They can also ask for suggestions to improve and to rewrite the piece in 4 different styles and 3 different lengths. The final output would be all of these things instead of just an AI-generated blog post. You’d be teaching people how to write, with AI as their helpful editor.

A newsletter breaking down great copy, analysing it with AI to see what it does well and where it could improve. Sam Parr has a course, copythat, which looks at great writing and you copy it to learn the techniques behind the posts.

Nicholas Cole has a ‘Write with AI’ paid newsletter that teaches you to use AI to write. You can do this for all different types of copywriting - focus on sales emails, product copy, personal journaling etc.

AI writing tools. Given there are so many, you could review each one, do a write-up, give them a score and get paid from ads or affiliates by linking to the tools. Similar to Site Builder Report - which reviews website builders.

Create a site of beautiful product copy that people can copy and remix using AI. Did you know Emojipedia (a site for searching and copying an emoji) sold for $7M?!!

Simple tools that generate text from images - I’ve seen people upload an AI image and ask “from the image, create a detailed prompt that could be used to create a similar image” - this is a great hack to find great prompts, but also a system for making a simple tool. Use it for product descriptions, reverse script writing, producing product documentation etc.

Build a tool to A/B test your copy with AI-suggested improvements. Thumbnailtest.com does this for, you guessed it, testing thumbnails. And made $20K last month.

Build a tool for podcasters to take their transcription and turn it into a timestamped description, with product links mentioned, when they’re mentioned and what they do. Turn that transcript into a tweet, a blog post etc.

Let me know if you liked this post and what I should write about next 😀