Is Copy AI useful for indie hackers?

AI copywriting. Some people swear by it. Some people hate it.

Copy.ai is one, if not the most popular tool in this space. They have a free tier (2000 words per month) which I'll use in this post.

My purpose is to try to answer the question: Is Copy.ai useful for indie hackers?

Let's find out.

The experiment

Let's say it's August 2016. I'm Courtland and I'm just starting to create Indie Hackers (btw if you're new here, Indie Hackers was founded in August 2016).

As I'm doing this, I'm faced with the usual founder questions:

• Is there any market for this product?
• Who should my target audience be?
• What should my value proposition be?
• How should I promote the product?
• Once I decide on the channels to use, what should I write?

…etc.

It turns out that Copy.ai has specialized tools for answering all of these questions.

How good are those tools, though? Let's do some experimenting.

Audience Refiner

This is a tool you can find under "Startup tools". It allows you to describe your audience and it's supposed to help you…well, refine it.

Let's see how well it works.

For a start, I'll type "indie founders who are trying to start their first online business". Here are some of the results that Copy.ai provided:

Indie founders that are looking to give their first online business a try. They want to give their online business a shot and make their first dollar. They want to know where to start and how to make money online.

Anyone that wants to start a business online and is looking for guidance. This audience is typically just getting started in the online economy, so they need help learning how to take their first steps towards making money online.

Some of the results were really specific:

Indie founders in San Francisco who are looking to create a successful online business. They want to get some advice on how to start an online business by talking with other indie founders who have already begun their online business. They want to find people who have already created their first online businesses and learn from them.

Indie game developers that want to create a small scale online flash game without spending a lot of money. They want to learn how to program games that can be played on smartphones from outside the app store.

It gave me 12 results total. The results were probably sorted by "usefulness", judging by the bottom result which simply stated:

Anyone can read this book, you don't need a specific set of skills or experience.

So overall, 3.5/5. Not bad.

Value Proposition

This is a specialized tool by Copy.ai which should help us come up with a better value proposition. Let's put it to the test:

The "Choose a tone" option is an interesting one. If you've used AI writing tools for long enough, you probably know that the default tone is boring.

You need to explicitly instruct the AI to give you something in a specific (non-boring) tone. Bold, witty, relaxed, you name it.

We chose "Bold" in our example. Let's see some of the output:

Indie Hackers is a community of founders building profitable online businesses.

Inspiring stories of independent founders who are making profitable & successful online businesses.

Wait a minute. It seems like the AI was trained on data which already knew what Indie Hackers is. Let's try putting another business name: "Hey There Indie":

Hey There Indie is crazy-relatable: for the freakishly common experience of being an independent entrepreneur.

A blog about building profitable, sustainable online businesses.

Your online success is just a few clicks away: No website? No problem -- you can create an online store in minutes. No eCommerce expertise needed.

Two takeaways here:

It did a pretty good job for an "old" brand name it was (probably) trained on (Indie Hackers)

It didn't do a good job for a new brand name.

So, to make this tool really work for you, you probably want to put in a name of your closest competitor under "Business name".

Growth Ideas

Copy.ai has an interesting tool called "Growth Ideas", located under "Brainstorming tools". It's supposed to "brainstorm tactical growth strategies" for your product. Let's try it out:

The first result it gave me was to "build an online community to gather around your brand". Well, that's not a bad idea 😀

Some of the ideas were pretty interesting:

emphasize photo sharing. Create a site which emphasizes the excitement of viewers seeing themselves in an ad that they just saw.

use an audience network like Viral Loops.

make the product more "social". Assume that most of the people who join your site will be lower on the curve. They are just looking for some help, not necessarily images or a fully finished design. So if you can increase social interaction among users they will be inspired to invite their friends and it increases virality.

use the industry's obsession with email marketing to your advantage. Studies have shown that companies who use email marketing for their business generate more revenue in less time than companies who don't. It's a great way to stay relevant and to keep in touch with customers so that Hey There Indie stays top of mind.

…and some were a bit silly:

use the core value proposition of Hey There Indie - which is to deliver indie music and indie news to fans.

tap into a collective consciousness that sums up the great human desires of Hey There Indies.

But overall, around 70% of the growth ideas made sense. I'd give this 4 / 5.

Crazy YouTube Ideas

Let's say we've decided to hone in and use YouTube as one of our primary marketing channels.

Copy.ai has a tool (under Social Media Tools) called "Crazy YouTube Ideas". We put "indie founders who are trying to start their first online business" in the input field, waited for ~30 seconds, and the results came in:

going to a start-up incubator and trying to start a new company

People answering questions about their experiences being an indie founder​

Going solo and quitting your job to start an online business

Show how you started your online business from scratch. Show the bad stuff as well as the good stuff.

Starting a company and recording the launch

Interviewing random people on the street and having them start online businesses

Releasing a new online business startup every day for 180 days.

Most of these ideas make sense. And most of them worked to some degree for Indie Hackers as a brand. So I'd give this 4.5 / 5.

So, is Copy.ai useful for indie hackers?

I'd say yes, as an idea machine. Also if you're stuck in a loop of:

• Serving the same audience and looking to expand on testing a new audience
• Looking to change the perception of your product by having a different value prop
• Need some ideas for growth channels
• When you hone in on a channel, getting some ideas on what to post there