Episode 2 with Paul Yacoubian (CEO) and Blake Emal (CMO) of CopyAI

Hey everybody, it's KP, a creator, community builder, and the program director of On Deck's No-Code Fellowship. And this is Build in Public podcast, where I interview ambitious founders and creators to share their worldviews, best practices, and actionable advice on the topic of building in public. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the 2nd episode of Building in Public podcast. I am your host, KP. And today, I have with me an incredible duo. Both of them definitely don't need introduction in the building public space, but they are— Yeah. Polly Kubien, who's the founder at Copy.ai, and Blake Emal, who's now the CMO at Copy.ai. So Copycats, welcome.

Thank you, KB.

Hello. It's good to be here. Yeah. Thanks for having us. For the folks who are listening to this podcast for the first time, Build in Public is of course near and dear to my heart. And it goes back to 2, 3 years ago when I was First on Twitter, in this Twitter universe, and I had no followers and I was swimming. I felt like in a sea of noise and like a lot of random tweets and just discovered this beautiful signal where if you put out stuff consistently and rally people who believed in the same beliefs around the problem you want to solve, you will actually be able to build a terrific community. And I've seen this work in a couple of places. Of course, we talked to Morning Brew CEO earlier. In the podcast. And we're going to talk to a few more, but one of my favorite observations in the last maybe 12 months has been watching Paul execute this playbook to almost great perfection. And of course, I know he'll laugh. All right. But he's done a terrific job as taken on this building public mantra and put his own spin on it. And I want to address Actually a little bit around like, where did he find inspiration before getting started with building in public? Because it was not very obvious 6 months ago. So Paul, tell us.

Yeah. Elon Musk does it and he has a ton of followers and can raise any amount of money he wants and build any company he wants and attract any talent he wants.

Love it.

I mean, so that was it. It's that it was literally that clear. And then the second Case study was Donald Trump. Donald Trump had like 90 million followers and got elected president because there was no filter between him and the people he was trying to reach. So it was a very one-on-one direct communication, but at scale, and it was real time. So like, I think all of those factors kind of point to the same thing, which is Twitter can be this insanely high leverage point to build a real audience and and build like some, something that's super powerful that has a really long, long-term advantage to it.

I'll popcorn the same question over to you, Blake. When did you discover the magic of building in public?

For me, it was, it was more learning in public for a really, really long time. So I've been creating content starting mostly on LinkedIn back when it wasn't so boring and platitudinal. It's worse than it's ever been right now. But like, I was creating content before it was actually acceptable to do it when it was still like, a recruiting resume website. I was making content because I was a crazy person and thought that that would work, and it did. So I was learning in public and sharing what I was learning along the way. I really didn't become more of a maker and build in public until the past year or so. I've been doing side projects forever. Mostly that looked like consulting. But then recently, I just like, I want to put some products together. I want to try my hand at some digital products, see what I can do. And just scrapped together this really janky tech stack of like Gumroad and, uh, you know, free website and whatever. And it worked. It worked really well. It wasn't like massive, but it did work. And so I started seeing the value of just putting that out there too, not just sharing what I was learning, but sharing what I was learning and doing. And then just like creating this flywheel of content through that. And that's— that pretty much led me to Uh, getting more active on Twitter, and the rest is history.

Love that.

Well, well, the rest is not history. I could still, I could still really flame out here. So let's—

So actually, I, I want to get to that segment where you, um, you're now CMO at Copy. And, um, well, actually, for the, for the, for the listeners and for the viewers, Paul, do you want to quickly summarize what Copy.ai does?

Sure. So it's an AI copywriting app. And we use an AI platform called GPT-3, which is the world's most powerful AI model for language generation. And that was launched in summer of this year. And since I'd used GPT-2, I was expecting 3 to be really good. And so the first people that really saw GPT-3 were on Twitter because that's where you— that's the fastest place to find demos and early beta use cases. And so it was immediately in my timeline. I immediately recognized the power of it and thought, okay, well, this has got to be the next big thing. And I became the unofficial GPT-3 hype man on Twitter. Oh, yeah. It is. And because I was doing investing, I was trying to find anyone building on it. What are the big things going to be? And trying to invest in those things. And at the same time, trying to get access as fast as possible, which we did. My co-founder, Chris Liu, and I, and then we just started pumping out MVPs and launching them on Twitter. So if you don't have money, you can't really run ads. So Twitter is the best platform for generating, finding your first users. And what we realized very quickly was each time we launched anything, we would get more followers, which would give us more users the next time we launched.

There's a Iteration domino effect that occurs.

Yes. And then there's content that is just spewing out of these side projects. People want to know everything about it. Your first dollar of revenue, your second dollar of revenue. What are you thinking about doing? A feature request, a customer testimonial. All of that is content that people are generally curious about. So when you start posting it, you're basically sharing your journey with people You know, they're on Twitter. So at first they're going to be like, dude, everybody's really encouraging and happy for you. And this is something I've noticed since the summer. A tweet from someone that says, just made my first dollar of revenue. I will— I'm always liking and retweeting that, but those have gone from getting like 15 likes, maybe 30 likes, to getting like 600, 700, 800 likes on it. And so a big part of that, of my, like, the thing I want to do with Twitter is to basically reinforce that as a positive thing.

Yeah.

So because I know everybody wants to imitate success and we're all looking to see who's growing and whatever, but that honestly, that one tweet, I just made my first dollar of revenue, will inspire more people to build.

Right.

And I'm all about I

think one theme that sort of consistently shows up in your feed, and of course, even in Blake's too, is how much you both cheer on the sidelines for others and their micro wins and small wins, right? Because, you know, I think one of the harshest things that I've seen in the last 10, 15 years is how founder culture tends to be celebrating the hustle, the hours I worked or this or that or this. And there's actually not enough gratitude that goes into small wins. So, someone like you co-signing on some maker who made like a dollar by selling a product on Gumroad, or maybe they got their first SaaS customer, actually means the world to that maker or a founder, right? And I think it's one theme that I've seen both of you do really well and then speaks to Sort of like the ethos of building in public, you know, for steering in public as well.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Because that was me in August. I had $3 a month in recurring revenue, you know.

Yeah, there we go.

The next day I had— we got another subscriber. We had $6 a month in recurring revenue. And I posted a tweet like growing 100% day over day with all the fire emojis. Right. And then somebody in the comments does the math. He's like, dude, if you grow 100% day over day for the next 30 days, you're going to be like this huge company. And I was like, I was like, let's plan on it, right? Let's plan on it. So that's where I— that's like my— that's the neighborhood I'm coming from. So people that were following me back then, I might have had, let's say at that point, maybe like 1,500 followers. Yeah. 10x that, everybody that starts following you after that, they missed that journey. They don't realize it.

Right.

So I, you

know,

I try to let people know, hey, look, when you have a startup that does strike something that people want, you can grow extremely fast. So in less than 5 months, we're at $60,000 a month in revenue.

Right. MRR.

MRR, yeah. Recurring revenue. This is a huge jump, right? So how did you go from taglines.ai, which does one one tool, which I think we ended up getting to like $300 a month in MRR, which is maybe 20 or 30 paying customers. How do you go from there and build the next thing with what you learned from that? So that's all in my timeline, which is fantastic. 'Cause it's like my history, my log, like this is what we did.

Moving to like the part about CMO. And actually I'm curious, before you announced that you were hiring on Twitter, Paul, what was going on in your mind about Given how build in public you are, how like the company was formed around that culture, what was going on in your mind about what your first hire would look like and what you were looking for from that person?

Yeah. So we, you know, Chris and I, before we even started building, we have our own understanding of how seed stage companies work. And—

Because you're investors, right?

Yeah, we're angel investors. The first one is, does this company have traction or not? And it was our viewpoint that most people should not quit their day job until they hit traction with something because it's so hard to do. The second viewpoint was that a real MVP, given all the tech that we have access to now, shouldn't take more than a week or maybe a few weeks to get an actual MVP out the door. So we use that to really rapidly build, launch, and iterate. So we knew, okay, we're not quitting like our dream jobs unless we get serious traction in something.

Right.

And my hope was that the traction would be a strong enough signal that it was a no-brainer, right? It's not riding the fence like, oh, we got to, you know, 3 months in and we're at $800 a month in revenue, right? It's like we have a little bit of traction. But it's unclear that it's going to be very easy to scale this. So once we hit traction and we knew, okay, time to go full-time on this, the second thing we knew was that the people you want to hire won't work for you until you have a serious amount of traction.

Right.

Not just like $3,000 a month in revenue. I can't get Blake on board, right? Blake's got a million offers. So how am I going to get the caliber of talent I'm going to need to actually execute the real vision? And the game plan was, Chris, you and me, we're going to take this as far and as hard as we can on our own. Right. We're going to build in public. We're going to hope that we can actually recruit talent off this build-in-public playbook, which is people can see us building and they get interested and maybe they get aligned with the vision and the mission. So maybe either they reach out to us or when we reach out to them, they've already— they already know who we are. So that was the playbook. So I think Blake came on, we literally hit like $50,000 a month a day or two before he joined. That is atypical for startups. Okay. But the nice thing is if you do find mega traction, you hope that you have a game plan that's going to work. So the problem is you're You're now late to building the team out. So we're like 4 months behind building a team, but the team we have, we're hoping is the right team that we need to actually take it to the next level.

Right. What were some qualities that you saw in Blake or his profile and his playbooks that made you go, okay, that's my CMO?

Bring it on.

I'm not a big fan of resumes. So for a marketer, I was looking for— since we're totally like marketing-focused as a platform, we're extremely heavily focused on organic marketing tools.

Right.

Which means that the marketer you want to bring on board needs to understand organic channels. They need to understand how to build an audience. They need, they need to be data-driven, like, hey, what's working? What's not working? And then they need like— they need hopefully have built side projects. So they have like this creative energy that is— doesn't like the— if they're working at a company, that doesn't stop them from wanting to pursue these passion things because that, that's a core focus of our tools. And then if they're generating content, like how literally how much content are they able to generate? And then I saw Blake. I'm like, oh, this is the guy.

So you almost saw him before he applied?

It was— no, it was like the same. Like, he showed up in, uh, he showed up in Whit's thread.

But

yeah,

and, uh, the Bad Unicorn founder, Whit Anderson. And, uh, yeah, Whit's awesome. Uh, ATL. And, um, I was like, Blake, who's this Blake guy? I look at his profile for like 6 seconds. I'm like, oh, this, this is, this is who we want. Instant DM. You know, just like it took it from there. Just like we had a funny DM thread going on. Blake's like, yeah, you need help with something? I'm like, I need a podcast. I need my own podcast. I can help you set that up, whatever. And then I was like, and also I need a 90-page Growth plan. Can you help with that? He's like, yeah, I can help with that. Just as a joke. So it was like instantly, I knew that he has this output. I knew that not only does he have followers, because a lot of marketers on Twitter, they buy followers, but he had real engagement on his tweets. And then just from personality, if you're a marketer, you become like a core voice of the company.

Right.

Is this somebody that you want representing your company? And Blake's awesome. Blake's like incredibly nice, humble, and helpful. And like this building in public thing, like you said, it's not just about, you're just pumping out promotional content, but really, are you actually cheerleading other people? Are you helping other people? I'd see threads like where people just offer help. It's like, hey, reply if you need help with something and I'll help you back. Like those are core values and virtues for us.

So from your vantage point, Blake, what made this decision inevitable for you to join Copy? And from also from your, I'm assuming long-term passion to build in public, like how did these 2 worlds collide and what made it Inevitable.

Just the money.

Wait, I thought Paul was paying in Bitcoin, but—

No, he pays me in Doge. Yeah. No, honestly, when I was looking at it, I've mentioned this to Paul a billion times, but the fact that I'd never been able to work at a company where I actually used the tool was huge. I've worked in really boring industries, worked at agencies, And been in a lot of different industries, none of which I would actually use any of their stuff. And that's a big thing for a marketer to be able to be your own customer is huge. Being able to like go into the tool and automatically identify opportunities for growth there, but at the same time get value out of the tool like simultaneously. Never had that before. So that was a really big selling point. Beyond that, like It was really clear that my skillset, personality, all that good stuff would fit really well with this company. And so the more that I researched, the more I talked with Paul, it just became clear like, yes, this is a good fit. And I wasn't actively looking to leave my other job until I really started talking with Paul, and then I was actively looking to leave my job, right? Because I realized that even though I had it good where I was, I was playing it safe at a company where I just would never get my hands on the tool. I didn't get to work with tons of people all the time because like I was managing a remote team, but it was just really— there wasn't a lot going on. It was a very traditional company. And so the idea that I could take something over, inject my voice and personality into it, really make a difference and be able to attribute like— because like marketing up until that point was word of mouth Twitter, right? So like, there's ground zero right there. Everything that's done above that, I can directly contribute to. And that was huge for me. Also, just the fact that they had insurance and they were a startup was, was a really, really good selling point because I was really nervous that we weren't going to have insurance. And if you know anything about paying for insurance outside of your employer, it's like insanely expensive.

Right.

So that was like the final little puzzle piece to fall in. And then from there, I was like, yeah, I'm joining, I'm doing this thing.

I love that. So now that, Paul, you picked your first hire in public, is this going to be the hiring playbook at Copy?

Yeah, so we hired our second person, Zach Lee. He built in public.

Wow.

So his— WinKwai is his handle, but he built a company or a side project called potion. There are 2 potions, his was one of them, and he ended up selling it. But he had been following me since we launched. And he said I had inspired him to build that project, which he ended up selling. So in that time period, you know, that was like, that was basically the story. And I think Chris and he connected and then there was already an energy. So like, this is especially in remote environment, you cannot— Right. like remote-first company, how do you convey energy like that?

Right.

There's no vibe in an office. So you need something to replicate that and take it to the next level because I've got like a family and kids living in the other rooms of my house. It's not the right— it's not the same vibe, right, that you might get like being in a cramped office with your first hires and it's totally different. So without that, how do you build it? How do you actually build a culture and onboard You know, consistently so that everybody's excited about the project and waking up in the morning. And so that's something that's super important.

So when, um, I, I mean, of course I was following parts, bits and parts of the story. One of my favorite, again, another, um, moments that I thought I stopped scrolling, which is a pretty big deal, right? Like getting people to stop scrolling, uh, is when you mentioned something around onboarding. And you were looking, you know, you're looking for advice and guidance around how to onboard in a remote-first, you know, setup. And I thought that was pretty vulnerable, you know, for a founder to come out and just say, okay, I need some guidance and help, um, in, in onboarding. Because, you know, people, you know, people who don't live in the build-in-public camp are very defensive about their strengths and weaknesses and things they know, things they don't know. And I think, Paul, One thing that's refreshing, the way you lead copy or the new wave of leaders is, in my view, is how vulnerable and open they are in sharing, hey, I don't know what the heck I'm doing here, so help me out. What was your sort of genesis behind that tweet? And does it mean something to you or you just did it?

I literally don't know what I'm doing, man. I don't know what to tell you.

That should be the one-line zinger of this episode.

Copy AI founder bares all. Look, I don't know what I'm doing.

I swear to you, I don't have a clue. And I hear people all the time talking about how they have imposter syndrome. I'm like, everybody can't— if everybody has imposter syndrome, then we just need to cut the crap. Right?

Right.

Like, okay, if you have this weakness, How are you going to fix it? Well, you need to ask somebody for help. Twitter is like literally, I don't know, 300 million people that are scrolling their feed in order to find a place to actually say something that adds value. So now any question I have, any problem, it's a tweet and the answer is there in seconds. It's a superpower. It's a total superpower.

I'll share a personal anecdote on that. A couple of weeks ago, I'm not sure if you guys saw, but my wife asked me, okay, I need some book recommendations like dad book recommendations or parent book recommendations that you can ask your friends. And I'm like, what do you mean? I have no friends. I mean, I have friends, but I will just ask Twitter. They will tell me. And she did not believe it. But I just tweeted out and we had 65 books recommended. 65. So, there's a whole giant shelf in the next room, the baby nursery. Yeah. Filled with all the books. And she— it blew her mind. And she was like, I can't believe you had so many dad friends. And I think the answer is really not like that you have dad friends or not. It's really about like how Twitter's algorithm works in a way that it surfaces your content and tweets to the people who tweet about that topic all the time, right? So, and then there's also, of course, a community around you. So why not tap into it?

Right.

That was one of my recent favorite memories. I was like, whoa, that's the power of Twitter, not just in tech, beyond.

Yes. Yeah. And so that, that's exactly right. So Twitter is a community you build around yourself. So if you tweet about politics, then you're going to get people that have certain expectations. They're coming to you, they're going to— that's going to influence what they're tweeting about. So I've heard time and time again, hey, Twitter's great until you hit 10,000 followers.

Right.

And then it just devolves.

Right.

I've hit 15.6K. It's still amazing. I'm very focused on the content I'm putting out there. I don't want this. I don't want to have a hot take just to generate interest or likes or whatever. I have no interest in that at all. I feel like that ruins the experience of that community for a lot of people.

Right.

Like, Paul Graham, right? Brilliant mind, has a million followers. I would never trade his follower base for mine, ever, despite the fact that he's got a million, because I look at what people tweet at him and I'm like, I don't ever want this to happen to me in my life. Right?

Right.

He could be an influencer, but man, the amount of like problems and negativity that he attracts is off the charts. I'm like, why do this to yourself?

I mean, it seems to me you just want to be Paul Y and not Paul G. Yeah.

I mean, look, not everybody's got the same things that they want out of it, but in my head, in my megalomaniac head, I have this impression that this community, continue to grow.

Yeah.

Like, we'll get— I'm at 15K. I don't care about followers. You'll never hear me, see me tweet about how many followers I have or got. That just doesn't happen because I don't care what the number is. I care about the quality. So if you— the thing that I'm thinking about, and you're helping to make this happen, and Blake is too, is if you had 100,000 people that want to be at the edge of tech in real time in a community where everyone's supportive. Yet when something gets launched, like take any private maker communities, it's great for support, which we have in Twitter anyway.

Right.

But what they never have is when you launch, like it could be a massive success, you know, a million people could see this project. It just doesn't happen. So then they flip back and go to Product Hunt. Or they go to Hacker News. You know, people that launch on Product Hunt that already have even a tiny Twitter following will get 4 times as much traffic from Twitter than they do the Product Hunt launch.

Yeah.

Which means Twitter is the community. So this is something like you have to go all in on one. I went all in on Twitter very purposefully. So

are you Um, Blake, are you taking notes of how many times he's saying Twitter is a community? Because I think every time he says that, we should take a shot or something. Do it. No, hey, you'd be drunk before the interview.

No, we don't. None of us drink, man. We don't drink. We're here, we're here to bring the future to people, to keep it optimistic, to, to create a can-do attitude. My feeling with Elon Musk is that while he's doing these awesome things, I don't feel like enough people are inspired to actually try it because they think what he's doing is impossible. Right.

It's like several orders of magnitude above. Yeah.

I'm not Elon Musk. I'm not Albert Einstein. That's the thought. Whereas me, I'm trying to break it down. I'm like, this guy is a regular guy. How does he construct his blueprint and roadmap and strategy so that he's able to pull off impossible stuff? Because if you can learn from him on how he did that, you can pull off impossible stuff. And yeah, so those lessons have not been lost on me and we continue to use them.

No, of course. I mean, so that leads me to another segment, which is the notion of, is it marketing or is it sales? So Blake, this is probably more relevant to you. How do you view building public? Do you think, is it more marketing or is it more sales? How do you view the art of building public?

Yeah. The correct answer is that it's everything when you do it correctly. It's nothing when you do it incorrectly. So that's the same with any marketing tactic. It will result in nothing if you do it really bad. If you do it well and build relationships, it will drive the results that you're looking for. And so when you're building in public, yeah, upfront, like the initial thing is it looks like marketing, right? It looks like— because inherently, if you're building in public the right way, you're not just always pushing some call to action. You don't look at what Paul's posting and you don't think like every freaking day he's just pushing me to sign up for copy.ai. Of course, he wants people to do that. What he's sharing though is, here's where we're at as a company, here's what we're learning, here's what I'm learning, here's what you could try out, here's me trying stuff out, either looking like a fool or looking like a success along the way. He's showing the whole gamut of everything. So yeah, build in public can lead to sales really effectively, but not because you're just trying to push something. It's more because people start trusting your story, they start trusting you as a person, which leads them to trust the company, which leads them to want to use the tool that the company offers. It's a really simple funnel that works and you don't have to explicitly just guide people there. Like people aren't that dumb. Right. They know what's expected. Like they know Paul is the CEO of CopyAI. They kind of understand what action he would like them to take over time. Right. But the way that we talk about it, It's not, hey, you should join. It's more like, hey, here's, here's some cool stories. Here's, here's stuff you could try out. I'm here to give you free knowledge. This is what we're learning. You don't have to make this mistake yourself. We're throwing all this stuff at them, and then they trust the person, then they trust the company. And this is why, like, people like Dave Gerhardt have done really well over their careers. Uh, love him, hate him, whatever. He makes a podcast bearing out all the secrets of him, and like, he used to have David Cancel, the CEO of Drift, on the podcast all the time too, and just like get really specific with stuff.

Right.

And then people liked Drift as a brand a lot more, not so surprisingly, than, than some of these other chatbots because they knew them and they knew the people behind them. So it really becomes important when you're building in public, especially behind a brand, that you attach the brand to people, which lets you tell stories and weaves them through this tapestry of eventually becoming sales. But It's, it's a lot more nuanced than the typical promotion culture that we've been living in.

Right. And it also ties into, um, what we were trying to say earlier too, is that it's not always about you, right? When you build in public, yes, you may share an update, but that doesn't have to be always about like your product or, um, you know, the number of signups you got that day. It could be about the problem you're solving. You know, a customer quote, a customer story, a customer win. You know, I see you guys do that all the time. Like, you know, like pick someone who built a funny, crazy thing with Copy.ai and then they highlight them, right? And those are the things that resonate, you know? Okay. So if we don't have any comment on that, I actually want to—

I have a comment.

Go on. Finish.

I don't like that question.

I'm going to edit that part out of this. But—

Well, look, because I get at— this is an important topic. Yeah. Because I get asked, and I just see other makers not complaining, but just not happy about the tweets that I make, saying basically, hey, just posting your MRR numbers isn't really building public. I think that the big thing I don't want people to miss is that when you look at social media in general, there are very few spots where people are trying to be open about how to build a company.

Right.

I think that market for people who are interested in that is insanely big, millions and millions of people. So when you build in public, if you go the, I'm gonna go like, it's just sales route. I mean, that's every corporate Twitter handle is a sales route, CTA. They get zero engagement. So no one really cares. So what you have to realize, the first thing you realize is this is people. This is not followers. This is a person, right? So once you realize it's a person, you just have to like literally be a human.

Yeah.

Write your tweet like you're talking to a human being who has, you know, might be interested or might not be. Get their attention and like explain what What this post is about and what they should think about it. So, so for most people like that will follow me, they'll come in through like an MRR tweet. It's basically the top of funnel, like, hey, who's this guy growing this company? What is the company? Well, in the tweet, I don't even put our company name in there, right? So it's not a— I'm not promoting the company. I'm just saying, hey, I'm doing something that's kind of interesting and people happen to like this, the fact that they can see this happen in real time. And people then want to DM me, hey, do you have any tips for building in public? I said, check out my Twitter timeline. It's all there.

It's all done, laid out for you there.

Yeah, it's all laid out. I never delete a tweet. I'll say one last thing. The whole point of this social media network is to surface the important things people are doing and the vision. And how do you turn something like this into a movement?

Right.

Well, the way you would do it is you have a few companies that do it and become really successful being very open. So there are a number of venture-backed companies that are built that way, and then you continue to just layer it on. And I think a lot of those companies, they tend to be— they grow and become more insular about how much they share.

Yeah.

You know, where it's like, okay, we're not interacting as much because we have this other thing to do. So the hard part for me is like, what's the right balance? Because what we do want to do is still foster as much as we can in that community without like spending too much time on Twitter.

I'm sure you get that. You get asked that question all the time too, right? Like, Paul, what are you doing? How are you being the CEO of a company when all you're doing is spending your time on Twitter? But people miss the entire point. It's a lot of being the CEO of a company. So much of it is actually building the narrative, a story, a movement for folks to rally around, including investors, including future hires like Blake, including your potential customers. And it's not trying to close it on day 1. And so, I'm sure you get asked that all the time because people ask me that all the time. And I'm like, you're not getting it. That's not the point.

It's everything. It's how you reach anyone.

Yeah.

Like, you do ask them, so, okay, how are you gonna reach— how are you gonna find a— how are you gonna recruit someone? They're like, oh, well, we'll post a job posting. We'll post that on LinkedIn, Indeed, AngelList, something, or it's on our website. We hope someone clicks on it and like actually applies, right? First question we're gonna get in the interview is like, okay, how much This is going to pay,

right?

And what, what, what percentage of those applicants are going to be a good fit? Like 1 in 10? So how much— how many resources at the company level are you allocating to actually promote these openings and then to review them? And like, KP, I just don't have time, man.

Yeah.

Like, I got to build an awesome team. Blake quit his job the day, like, I gave him an offer. It was like 3 days. You know, our, our second hire, we talked to him the next day, he had an offer and accepted and quit the next day. Okay.

Wow. That's a good testament. Yeah.

Hire 3 we made accepts the offer on Monday, starts tomorrow. Like, there's power in the vision and like understanding the company you're going to join. And these are really big decisions for people. These are life-changing decisions, right? Career-changing decisions. Absolutely. So how do you— this other way, the normal way people do it, I don't think it's sustainable. And when I look back on it, I'm like, maybe that's why so many people are unsatisfied with their work is they don't— they didn't get the first part right, which is Am I aligned with the mission this company is on? Right? Not just like, okay, am I going to get this title and then I can advance? Or, and then once I have that, then I can quit. I don't— you don't want your new hire to be like, all right, great, this is gonna be awesome. I'm gonna work here for 3 years and then I'm quitting, you know, and doing my next thing.

You want them to be excited, you know, for the long run, you know, ideally.

I think so.

Yeah. So I'm going to be switching over now to the audience Q&A. We had, of course, Of course, some questions from tweets and from Twitter. So I'm going to, you know, pop them up here on my screen and start asking them. This one comes from Reza. Question for Blake. As the first marketing hire at an early real estate startup, what's your framework for defining and prioritizing marketing programs?

Yeah, so establish marketing programs. That's the framework. Establish marketing programs.

Yeah, step one.

Step one. Honestly, it was coming in, identifying what's absolutely crucial but isn't there, and then the rest of like the cherry on top ideas come later, right? Paul and I have had meetings where we just have 1,001 ideas, so many cool things we could do. There's so many ways you could take this technology and the marketing for the technology, all that good stuff. When you boil it down though, you have to be able to focus on a couple of things that actually move the needle up front. So for us, obviously there's, there's some infrastructure stuff happening, like hiring people that there are clear gaps with community or for content creation or for marketing operations, whatever it is for whatever company. There are going to be gaps that are readily apparent, and building out a team is important because I can't do everything, nor do I want to do everything all at once. There's, there's some structural stuff like setting up We use Notion. So setting up all the documentation you need for people to come on board, new hires down the road, setting up what programs we actually want to invest in and what's really important, what's the mission of marketing right now and how is that going to evolve. There's a lot— it's a lot of writing, right? Honestly, like, that's the biggest thing. The more that we can write, the better that we're going to perform over time. Because even if we write things that are bad ideas, at least they're out there and we can start editing and finding the things that really do move the needle. But You can't— if you keep it all in your mind or keep it all in a Zoom meeting without writing it down, it all gets lost instead of just like needing to edit out some things that do need to get lost. So that's, that's been huge. Um, outside of that, we're a content creation company too. Like, we gotta— we have to make content everywhere. And so getting community set up across the board is massively important for us. I know that that may not be a priority for some other companies. I I think it probably should be though. Uh, that— not to say that like the way Copy does things is 100% the only way to do it, that's absolutely not true. But we're, like Paul's mentioned multiple times in this podcast, we're looking to be at the edge of technology, which means that our marketing has to be too. We can't just be doing the old traditional way of marketing where we're just like seeking out PR and trying to get good, uh, you know, good quotes and build— like, we'll build partnerships, we're gonna do PR, we're gonna do all that stuff, but The people in this company are going to be interesting, and that's what's going to make the company interesting.

Love that. So, um, another question from, um, That Dude Dennis. Dennis Lin. Um, now we know which Dennis. Um, your biggest build-in-public-related mistake or screw-up, what you have learned from that and how you grew from it. So I'll go both of you. Paul, you want to go first?

I've not made any mistakes.

Another one-liner for, for this podcast episode. That's

the clip right there.

Never made any mistakes.

None.

People will be confused if this is a bloopers reel or if this is the real podcast.

Nah, I've not made any mistakes. I mean, maybe some like— no, I haven't made any mistakes.

When you're thinking about building public though, like if you're really committed to building in public, you have to show all of it. So it can't necessarily be a mistake, right? Like if you, if you do something that doesn't work, it doesn't mean it's a mistake. It's like you're building this in public to show both sides. And so, um, for me, like at least there have been products that I put out that just totally flopped. I've had some that have generated a few thousand dollars, like almost instantly. On the Gumroad stuff that I've done, I've had a couple that I thought were dope and they flopped immediately. Like, I thought that I was gonna get tons of sales. I put it out, I did the same framework, same thing as I've done that had worked before. Crickets. Worse than crickets. Like, it's like the crickets all got eaten and there was just like nothing but pure silence out there. And so that's happened and it's documented in my timeline too, for sure.

So I have one more from— Um,

I did think about it more.

What is that?

I don't have any. I just want to let you know, I did think about it because I saw the question come in on Twitter. I'm like, oh, that's a good question. And I'm like, I hope someone can identify one, but I'll be honest with you, the one that would stand out is like, oh, well, you show people your revenue. So what if you have a hiccup and your revenue falls? Well, I'm like, the revenue would not be as high if I never reported it. So that's just a risk. I mean, there— and then the other risk building in public is everybody sees what you're doing. Your competitors see what you're doing. If you're worried about competition, you shouldn't really start a company that way, especially in this market that we're in.

Actually, I actually have a specific question on that and I want to understand Succinctly, your view on it very briefly, because I have a couple more questions coming in. How does Copy.ai view competition?

I mean, we going into it, Chris and I were like, hey, we're going to have 100, 200, 300, 400 competitors. Are we ready to go? That was it. It was like, all right. What are you going to do? So you need things that work that you can do that other people aren't as good at. And so we knew, okay, if it's competition, yeah, they might clone the product, maybe entirely, at least the early product before you can build and layer in technical complexity that makes everything better. So then you're about distribution. So that's why we're all in on Twitter.

Right.

Like all in. 100%. So when you go all in on one platform, it has a huge advantage, and it's on us now to really extract the maximum value out of those advantages. I think we've done an adequate job, but those advantages don't solve those big core business problems. You still have to build a company. You can't just make it sound and look like a startup. It actually has to work as a real business.

Right. Blake, I want to popcorn that to you. And I'm curious how you viewed competition before joining Copy. Generally, your thesis around build in public, you're much more likely to be copied, which technically is true, right? Because people can see what you're building on and they can simply clone because everybody's attention is here. Like, how do you sort of mentally wrestle with that? Or you don't even care, like Paul, just like say— I don't care.

I— yeah, I think that competition is, is more of a traditional— like, going after competitive analysis is more of a traditional marketing play than it is marketing in the new world. I think it's important to know what, what other people are doing, to be able to see that, but I would never in a million years formulate my entire marketing strategy around what other people are doing. I want to be able to control the story and what we are doing. and build something special. I don't think it's possible to build something special when you're looking behind your shoulder. I just don't. So I've been keenly aware of competitors and even just when I'm doing consulting for myself, who are the other people out there that are offering the same thing? But I'm more likely to try to make friends with those people than try to ever publicly combat them or copy what they're doing because relationship building is the name of the game. So The more that we can build relationships with people, whether that's competitors even or just anybody else, I think that bodes a lot better for a company than saying like, okay, copywhatever.com is copying us and they want to, you know, we need to check out what they're doing. Like, yeah, we can be aware of it, but what's going to move the needle really? Is it going to be copying somebody else's features, worrying about other people copying our features, or are we going to take it to the next level? Do we have the right team? Do we have what we need infrastructurally to go forward. That's what I value much more.

Gotcha. All right, so, um, one more question. Um, what was one of the most important things you had to unlearn, um, from college and going through your first couple jobs that got you where you are? Paul?

I didn't learn much in college,

so that was easy. So you didn't have to unlearn a lot?

No, honestly, I had a degree in business economics and accounting, business administration. So all the economics was very useful, like makes sense. It's a worldview. It explains incentives and how things work and how that machine's put together. On the accounting side, I knew I wanted to become a CPA, which I did become a CPA. We didn't even learn QuickBooks. So how are you going to graduate someone with a degree in accounting when you never taught them how to use QuickBooks or any accounting software for that matter? And then the second thing was in marketing, literally never talked about how to use Facebook ads, Google ads, anything. And I'm like, man, this is so stupid. People are going to graduate and not know how to the first thing about starting a business. So I kind of knew at the time, okay, this is not really going to get me anywhere. And that was back in 2009 when I graduated. So I spent 2 years in public accounting, 3 years at a hedge fund as a CFO, 3 years at a startup, and then 4 years at a venture capital firm before I felt like, all right, now I actually have I feel like I'm reasonably in a good position, like, to take this next step. But yeah, no, didn't have to unlearn anything because I kind of knew what it was even at the time. Like, okay, this is something people do at this point in human history. We're still doing this. It's very expensive. So I graduated in 3 years instead of staying 4 and doing a master's. Which was great. But I think at the end of the day, like, just the amount of content Blake's putting out there, like, you want to learn marketing, YouTube and some podcasts will get you up to speed really, really quickly.

Follow the right people. So, um, Blake, is there something that you had to learn from college?

Yeah, I mean, I was a little bit more naive in college than Paul. Like, I didn't know—

I was cynical, man.

Yeah, maybe you're— maybe so, maybe so. So I went in like I had no clue what I wanted to do. I was actually— I was 2 years behind because I was a missionary in France for 2 years right after high school. So everybody else is going off to college, I'm doing that for 2 years, and then I go to college after. So I'm going— I'm an old man when I start college at 21. And then I had no clue what I wanted to do. I started working in SEO, and then that's when I really started having my marketing courses kind of at that same time. And so I get into these more advanced marketing classes and they'd be talking about this great new fad called search engine optimization. That's like how they'd say it every single time, optimization. And the things that they would teach were just so ridiculously irrelevant and not close to what actual good SEO was. And that was kind of a wake-up call, like, oh, okay, so these people don't know anything about the practical side of what I'm about to face in this world with my career. And so, yeah, I mean, I kind of had to unlearn just blindly trusting organizations. Like college, I went in just blindly trusting because everybody in my life was telling me, you have to get a degree or else, but they never finished that sentence. They never said, or else what? They just said, or else. And I learned, oh, that doesn't even exist. There's no or else. Like there are a lot of viable options. Like you think Barricade's going to go to college? That dude's going to be a billionaire before he goes to college. He's not going to need to go to college.

Yeah, what are they gonna teach him?

It's just kind of a joke.

Yeah, it's kind of a joke.

Shout out to Barricade. If the folks who are listening, uh, don't know who it is, Blake, you want to tell them? He's what, 12 years old?

Yeah, he's just some 12-year-old kid that's way better than all of us at everything, including

bullying in public.

Oh my God, he started, he started learning to code 6 months ago and has launched like 10 projects on Product Hunt this year. And it took his— God, he just hit 5,000 follows. His build-in-public game is way better than me or Blake, like probably combined. Just his way. Yeah. His way of engaging is like insane. Insane.

I can tell you what I was doing at 12. I was definitely not building in public. I was mostly just worried about what, what, you know, what grades to get and all that. So one last question, and

I was trying to learn how to code and it was C++ and I bought this book this thick. Yeah. The first 1,000 pages was on modules and it was totally abstract and I just, I threw it away. I threw the book away.

Yeah. I was, I was gathering change in the couch cushions to go buy Hot Pockets by myself at the store. That was 12.

Good times, Blake. Good times. All right. So one last question. We'll wrap up. This is coming from Glenn. The Twitter handles, @TheFlowAgency. I'd love to know from your esteemed guests what anxieties they had when they started billing in public and how they addressed them, please. I'll wait for— actually, let's do Paul and then I'll wrap it up with Blake. Paul, give us a real answer. You can't say no anxieties, unlearning, nothing. Give us a real—

What?

Make something up at least.

No,

look, when, when you're on Twitter, like you join Twitter, you're literally just trying to get likes. So you'll, you'll post whatever the hell you need to, to get a like. So if it's posting like, hey, I got my first customer. Hey, that's a tweet. We'll try it out. So there are a million tweets to get no engagement. And then you find something that does and you do more of it. So this is a, this is definitely a positive feedback loop, especially for people building in public. So it's, I think some people have gone on Twitter and done it and then they will leave. But what I'm trying to figure out is this core group that's doing it now, will they be consistent in doing it? And will they be able to see results in it? So like even the anxiety would come from being alone, like loneliness as a founder and just anxiety of doing it and you run into a problem you can't solve. Yeah. With this community, boom, you get all the answers you need. So if you say, I'm running into this issue, one founder said, you know, it's hard, there's some burnout, like, what do I do? I'm not able to grow things as quickly. I'm shipping a lot, but it's not really working. Those are the core things that, like, your community can really help with. So what I'm hoping for is that the community attracts people, like, more knowledge. Found like high-level founder knowledge that I think is probably still missing so that when someone has, you know, a question like that, somebody can come in with some real insights to help them out rather than just like encouragement, which encouragement is fine, but it's not— that's not going to solve the problem.

When you started building in public, what were some anxieties you had and how you addressed them?

Yeah, real quick here. I— my anxieties weren't around like what I was going to say or how it was going to be perceived. My biggest anxiety always, and to this day, is I hope that as my account keeps growing, that my content doesn't start sucking more. Because when you get into like 10,000 follower range, which is where I'm narrowing in on that now, um, everything kind of works a little bit for you when you get to a certain point. When you're just starting out, nothing works. And then when something does, it's like this aha moment and you keep grinding from there and figuring stuff out. You get to a certain point where everything kind of at least works enough for you not to be embarrassed by it. Um, that's dangerous to me. And I get anxious about like, I want to make sure that I have ways that I can still tell that this is valuable to people because the likes might not be a good metric for that anymore. That's, that's the big thing. But I found that if I'm still able to generate conversations, that's probably a fairly good— way of knowing that I'm not, I'm not like hitting my— I haven't hit my peak yet. I'm still working up to that. But that, that would be the number one thing.

The, the one takeaway I got from there is that clearly shots were fired, Paul, at you and me because we just passed 10K or whatever number, and then he's saying he's already indicated, insinuating that our content sucks. So

yeah, whatever, Blake. No,

dude, I just got 2,600 likes on a post about naming a startup, like 6 rules. But that post, I've given that—

Can we address that for a second? Says the guy who literally earlier in the podcast says, I don't care for likes. I don't look at likes. I don't look at— There we go.

Well, you're talking about likes correlating with content. This was actually a high-quality content post because I've actually delivered this to people one-on-one a lot, and it's a mistake founders fall into, this trap about what they name their company. So I was like, okay, here are the 6 rules. And then I tried to like, you know, great names are worth millions. Everybody wants to like that tweet, right? But that got like 837,000 impressions. So people, I think they don't understand how far the reach can go on Twitter.

Yeah. That's another thing too. People don't understand like how many free impressions you can get just by pumping out like, you know, organic content. Appreciate you spending your time with me. And where can people, uh, follow you? Or, you

know, TikTok. I'm on Tumblr and OnlyFans. My OnlyFans is onlyfans.com/heyblake, and I share all my, my deepest, darkest secrets. For my audience.

But where, really though, like where can people find you and Paul?

Uh, I'm in Memphis.

Just fire Paul. Just get him out of here.

I'm just gonna—

I'm on Twitter @HeyBlake.

Thank you.

Follow me before you follow Paul.

I'm @PaulYacoubian, the Twitter handle. And that's, that's the only place I want you to find me. I don't want you to look at me on LinkedIn

anywhere else.

Don't ping me on there.

@polykubian. All right, thank you, Copycats. Excited, uh, for wrapping this up, and we'll— I'll see you around on Slack, or see you around on Twitter. All

right, sounds good.

See ya.