Our Suite Of B2B AI Tools Just Crossed $1M ARR
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi, I am Mayank Jain, a coffee aficionado, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Scalenut. I am building Scalenut with my decade-long friends, and co-founding partners - Gaurav Goyal and Saurabh Wadhawan.
Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and Content Marketing platform designed for SMBs, marketers, content creators, and anyone who markets their business in the digital space.
Simply put, we help businesses scale their efforts to nail the entire content life cycle, from planning to creation.
Some of our crowd favorite tools are Topic Clusters (for content planning), Cruise Mode (a 5-minute AI blog writer), SEO Hub (for competitor research and brief creation), and AI Copywriter (to ace your copywriting game).
We launched our MVP in September 2022 and opened it for public use in January 2022. And the immense love we have received from our users worldwide has led to Scalenut turning over $100,000 in MRR. It’s overwhelming, but it’s only looking up from here!
What's your backstory, and how did you come up with the idea?
Gaurav, Saurabh, and I have spent a decade each with leading digital startups, ranging from consumer goods to SaaS businesses. While Gaurav and I have spent a good deal of time building business functions in leadership roles, Saurabh is your guy who brings BRDs (blueprint) to life, a product leader.
We would catch up over drinks and discuss life, work, and the in-betweens. While we were doing great in our career trajectory, life was getting a little flat, a little too monotonous. And we needed a kick.
Do not be stuck in a thinking loop; it brings stagnancy.
We evaluated many problems we wanted to solve, ranging from the pet industry, health tech, and D2C brands for chocolates, and the list is endless. This was also the time we observed parallels in how brands struggle to scale their content marketing.
And then, in came Covid. It brought with it massive digitization opportunities. Now, when an opportunity comes saying ‘Knock knock,’ you don’t ask ‘Who’s there?’ you simply open the door.
That’s when we decided to build the SaaS platform to help brands scale their content marketing with ease. Why content? It was an obvious choice for one main reason. If businesses have to be sustainable, they need to drive massive organic traffic (like Hubspot) rather than spending a fortune on paid marketing. With the cluttered industry and no good solutions, it’s incredibly difficult for businesses to do that. And that’s what we want to change.
That led to the birth of Scalenut.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product + the launch of the business.
As I mentioned, we feel written content is the starting point of any content piece generated for marketing, and it is a cluttered field at the moment. There are many challenges brands face when it comes to nailing content, such as getting niche experts on board, training them, scaling production, high cost of producing content, siloed communication, lack of ready insights to drive strategy and content efforts in the right direction, and so on. If you see, the industry is scattered overall.
Online businesses want to increase their digital footprint. Some ways of doing that are paid media (the ads you run), owned media (your website, blog content, social media, etc.), and earned media (social mentions, word of mouth). For businesses to grow sustainably, one has to focus on non-paid media. That’s where we wanted to focus on - helping businesses grow their media.
Marry the pain points with opportunity (technology and demand for content), and our first product, Talent Marketplace, was born in December 2020. With our Talent Marketplace, we brought brands and professional writers together to create compelling content. On one hand, we vetted and trained the writers, and on another ensured quality for the brands. At the end of the day, brands could scale content with writers who understand their niche, and writers could earn predictable and consistent income.
During the first phase (the first six months), we worked with over 100 SMBs and connected with experts worldwide to dig a little deeper. We realized that SMBs faced an array of challenges in scaling content.
They struggled at each stage of the content journey - what topics to cover, what kind of content to create, what to include in the content and creating content pieces. As competition increases, pressure builds up to drive organic traffic. Spending money on paid media and paying heavy commissions to marketplaces make business unsustainable. Hence, brands must build sustainable sources of traffic. To add to the misery, the technology tools are scattered and work in silos. Being an SMB, it’s almost impossible to scale content without spending a lot of money and time.
After 6 months of research, we started building our platform. Again, marry pain points with opportunity, and we rolled the MVP of our SaaS offerings in September 2021.
This reminds me of the 5-day workathon we held at Gaurav’s house before the launch. There was a team of some 10-13 members, all caffeine intoxicated, running on power naps, solving all possible bugs before launch, and addressing all possible queries afterward. Insane amount of energy in the room, and it all paid off.
Our MVP product could help users do SEO research, long-form writing as well as short-form writing. The goal was to test out the functionalities and what features attracted the most. At the same time, the goal was to get initial users who could help us shape up the future roadmap. We were super proud as a team since the MVP product could do much more than some of the established players couldn’t. That is also reflected in the results we got.
After receiving massive love and positive feedback, we introduced our offerings to a wider audience in January 2022. And we have grown 10x in the last 6 months. It tells us we are on the right track and motivates us to keep going.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
We prioritize our users over everything else. And that’s one thing I highly recommend to all founders and leaders. Focus disproportionately on the customer experience.
We have one of the best support functions in our space. Thanks to that, we won the G2 Summer Leader award in the overall content creation category.
Focusing on the user interface and experience early on helped us double the conversions. Today, users don’t have a lot of time. You need to tell them what your product does in the least amount of time. We have built our processes fluid enough to make room for changes as per the customer feedback, which also helps in retention.
We also do what we preach. Practice sustainable growth. We are not aggressive with marketing spending. Ads aside, we do our bit in having a social presence, community engagements, and creating content assets that bring fruits in the long run.
Today, over 80% of our traffic comes from organic and direct channels. People are helping us spread the word, and it can’t get any better than that. I feel it’s extremely important to focus on organic channels right from the start. That helps build sustainable businesses.
While it depends on the industry, some of the things that can help drive organic growth are affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, building a social presence on sites like G2 and Capterra, and referral. We also promote users signing up for longer-term plans. That helps users get actual benefits by remaining with the product and helps us build the product with them.
Lastly, as I said, customer success is extremely critical. That’s bigger than any other growth channel. Invest in it early on and one sees results.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
As I mentioned, we have grown 10x in the last 6 months and are trending at $100,000 MRR. We have a very healthy LTV to CAC ratio, helping us reinvest profits in product and growth. Most of our traffic comes organically. Over 100k users have used the platform within 6 months of the launch. It’s crazy! We aim to become a $10 Mn ARR business within the next couple of years.
We intend to build an entire content suite for businesses. The current market is fragmented and does not offer much in terms of scaling content marketing. Where our current focus has been on the Planning, Research, and Creation part of the content journey, we will be launching other new products to complete the entire content cycle. In terms of the market, as of now, we focus on dominant English-speaking nations, but we will soon be expanding to other geographies.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Yes, of course! We have learned many things on this journey.
You must have heard the saying - “It takes a village?” It does! To scale things, you need to have processes in place. People make processes. We were focused on building the product when we should have aligned our energies on building our growth function.
We could have launched 6 months earlier, however, we were too much in our own headspace. We wanted things to be perfect each time, but the wise ones know that perfection comes with time. Better late than never though, right?
What’s working for us? I’d say the team and culture. We are all customer obsessed. You solve one problem, and immediately someone asks, “What’s next?.” We take pride in the determination and energy everyone shares.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We use an array of tools across the organization. Here are some of them:
- Intercom for Customer Engagement
- Webflow for Marketing Website
- Google Analytics for User Insights
- Sentry for Monitoring Production Errors
- AWS for Cloud Services
- Slack for Communication
- Stripe for Payments
- Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects for Design & Animation
- Figma for UI/UX
- Loom and Vimeo for Video Production
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Books worth reading:
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - There is no sure-shot formula to success. Trial and error is usually the way to go. This book talks about the backward method of solidifying your ideas by forming hypotheses and experimenting to see what works and what does not.
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg - The name is self-explanatory.
A podcast you must check out:
SaaS Marketing Show - listen to this to learn practical marketing tactics and growth strategies from people who come from the field.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Do not be stuck in a thinking loop; it brings stagnancy.
Fall in love with your plans/ideas but keep a scientific enough mind to be able to change them when required. Your customer may not be seeking what you love. Your strategies may change as you grow and learn. Change can be brought when there is room for welcoming it, your mind is the first place. Pivot when necessary.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes, we are! If you are someone who can take end-to-end ownership of their work, have the drive to build things, an eye for details, and the zest to be a part of meaningful engagements, we are hiring Product Managers, Growth Experts, Developers, and more. Interested? Hit us up!
Where can we go to learn more?
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
