Jasper Prehistory: Three People, Eight Years, and an AI Unicorn Miracle

Source: “Silicon Rabbit Race” (ID: sv_race), Author: Wang Wang, Editor: Man Man Zhou

Image source: Generated by Unbounded Layout AI tool

**From a layman in marketing to the first person in AIGC marketing, what happened in the 8 years before the birth of Jasper AI? **

Before ChatGPT exploded, when most people had not heard of the term generative AI, there was a company — Jasper AI — that had already relied on GPT-3 to automatically generate creative marketing content, within 18 months Ri starts from nothing and becomes a unicorn.

Behind the overnight success, the three co-founders of Jasper experienced 8 years of exploration and 3 setbacks before they found a suitable business opportunity, and grew from a grassroots team who knew nothing about entrepreneurship and management to the head of a star start-up company. What have they experienced in these 8 years?

01 Marketing for laymen

In 2014, three young people Dave Rogenmoser, JP Morgan and Chris Hull who did not want to find a job sat together and made three ambitions: first, start a business together It doesn’t matter what kind of career; second, earn $6,000 a month to support the family; third, long live the friendship.

Just do it, the three quickly started a SaaS company, and it failed fast as expected.

The company’s business model realization cycle is too long. In order to maintain their daily life, they had to give up their first entrepreneurial project. Soon, by chance, three people who knew nothing about marketing established a marketing agency.

There is a sense of sight of three idiots making trouble in Bollywood｜Source: Business Insider

This company helps local businesses with Facebook ads, SEO or website landing pages. Since customers are usually small business owners, they are not professional in these marketing tasks, so they can act as middlemen to earn the difference: the company collects the customer’s service fee every month, and then spends 50% to find an outsourcer to perform, and they just answer the phone to convey need. This business looks very easy, but the parties are always on tenterhooks. They basically pretend to be experts every time, give advice to customers, hang up the phone, and start studying nervously while Google.

The eaglet learns to fly only after being pushed off a cliff. In the process of digging and filling their own holes, Dave, JP and Chris became real marketing experts and learned a lot of industry knowledge by serving customers from all walks of life. The company reached a monthly revenue of $25,000 and then stagnated because the business model could not continue to expand and the company often received complaints from customers due to unprofessional service. One day a year later, the three closed the company, started anew, and set up a new project: teaching others to start a marketing company with a monthly income of $25,000.

02 Successful self-marketing, failed knowledge payment

After closing the marketing company, Dave, JP, and Chris invested in the new paid course project 6K Success, productizing the three people’s successful experience in the past year and selling it to marketers.

This time, the three started marketing for themselves. With the help of previous experience, they built effective marketing channels, expanded the scale of advertising, and operated online communities, relying on these to attract many new customers.

During this entrepreneurial experience, Dave, JP and Chris have once again refined their marketing skills. But selling courses is too difficult to make a profit. Although the company strives to be perfect at the marketing level, it cannot prevent someone from buying a course and immediately copying a set of secondary sales-it is too difficult to realize knowledge.

The three of them, who were unhappy with their work, came to a crossroads of choice again: **Should this company continue to operate? **

03 Inadvertently planting willows and daily income of 80,000, it is difficult to reproduce the glory of the past

Among the three co-founders, JP can program. While running 6K Success, he developed a simple browser widget: When users browse the website, a small window will pop up periodically on the page, showing who just bought the product and when, incentivizing users to place an order.

The first time this small plug-in went online, the conversion rate increased by 48%, and the three immediately discovered potential business opportunities sensitively. They sent the tool to a few friends in marketing to try out and received positive feedback. This encouraged the three men to cut their wrists, shut down the business of paying course operations, and focus on new product development.

At that time, this small plug-in was not even packaged into an app, it was just a simple piece of code, and the three held an online seminar before officially building the product. The event attracted hundreds of people. At the end of the event is the pre-sale link. Although the product is not ready for commercial use, you can become the first users by prepaying $1,000. The audience David was angry: such a good product, we will use it now! So 80 people cussed and paid $1,000—**this is the most money Dave, JP, and Chris have made at one time since they started their business. **

Looking at the transfer records, the three serial entrepreneurs felt the real market demand for the first time. It took them a few months to develop the product and put it on the market, and received a positive response. This is the later Proof. With Proof, Dave, JP and Chris were selected for YC’s 2018 Winter Entrepreneurship Camp.

Three people in YC｜Source: ScaleUps

Proof was validated by the market from day one, and in no time, the product reached an MRR of $75,000. Yet the ceiling also came quickly. Proof is just a simple small function, easy to install and uninstall, and has a high turnover rate; because the product is extremely simple, the cost of competitors’ copying is also very low, and a large number of challengers flooded in to initiate a price war.

The three decided to change Proof from a “function” to a “platform”, and they began to develop website building tools to help users create personalized websites. However, the new Proof products did not win the enthusiasm of the market again. The company continued to burn through cash, but growth never picked up. Dave later resumed the market. At that time, because of the capital support, the founding team began to slack off and lost their sense of crisis. They always felt that the company still had money in their accounts, which resulted in many problems not being solved in time. As of October 2020, when the project was shut down, the company’s MRR was $25,000, with a monthly growth rate of about 3%, but most of the revenue came from the initial pop-up software.

After a successful start, Proof shut down after 18 months.

04 The sudden emergence and return to the peak

At the end of 2020, while the Proof project was over, Dave, JP and Chris began to study AI and noticed GPT-3. At that time, the three of them began to return to their old business, providing training for companies in advertising. There was an advertising copywriting class in the training, and Dave had a whim: Can AI be used to help people write copywriting? **

At that time, Dave, JP and Chris hadn’t come out of the torment of the first 18 months. They decided to develop a simple small app and give it to the people in the training class for trial, and listen to their feedback. If there is no result within 30 days, Just give up this entrepreneurial direction. Then, the familiar wonder and enthusiasm returned, people were excited to buy just by seeing the demo, and Jasper was born.

As a senior marketer, the Jasper team deeply understands the pain points of marketers. In addition to creativity and content production, marketers have to design different styles of content for each media carrier—even for the same product introduction, there must be differences in the official press release and TikTok presentation. Jasper can not only automatically generate content suitable for the style of each platform, but also feed the brand style requirements to AI, so that the generated content maintains a unified brand tone.

As of the end of 2022, Jasper has completed 3 rounds of financing, raising a total of 131 million US dollars, with a valuation of more than 1.5 billion US dollars.

At the beginning of 2023, ChatGPT began to explode. In less than half a year, GPT-4 and AutoGPT were iterated rapidly. Large models such as Bard, Wenxin Yiyan, and Tongyi Qianwen were also released one after another. Large language models and generative AI For a time the limelight was the same.

At the application level, the field of AI automatic copywriting, as the “old line” of large language models, has become crowded in just a few months. Although Jasper has the first-mover advantage, it is also facing the challenges of Copy.ai, Anyword, etc. competition from new forces. Facing the ever-changing market, today’s Jasper has expanded two new product lines of chatbots and AI image generation on the basis of the original.

The generative AI race has just begun. When the wind will stop, and who will be the final winner among the players on the single-plank bridge, everything is unknown.

However, for today’s Dave, JP and Chris, as entrepreneurial veterans with repeated failures, they already know better how to run a company and enjoy the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial process. Perhaps Jasper is just another stop in their entrepreneurial journey, but we have reason to believe that this group of smart and interesting Three Musketeers will set off again to create more surprises for the world.

Reference source:

How Jasper found product-market fit: pivoting to AI-native SaaS（UNUSUAL）

Jasper.ai（YCombinator）

Interaction at the end of the article:

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