Development of FridayGPT: An AI Copilot for Mac

If necessity is the mother of invention then laziness is the mother of innovation. Think about it. The most useful inventions of the world are those that were brought about by the innate human trait of laziness. A toaster? Laziness to use a pan every morning. Alarms in clocks? Laziness to raise a rooster in your neighborhood. Just to be clear, this laziness does not mean lack of activity or inertia against action. It is the concept of not wanting to do something that has a poor input to output ratio - something that consumes a lot of time but the value addition it provides is quite less as compared to the effort put into utilizing it. One might use terms like ‘ease’ and ‘hassle-free’ to mask this definition of lazy, but at the core of it, it is what is. These were things that we didn’t need per se, but their existence makes life more relaxing. This axiom is applicable to modern innovations as well and will be applicable to future innovations too. The entire field of AI is an epitome of this effect, for example. It was this very aspect of being that led Sam, the founder and CEO of Writesonic, to start his journey in the world of AI and SaaS. But what was the key that led him to bootstrap his AI SaaS to a multi-million dollar ARR? How does one raise a funding of more than 2.6 million dollars but not use any of it because the foray has been profitable since its inception? Read on to figure out this and more.

Sam had always been an active thought person. During his college days, he always had something or the other running parallel to the coursework. Skill development while also creating a useful tool is a win-win situation and that had always been what Sam wanted to do. One fine day in 2019, while he was scrolling through the fascinating world of the internet, he realized that there is too much to read and a lot of articles and posts use clickbaits that turn out to be red herrings. One does not know if reading this particular long winded piece about SEO will lead to value addition or not. Specifically, will it serve your purpose or not? How about a tool that can summarize the body of information so that you can figure out the answer to this exact question within a glance? This is the exact thought process that led Sam into creating tldrthis.com. Grappling with NLP, figuring out how to handle various document formats, creating a user friendly interface, etc were some of the key challenges that needed to be overcome. This is why Sam likes to call the development of TLDR as “a crash course in AI application development”. The service is still active, not updated in years, and yet it keeps on generating revenue on autopilot. This served as an inspiring stepping stone for Sam to go further and develop products that the world needs - products that will satisfy human’s evolutionary desire to laze around.

If an opportunity seems to present itself, you should actively vie to grab it. This is a tenet that helped Sam a lot when OpenAI announced GPT-3. He emailed Greg Brockman, the then CTO of OpenAI, which was at best a shot in the dark. But, he replied! Sam became one of the first 100 people to become a beta user of GPT-3. Sam’s very first tool utilizing this was “Magic Email”, which was a Chrome extension to help create new emails from scratch, summarize long email threads and suggest responses. It tanked. This failure taught Sam an important lesson - cool technology alone isn't enough. You need to solve a real, pressing problem that users are willing to pay for.

This realization led Sam to hold back on a lot of ideas that he had, but might not be profitable or marketable in the long run. A spellbinding landing page is a key necessity and the biggest hurdle for Sam. So why not convert a problem into an opportunity? This led to the creation of an initial version of Writesonic. Sam trained GPT-3 for weeks on end over the best landing pages he could find and lo, Writesonic was born, with a simple pay-as-you-go model. The first major marketing feedback led to Sam’s first pivot. Instead of just landing pages, what if Writesonic could be used for all sorts of AI copywriting? Social media posts, blog articles, product descriptions, short bios, advertisements, blast message templates, anything under the sun. The switch to a subscription model to provide more value and predictability for users was another key step in this journey. With this revamp, $10k in MRR was achieved within two months. A much required validation that this is a problem people are willing to pay for.

The next milestone turned out to be life-changing, literally, for Sam. March 2021, the Y Combinator buzz was afoot. Sam decided, at the last possible day, to fill in the form (most of it using GPT-3 hehe). The acceptance into the summer 2021 batch meant that Sam would have to leave his Deloitte job in London and move back to India to go all-in into Writesonic. A leap of faith. The YC experience included being surrounded by brilliant founders, access to incredible mentors and a push to grow faster than Sam ever thought possible, all of which led to raising a $2.6 million seed post-YC. The best part? They never touched that money.

On your toes. You need to be on your toes if you are working in an industry that moves fast. If you go under the wave, you’re done with. You need to grab a surfboard and do your best to ride the wave successfully. The onset of Stable Diffusion and DALL·E 3 meant the need to integrate and utilize them as soon as possible. This led to the creation of Photosonic - a dedicated AI image generation tool, which was later folded back into Writesonic as a feature. But the epitome of being on your toes was when Sam’s team launched Chatsonic within 10 days of the launch of ChatGPT - a service that loomed as a big threat to them. Chatsonic had real time information, multimodal capabilities, file processing and personalisation features, something that ChatGPT lacked and something that people were willing to pay for. At its peak, Chatsonic was serving over 3 million users per month, helping catapult their total registered user base to over 10 million across all their products.

Their Chatsonic growth strategy was multifaceted for maximum impact:

Influencer partnerships - collaboration with AI tool social media influencers for credible publicity.

SEO - The word “ChatGPT alternatives” was aggressively targeted through organic as well as paid ads.

Content marketing - Creation of in-depth comparisons, use-case articles and tutorials to showcase Chatsonic’s features vis-a-vis ChatGPT.

Public Relations - Reaching out to tech publications, giving interviews, appearing on TV shows.

Product-led growth - The focus on creating a superior user experience which never fails to encourage word of mouth growth.

Freemium model - The standard technique of a free tier that allows users to try and test Chatsonic’s power, leading them to pay for the premium features.

These efforts led to fruition as their revenue multiplied significantly within a financial quarter. They had finally tapped into the multi-million dollar ARR territory.

The key to continue growing is to never let a lull take over. Challenges always exist and need to be tackled to provide users and subscribers a satisfying experience. Botsonic was Sam’s next foray - a tool that provides customized AI solutions to businesses. It allowed companies to create and deploy customized chatbots akin to ChatGPT, but trained on the specific data and knowledge base provided by the companies. Multi-model approach to alleviate reliance on a single AI provider, instant resolution of 70% of user inquiries, addition of dynamic AI agents to make intelligent decisions and automate complex tasks, seamless live agent handoffs are some of the features that are key to Botsonic.

Growth strategy for a new tool when you already have a successful tool in the same domain centers on leveraging the users of the previous tool, Chatsonic in this case. The previous users are already familiar with the domain, AI chatbots in this case, and hence are prime candidates for a more customized solution. Targeted advertising and SEO optimization are some more strategies being adopted by the team to bolster growth. Botsonic is still in its growth phase, but quickly becoming a significant revenue generator. A continuous refinement of marketing strategies and identifying the most promising target industries is the current area of focus for Sam’s team.

Keep identifying profitable problem areas. “LinkedIn is the new Facebook” has been a saying since quite some time now. People do not know what and how to post on a platform meant for professional connections. Inconsistency in posting and not covering trending topics are key problems that users like small firms and home businesses, for example, face during their social media engagement strategies. This leads to failure of effective engagement with the target groups and might even lead their content to skip the right audience altogether. The latest foray for Sam is Socialsonic, which is an AI powered tool designed to help professionals and businesses maximize their LinkedIn presence. The tool, while providing help for the aforementioned problems, also helps to track LinkedIn performance of the said posts. It has only been 3 months since Socialsonic’s launch. Being in an early stage, the growth strategies for it focus on collaborating with LinkedIn power users for publicity, leveraging organic content to target professionals and businesses looking for such tools while also creating and distributing resource material like guides, case studies and video tutorials. And of course, a lesson that has been highlighted previously as well - utilizing the user base of a previous service in the same domain. Socialsonic is hence being offered as a value-add to existing Writesonic customers.

Phew! That sounds like a journey I would love to embark on. Sam’s experience teaches a lot of useful strategies and helps streamline philosophies to keep at the core of the services you seek to provide.

For all of you who have skipped to the end of this article for a quick summary, you will not be disappointed. The journey of Sam is a goldmine for newbies and pros alike and here are 10 key lessons that stand out - in Sam’s words infused with mine.

Always be shipping - Never stop expanding and innovating to stay relevant at all times.

Listen to the users - You need to recognise problems that people need solving and provide an experience in the said domain that people would be willing to pay for.

Ride the waves - Never let the wave ride over you, be the surfer that stays ahead of every new technological wave.

Content is king - Words to live by in any domain. The longevity of your work will only be ensured by quality content, not by the short term marketing tactics.

Bootstrap with a safety net - Sam raised money but ran the company as if they were bootstrapped. An interesting strategy indeed.

Don’t be afraid to pivot - The product line should be constantly evolved based on the needs of the market and your user base.

Use your own product - This dogfooding approach leads to refinement of your tools without having to wait for public review.

Build a strong team - Hiring the right people and fostering a culture of innovation is a crucial stepping stone to success, according to Sam.

Stay curious - Keep figuring out new avenues that might help your user base in ways no one else has yet thought of - pioneer.

Focus on profitability - Keep in mind that your product needs to be profitable as well so that you can make long-term decisions without the constant pressure of fundraising.

With these effective tips in mind, dream on. As Buzz Lightyear would say - to infinity and beyond!

Before the advent of streaming services, listening to music used to involve a lot more steps than it does today. You had to mount a CD, a cassette or a vinyl, depending on how far back you want to think. Shifting from Beatles to AC/DC or from Cher to Britney meant ejecting a storage device, mounting another, then waiting for it to load and sync before trying to move to the specific track you wanted to listen to via trial and error. In today’s world, you can open your favorite streaming app, type out a song and voila! It plays. Some services have lyrics synced to the respective timestamps, which makes seeking to your favorite part a mere click away. Now imagine a similar ease, but with AI models. Imagine being able to access, for example, ChatGPT without having to switch tabs or summarizing a paragraph with the click of a button rather than a cumbersome “summarize in 3 lines” command each time. FridayGPT is an AI Copilot that vies to easily imbibe this exact scheme in your Mac. It packs a bunch of features to achieve the aforementioned and much more.

First things first, I personally abhor the need to constantly change screens or tabs while trying to use ChatGPT. The process of constructing a good presentation requires multiple screens open at a time and multiple tabs within those screens. Having to change a tab or screen, erroneously getting the wrong one open, then changing to the right one is something that happens more often than we would like to openly admit. This constant changing also derails the train of thought, or at the very least creates an obstruction which I then need to overcome. Meanwhile, FridayGPT allows me to pop open a small ChatGPT window on top of any screen or tab with a simple keyboard shortcut, much like how the framework of ‘inspect element’ works.

Great. Hassle-free tab changing. What next? Backspacing while writing is another common time and productivity sink. The fingers fly over the keyboard while the brain parses thoughts at lightning speeds. A few letters get elided by a few, while elision of letters is statistically more common. FridayGPT offers that you keep on writing as much as you want without breaking your flow as it takes care of the typos that might happen along the way. It also checks the grammar and corrects it, allowing your brain to completely focus on the words rather than the syntax.

Moreover, the dictation feature of FridayGPT uses OpenAI whisper API, Local whisper, Deepgram and Groq, boasting a speed of 5 times faster than MacOS dictation. One can also orate a sentence containing segments in various languages and FridayGPT can write a comprehensive, grammatically correct sentence in English by automatically translating all the different segments in the blink of an eye. Spellbinding, isn’t it? (Literally as well)

Back to our original analogy to music streaming, one of the key features of FridayGPT is the integration of various AI models in its platform. These options include providers like Open AI, Anthropic, Groq, Together AI and Ollama. You can type in a prompt and choose which tool to use from a drop down menu before pressing enter. This is exactly akin to replacing the need to insert a different CD each time with being able to play any song on a single platform. Usage of local LLMs like Ollama API is supported for offline use, just like streaming apps. This means that FridayGPT also covers creating a report while being stuck on a plane without wifi.

But one feature that takes the cake is the ability to generate shortcuts for some prompts, called AI Actions. The ability to add a song to your favorites on your streaming service so that you can easily access them by just a tap is the exact analogy here. You can input a prompt in your preferred model and create an ‘action’ out of it that will assign a shortcut key to this particular prompt. This means that instead of having to input ‘summarize’, you can simply create an action out of it and use your assigned keyboard shortcut anywhere inside FridayGPT to use the action.

All in all, FridayGPT provides a unified user-friendly interface to use different AI models and providers, create AI Actions and assign shortcuts to them, overlay a small GPT screen over any screen, check grammar on the fly and accurate multilingual transcription capabilities faster than MacOS. The synapses of my brain already feel soothed on thinking of the effort they will be saving in processing things as frivolous as these. Moreover, all these features are available through a 1-time payment. The developer is friendly and responsive as well. You can start using FridayGPT without any ado at https://www.fridaygpt.app. Give it a whirl next time you feel pestered by the never-ending banality of screen changing.