(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Corporate spending on artificial intelligence is expected to hit $97.9 billion by 2023:
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from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
Corporate spending on artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to hit $97.9B by 2023, according to Deloitte. The AI writing assistant software market is projected to be worth more than $5B by 2028. For founders, this means new tools and new opportunities on the horizon.
The background: On March 17, 2014, an earthquake struck outside of Beverly Hills, California. The tremor wasn’t noteworthy, but the first report on the 4.7 magnitude quake sparked international headlines, as it was the first time an artificially intelligent machine had authored an article in a major publication.
AI-powered writing has come a long way since Quakebot’s first report, and there are a handful of firms vying to augment keyboard-intensive tasks for writers and developers.
AI-boosted marketing: Marketing departments are some of the key drivers behind AI-improved writing. About 63% of marketers would consider buying AI tools to generate and optimize their ad copy, according to a survey by Phrasee. Another survey found that 61% of marketers say that AI is the most significant data initiative that their companies are planning for next year.
Keeping up with the Joneses: About 80% of high-performing companies use AI in marketing and sales for pricing, predicting a customer’s likelihood to buy, and for customer service analytics, according to a McKinsey study.
Anyword: Israeli-based Anyword announced Thursday that it raised $21M to expand its AI-powered language optimization platform for publishers and marketers. Anyword offers original text suggestions, variations of existing text, keyword suggestions, and performance evaluations on a message’s potential success.
But how? The company’s predictive model has analyzed billions of data points from A/B testing messages across an array of industries, channels, audiences, and marketing objectives. Anyword says that marketers using its platform see an average increase of 30% in conversion rates.
Grammarly: AI-powered writing assistant Grammarly recently hit a $13B valuation after raising $200M. Grammarly’s tool checks grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure in real time, and offers suggestions on clarity and vocabulary. It also offers a plagiarism checker. The company has more than 30M users.
For developers: Grammarly recently launched a tool for developers with Test Editor DSK. It allows developers to embed Grammarly into any web app to offer automated live editing.
Writer: San Francisco-based Writer recently raised $21M for its AI-enabled writing tool that automates checks on style, tone of voice, and inaccuracies. The tool, used by companies including Twitter, Intuit, Pinterest, and Accenture, implements a company’s brand guidelines to ensure that writers keep with its style. It offers approved suggestions, and even helps writers maintain company policies in regards to appropriate language.
Compose.ai: Y-Combinator graduate Compose.ai raised $2.1M over the summer to boost its browser extension, an autocomplete feature for writers. It also created a tool that will learn and automate your tone of voice, offering increasingly accurate suggestions over time.
Other players: There are a host of companies in the AI writing space that specialize in various niches or tasks:
Skillroads offers automated tools for crafting and reviewing a resume and cover letter.
Textio helps recruiters to automate compelling messages for candidates.
QuillBot is a paraphrasing tool with two free modes and four premium modes.
Ginger Software is a desktop app and browser extension offering grammar checks and copy suggestions for writers of all levels.
Writesonic is an AI copywriter that uses GPT-3 autoregressive language modeling to generate ads, blogs, and landing pages.
Article Forge (the same AI used by Google) writes articles in a few minutes. Just add a keyword, optional sub-keywords, and article length.
Do you use AI to enhance your writing? Share your experience below!
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from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
📱 Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has stepped down, and CTO Parag Agrawal will take over.
💾 This MySpace clone is reviving the Y2K social media aesthetic.
🔌 Crypto mining is crippling Kazakhstan's energy supply.
🕳 San Francisco is sinking into the earth.
😇 Ethical hackers saved $27B in security risks.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley
Time is your most valuable resource.
We spend most of our lives working, in hopes of reaching financial independence in our 60s. By then, we may be financially wealthy, but time poor.
FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) is about living intentionally. Financial independence helps you focus on non-financial forms of wealth, such as time, health, and relationships.
To reach FIRE:
The "25x rule" (or 4% rule) is based on the Trinity Study. It is focused on a mix of stocks and bonds.
Examples:
Notable figures:
"This takes too long."
Time will pass whether or not you're financially independent or stressing about money. You can cut years, or decades, off of your FI journey by making more, saving more, and cutting expenses.
"I don't want to cut expenses."
You don't have to. Focus on making more, saving more, and setting an aggressive savings rate. Use FatFIRE, which focuses on making and saving more, instead of only cutting expenses. There's no wrong FI number. Your number is your number.
"This is only for people who make lots of money."
There are examples of those who reached FI with modest incomes. A high income can help. Making more is in your control. Earn more if you prefer to hold this belief.
"Money isn't everything."
There are other forms of wealth. These types of wealth are easier to optimize for once you reach financial independence.
"I don't want to retire."
Most who reach FI (financial independence) don't RE (retire early). They have optionality. They can take breaks. Or quit. They can do what they want to do, not what they have to do.
Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.
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from the Marketing Examples newsletter by Harry Dry
Don't imitate. Let your personality and character shine through, and speak the way you actually speak.
Go here for more short, sweet, practical marketing tips.
Subscribe to Marketing Examples for more.
Hey indie hackers! I'm David Miranda. I've worked at a bunch of startups (~2 years each) and observed firsthand that each one made the same mistake: They refused to launch. The source is simple. They had a deep, visceral fear of rejection.
Half of the startups I worked at didn't make it. Here's the exhausting cycle:
If you go through this process two or three times, and you still have zero real users, it can be incredibly demoralizing.
I think the secret is to find some way to do it 20-30 times in quick succession. If that means you have to call up random people and launch to them, do that. Or if it means you have to build an app within a company, for only that company, do that!
Any situation that can help you iterate quickly (i.e. launch, improve, and launch again) is what's going to lead to ultimate success.
AMA!
When you're small, just keep a tally of votes on each piece of feedback and work on the thing with the most votes. This will lead to more customer engagement, great testimonials, and referrals, and this will help you grow.
When you're at a medium-sized company, talk to your sales team or customer service team. Figure out what the sales team is telling people before they sign, and make sure that's what they experience after they sign up. Do everything you can to empower your support team (provide workarounds, admin tools, workflow automation, etc.) with anything that helps them scale to serving the most customers per rep. Then, build their automations and workarounds into the product as they become the standard.
When you're starting to get bigger and scaling up, there will be so much feedback coming at you that it'll be impossible to categorize and prioritize it fast enough. Everything will seem like an emergency. A really good product manager will be able to handle it though: They'll put most things in the backlog (documenting them, but not prioritizing them), lean heavily on customer support to find workarounds for customers, and will make sure your company continues to innovate by focusing on high-level, strategic projects (and not just one-off bug fixes).
If you have a high-value customer that won't sign until you build a feature, write that feature into their contract and get them to sign before you build it. On the flipside, if there's a segment of the market that doesn't pay your company that much, but makes a lot of requests, ask them if they'd upgrade to a more expensive plan in order to get that feature. If a large segment of this market agrees, build an MVP of that feature and get them to upgrade.
Think about how you browse the internet. Most people visit one site after another, and only post comments or send chat requests when something goes wrong, or they disagree.
What would it take for you to care about something new with all that you have on your plate already? Understand that other people are no different; their default mode is just browsing, then later discarding anything that doesn't fit their expectations.
The key is to either break through people's malaise or seek out those who are open to caring about something new. And both of those are hard to do.
If the solution you made doesn't fulfill the need, learn and iterate. If it satisfies 90% of your customers 90% of the time, move on to the next project!
I've learned that startup employees get burned out because there's a lack of connection to the work they're doing. The way to ensure a strong connection to your work is to just launch! It doesn't have to be anything big. It can be a blog post, a Twitter thread, a landing page, whatever! But you need to take the first step and put yourself out there.
It's basic:
The only way to learn and overcome your fear of rejection (and connect with your audience) is to launch and fail again and again until you realize it's not such a big deal!
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, Dru Riley, Harry Dry, and David Miranda for contributing posts. —Channing
Hmm, a very interesting article. I like the FIRE program. It will be very good if people can retire earlier. They'll have enough time to live for themselves and enjoy the moment. For example, my mother's friend did just that; she retired when she was 55 years old. But before that, she invested part of her savings in a business and signed a contract with an agency, Home Care Assistance for you, that helps care for the elderly. I think this is a very wise decision. I would also like to do the same and start living for myself at 55.