From a marketing layman to the first person in AIGC marketing, what happened in the 8 years before Jasper AI was born?

Before ChatGPT exploded onto the scene and before most people had heard of the term generative AI, one company -- Jasper AI -- had already relied on GPT-3 to automatically generate creative marketing content, and in 18 months had gone from from a white-knuckle start-up to a unicorn in 18 months.

Behind the overnight success, Jasper's three co-founders had to go through 8 years of muddling through and hitting 3 walls before they found the right business opportunity and grew from a grassroots team that knew nothing about entrepreneurship and business to the head of a startup. What did they go through in these 8 years?

01 Marketing company for marketing laymen

In 2014, three young men, Dave Rogenmoser, JP Morgan and Chris Hull, who didn't want to find a job, sat down together and made three ambitious wishes: first, to start a business together, it didn't matter what kind of business they started; second, to earn $6,000 a month to support their families; and third, long live friendship.

The three men quickly opened a SaaS company and, not surprisingly, it failed fast.

The company's business model took so long to cash in that they had to abandon their first venture in order to maintain their daily lives. Soon, by coincidence, three people who knew nothing about marketing set up a marketing agency.

This company helps local businesses with Facebook ads, search engine optimization or website landing pages. Since the clients are usually small business owners who are not specialized in these marketing efforts, they are able to act as a middleman to earn the difference: the company charges the client a monthly fee for the service and then finds an outsourcer to perform 50% of the work, while they just answer the phone and relay the demand themselves. The business looks easy, but the client is always on edge. They basically pretend to be experts every time, and clients point out, hang up the phone only to start to Google while learning intensely.

A chick is pushed off a cliff before it learns to fly. In the process of digging their own holes, Dave, JP and Chris became real marketing experts and learned a lot about the industry by serving clients from all walks of life. The company's monthly revenue reached $25,000, and then bottlenecked and stagnated because the business model could not continue to expand, and the company also received frequent complaints from customers due to the lack of professional service. One day, a year later, the trio closed the company and started a new project: teaching others to start a $25,000-a-month marketing company.

02 Successful self-marketing, failed knowledge payment

After closing their marketing firm, Dave, JP and Chris invested in a new paid course program, 6K Success, to productize the trio's past year's successes and sell them to marketers.

This time, the three started doing marketing for themselves. With their previous experience, they built effective marketing channels, scaled up their advertising, and ran an online community, which they relied on to attract many new clients.

During this entrepreneurial experience, Dave, JP and Chris once again refined their marketing skills. But it was too difficult to sell courses profitably. Despite the company's efforts to do the best it could at the marketing level, it couldn't stop people from buying the course and then immediately replicating it for a second sale - it was too hard to cash in on the knowledge.

Once again, the unhappy trio was at a crossroads: should the company continue to operate?

03 The unintentional daily income of 80,000, the past glory is difficult to reproduce

Of the three co-founders, JP could program. While running 6K Success, he developed a simple little browser plug-in: when a user browsed the site, a small window would pop up on the page at regular intervals, showing who had just purchased a product and when, to motivate the user to place an order.

This little plug-in boosted conversions by 48% the first time it went live, and the trio was immediately sensitive to the potential opportunity. They sent the tool to a few friends in marketing to try it out and received positive feedback. This encouraged the trio to take the plunge and shut down their paid course operations business to focus on new product development.

At that time, the small plug-in was not even packaged as an app, just a simple piece of code, and the trio held an online workshop before officially building the product. This event attracted several hundred people. The event ended with a pre-sale session, and although the product was not yet ready for commercial use, the first users could become the first to pay $1000 in advance. The audience, David, was furious: We want this product now! So 80 people cursed and paid $1,000 - the most money Dave, JP and Chris have made in one go since they started the business.

Looking at the transfer records, the three serial entrepreneurs felt for the first time what the real market demand was. It took them a few months to get the product developed and into the market, and the response was positive, which later became Proof. With Proof, Dave, JP and Chris were selected for YC's 2018 Winter Startup Camp.

Proof was market-proven from day one, and soon the product reached an MRR of $75,000. however, the ceiling came quickly. proof was a simple little feature that was easy to install and uninstall, and churn was high; because the product was extremely simple and cheap for competitors to replicate, a large number of challengers poured in to launch a price war.

The three decided to turn Proof from a "feature" to a "platform", and they started to develop a website builder to help users create personalized websites. However, the new Proof product did not win the market's enthusiasm again. The company continued to burn money, but its growth never improved, and Dave later reviewed the situation, saying that with the capital support, the founding team began to slack off and lost the sense of crisis, always thinking that there was still money in the company's account, which led to many problems not being solved in time. As of October 2020, when the project was shut down, the company had an MRR of $25,000 and a monthly growth rate of about 3%, but the vast majority of revenue came from the initial pop-up software.

After a smooth start Proof shut down miserably after 18 months.

04 A breakthrough back to the top

At the end of 2020, while finishing the Proof project, Dave, JP and Chris started to study AI and noticed GPT-3. At that time, the three of them started to return to their old business of providing advertising training to companies. There was a session on ad copywriting in the training, and Dave had an idea: could we get AI to write copy for people?

At that time, Dave, JP and Chris had not yet come out from the ordeal of the previous 18 months. They decided to first develop a simple small app and send it to the people in the training class to try it out, listen to their feedback, and if there was no result within 30, they would give up this entrepreneurial direction. Then the familiar awe and enthusiasm returned, people were excited just to see the demo and asked to purchase it, and Jasper was born.

As veteran marketers, the Jasper team deeply understands the pain points of marketers. In addition to creative and content production, marketers have to design different styles of content for each medium - even if the same product introduction is presented differently in the official press release and TikTok, Jasper can not only automatically generate content that suits the style of each platform, but also feed the brand style requirements to the AI so that it can generate content that is suitable for each platform. Jasper not only automatically generates content that fits the style of each platform, but also feeds the brand style requirements to the AI, so that the content it generates maintains a uniform brand tone.

By the end of 2022, Jasper had completed three rounds of funding, raising a total of $131 million and valuing the company at over $1.5 billion.

At the beginning of 2023, ChatGPT began to break the circle bursting with fire, and in less than half a year, GPT-4 and AutoGPT rapidly iterated, and big models such as Bard, Wenxin Yiyin, and Tongyi Qianqian were also released one after another, making big language models and generative AI all the rage for a while.

At the application level, the field of AI automatic copywriting, as the "old business" of big language models, has become crowded in just a few months, and although Jasper has the first-mover advantage, it is also facing competition from new forces such as Copy.ai and Anyword. In the face of the changing market, Jasper today has expanded two new product lines, chatbot and AI graphing, on top of the original one.

The race of generative AI has just begun, and it is unknown when the wind will stop and who will be the final winner among the players on the one-way bridge.

However, for today's Dave, JP, and Chris, as veterans of repeated failures, they already know how to run a company and enjoy the sweet and sour of the entrepreneurial process. Maybe Jasper is just another stop in their entrepreneurial journey, but we have reasons to believe that this group of smart and interesting trio of swordsmen will set out again to create more surprises for the world.

From a marketing layman to the first person in AIGC marketing, what happened in the 8 years before Jasper AI was born?

Before ChatGPT exploded onto the scene and before most people had heard of the term generative AI, one company -- Jasper AI -- had already relied on GPT-3 to automatically generate creative marketing content, and in 18 months had gone from from a white-knuckle start-up to a unicorn in 18 months.

Behind the overnight success, Jasper's three co-founders had to go through 8 years of muddling through and hitting 3 walls before they found the right business opportunity and grew from a grassroots team that knew nothing about entrepreneurship and business to the head of a startup. What did they go through in these 8 years?

01 Marketing company for marketing laymen

In 2014, three young men, Dave Rogenmoser, JP Morgan and Chris Hull, who didn't want to find a job, sat down together and made three ambitious wishes: first, to start a business together, it didn't matter what kind of business they started; second, to earn $6,000 a month to support their families; and third, long live friendship.

The three men quickly opened a SaaS company and, not surprisingly, it failed fast.

The company's business model took so long to cash in that they had to abandon their first venture in order to maintain their daily lives. Soon, by coincidence, three people who knew nothing about marketing set up a marketing agency.

This company helps local businesses with Facebook ads, search engine optimization or website landing pages. Since the clients are usually small business owners who are not specialized in these marketing efforts, they are able to act as a middleman to earn the difference: the company charges the client a monthly fee for the service and then finds an outsourcer to perform 50% of the work, while they just answer the phone and relay the demand themselves. The business looks easy, but the client is always on edge. They basically pretend to be experts every time, and clients point out, hang up the phone only to start to Google while learning intensely.

A chick is pushed off a cliff before it learns to fly. In the process of digging their own holes, Dave, JP and Chris became real marketing experts and learned a lot about the industry by serving clients from all walks of life. The company's monthly revenue reached $25,000, and then bottlenecked and stagnated because the business model could not continue to expand, and the company also received frequent complaints from customers due to the lack of professional service. One day, a year later, the trio closed the company and started a new project: teaching others to start a $25,000-a-month marketing company.

02 Successful self-marketing, failed knowledge payment

After closing their marketing firm, Dave, JP and Chris invested in a new paid course program, 6K Success, to productize the trio's past year's successes and sell them to marketers.

This time, the three started doing marketing for themselves. With their previous experience, they built effective marketing channels, scaled up their advertising, and ran an online community, which they relied on to attract many new clients.

During this entrepreneurial experience, Dave, JP and Chris once again refined their marketing skills. But it was too difficult to sell courses profitably. Despite the company's efforts to do the best it could at the marketing level, it couldn't stop people from buying the course and then immediately replicating it for a second sale - it was too hard to cash in on the knowledge.

Once again, the unhappy trio was at a crossroads: should the company continue to operate?

03 The unintentional daily income of 80,000, the past glory is difficult to reproduce

Of the three co-founders, JP could program. While running 6K Success, he developed a simple little browser plug-in: when a user browsed the site, a small window would pop up on the page at regular intervals, showing who had just purchased a product and when, to motivate the user to place an order.

This little plug-in boosted conversions by 48% the first time it went live, and the trio was immediately sensitive to the potential opportunity. They sent the tool to a few friends in marketing to try it out and received positive feedback. This encouraged the trio to take the plunge and shut down their paid course operations business to focus on new product development.

At that time, the small plug-in was not even packaged as an app, just a simple piece of code, and the trio held an online workshop before officially building the product. This event attracted several hundred people. The event ended with a pre-sale session, and although the product was not yet ready for commercial use, the first users could become the first to pay $1000 in advance. The audience, David, was furious: We want this product now! So 80 people cursed and paid $1,000 - the most money Dave, JP and Chris have made in one go since they started the business.

Looking at the transfer records, the three serial entrepreneurs felt for the first time what the real market demand was. It took them a few months to get the product developed and into the market, and the response was positive, which later became Proof. With Proof, Dave, JP and Chris were selected for YC's 2018 Winter Startup Camp.

Proof was market-proven from day one, and soon the product reached an MRR of $75,000. however, the ceiling came quickly. proof was a simple little feature that was easy to install and uninstall, and churn was high; because the product was extremely simple and cheap for competitors to replicate, a large number of challengers poured in to launch a price war.

The three decided to turn Proof from a "feature" to a "platform", and they started to develop a website builder to help users create personalized websites. However, the new Proof product did not win the market's enthusiasm again. The company continued to burn money, but its growth never improved, and Dave later reviewed the situation, saying that with the capital support, the founding team began to slack off and lost the sense of crisis, always thinking that there was still money in the company's account, which led to many problems not being solved in time. As of October 2020, when the project was shut down, the company had an MRR of $25,000 and a monthly growth rate of about 3%, but the vast majority of revenue came from the initial pop-up software.

After a smooth start Proof shut down miserably after 18 months.

04 A breakthrough back to the top

At the end of 2020, while finishing the Proof project, Dave, JP and Chris started to study AI and noticed GPT-3. At that time, the three of them started to return to their old business of providing advertising training to companies. There was a session on ad copywriting in the training, and Dave had an idea: could we get AI to write copy for people?

At that time, Dave, JP and Chris had not yet come out from the ordeal of the previous 18 months. They decided to first develop a simple small app and send it to the people in the training class to try it out, listen to their feedback, and if there was no result within 30, they would give up this entrepreneurial direction. Then the familiar awe and enthusiasm returned, people were excited just to see the demo and asked to purchase it, and Jasper was born.

As veteran marketers, the Jasper team deeply understands the pain points of marketers. In addition to creative and content production, marketers have to design different styles of content for each medium - even if the same product introduction is presented differently in the official press release and TikTok, Jasper can not only automatically generate content that suits the style of each platform, but also feed the brand style requirements to the AI so that it can generate content that is suitable for each platform. Jasper not only automatically generates content that fits the style of each platform, but also feeds the brand style requirements to the AI, so that the content it generates maintains a uniform brand tone.

By the end of 2022, Jasper had completed three rounds of funding, raising a total of $131 million and valuing the company at over $1.5 billion.

At the beginning of 2023, ChatGPT began to break the circle bursting with fire, and in less than half a year, GPT-4 and AutoGPT rapidly iterated, and big models such as Bard, Wenxin Yiyin, and Tongyi Qianqian were also released one after another, making big language models and generative AI all the rage for a while.

At the application level, the field of AI automatic copywriting, as the "old business" of big language models, has become crowded in just a few months, and although Jasper has the first-mover advantage, it is also facing competition from new forces such as Copy.ai and Anyword. In the face of the changing market, Jasper today has expanded two new product lines, chatbot and AI graphing, on top of the original one.

The race of generative AI has just begun, and it is unknown when the wind will stop and who will be the final winner among the players on the one-way bridge.

However, for today's Dave, JP, and Chris, as veterans of repeated failures, they already know how to run a company and enjoy the sweet and sour of the entrepreneurial process. Maybe Jasper is just another stop in their entrepreneurial journey, but we have reasons to believe that this group of smart and interesting trio of swordsmen will set out again to create more surprises for the world.