Features vs. Marketing

As a startup, I should be focusing 80-90% of my efforts in marketing, and only 10-20% in development.

That would be the right thing to do.

I went ahead and did the wrong thing.

I made Wraith Scribe, which is a platform that lets you use AI to write and edit blog posts.

Updates I Am Making

I’m improving this old editor which leverages ToastUI:

To a custom-built editor:

The new editor:

• Incorporates Grammarly, where ToastUI can’t.
• Has buttons on the side, so you can easily use them even if your article is super long.
• Is medium-like in that it is endless scrolling.
• Has live markdown conversion for lists and headings (i.e. you can type ## blah and it’ll make an H2 for you), so you don’t have to reach for buttons every time.

Why Not Just Do Marketing? You Have No Customers!

My churn’s about 40-50%+ for my customers in the past 6 months. I’ve only had maybe 20-ish customers in total so the sample size is small.

Additionally, ChatGPT just came out, so the churn has increased as people can just use that as an alternative (and for free, temporarily).

With this lull and these terrible numbers (even if sample size is small), I want to improve the product for a few reasons:

1. My own use. I am currently writing for a content mill (more on this experiment later), where I would have to jump back/forth to Grammarly to fix spelling/grammar issues. Adding headings is also a pain since I have to scroll up to the top to do so. Also, there’s not really a ctrl+K hotkey to add links easily.
   1. Improving product = higher $/hr for myself because less time spent writing a $100 article means the more money I earn. Right now, it take 15-30 minutes to write a $100 article with AI. But my hope is with these improvements, I can shave 10 minutes off it.
      1. Further, future improvements (adding internal/external links with AI) would shave even more time off this process, further increasing my own $/hr when I write for clients.
2. The long game. I already have some bad churn. It’s writing on the wall, or fake data. If it’s writing on the wall, then I need to improve the product anyway in order to differentiate myself from garbage AI products like Jasper or Copy.ai. If it’s fake data, I still earn an upside from point #1 above.
3. Down season. I’m sick recently so I couldn’t really make TikToks / YouTube shorts to begin with. I’m coughing my lungs out. Might as well code. Additionally, during holiday season people aren’t really inclined to sign up for a SMB SaaS. I feel I get more out of marketing out of down season, so I might as well use that time to improve the product.
4. The long game, part 2: I intend to add many more features to this tool, including enhancing the current SEO engine, AI engine, and ability to do research / fact check / evade AI detectors, all in the editor. In order to do this, I need my own editor. Using TinyMCE or some other editor is possible, but it’ll be very hacky after a certain point. Having a custom-built editor with my own format means it is easier to ‘maintain’ in the sense of adding new features.
   1. But it is hard AF to build a custom, rich-text editor though, I will admit.
   2. I also plan to use this tool in the long-run, writing for content mills and creating lots of blogs with this. Thus, any feature I add are features that’ll increase my output while decreasing my effort, in a compounded fashion.

In Conclusion

Yes, I should be doing marketing. But a 3-4 week aside improving the product isn’t the worst thing in the world.