CaaS: The Dirty Little Secret

Copywriting as a Service and why nobody wants to talk about it.

TLDR; Bootstrapped copywriting platform its users won’t admit to using.

Why?

If you’re an individual on the web, revealing you don’t write your own content is a bit creepy.

But if you’re an online marketing agency making 250% profit on outsourcing content production. You don’t. Tell. Anyone.

2009

I received a frantic phone call from my now business partner. We’d had the idea for the product a few weeks earlier, but were struggling with a brand name.

I’ve got it! You know “Spotify”? Well how about “Copify”?

Uh, okay.

We wanted to offer a platform where you can access a large pool of quality copywriters, and only copywriters, at scale.

Back then, we both worked in the SEO game and we were increasingly looking to outsource writing work on behalf of our clients, fuelled by the hysteria of duplicate content and what became “Google Panda”.

There was our itch.

At the time, I’d been learning to code so I was eager to cut my teeth on anything. So I spent the next 4 months of my free time writing some of the worst PHP of my life and a billion lines of buggy Javascript.

In February 2010 we finally scratched the itch and launched our first version of the platform. Shortly after, we quit our jobs. And we got lucky.

We received a lot of attention from angry copywriters who saw us an evil puppy-eating monster on a mission to ruin their livelihoods. They were probably right.

In fact, we got so much negative attention that while people were shouting and throwing mud — potential customers who had heard the screams — came to look for themselves.

The old cliché of “no such thing as bad press” really was true. The bleak publicity was actually fuelling our user base of both clients and writers.

We would have never gotten off the ground without this furious backlash.

Skip forward 5 years

I’m still finding bugs in the code base, and people are still angry.

But in a forbidden place, near the red light district of the internet, our product is doing great business. In secret.

Last year, operating in three English speaking countries, we generated $571,000 of revenues, and made our second full time hire.

But in all this time, we’ve only managed to agree a hand full of client testimonials. Nobody seems willing and everyone says they’ll “have a think about it and let us know”.

But you’re just another crowd-sourcing website?

Nope.

We’re very different to the likes of Guru and People Per Hour where any idiot can be a “freelancer”. We actually interview each worker and set a timed written test that many don’t even finish.

The process is painfully laborious. For every 10 applicants we only approve 1 writer. It’s very wasteful. But the product itself would never have succeeded without this rigorous quality control process.

It’s taken us nearly five years to build a network of only 1000 professional writers.

But our relatively small pool of talented writers attracts many companies looking to outsource “high end” content production. Not only that, many of our angry adversaries are now members with access to the endless stream of articles, blog posts, web pages and product descriptions up for grabs each day.

Many can make a full time living.

Er, can you sign this N.D.A?

The hardest thing yet in the 5 years has been accepting our customers wish to remain anonymous.

Imagine having a great product that your customers won’t admit to using. Or even worse, having big name clients you can’t mention during a sales pitch.

It’s impossible to quantify but I’d kill to know what our client base would look like now if we’d had “word of mouth”.

Or maybe the nudge, nudge, wink, wink factor is equally as powerful.

You’ll never guess how much I paid for this article! LOL

But even so, there’s still a large audience we’ll never win over.

The thought of content being a commodity just doesn’t sit well with some people. We recently launched a subscription blogging service and after sending out a small press release one reply simply said;

“I hate this shit” — TC

So there you have it.

The dirty online service everyone needs but no one is willing to talk about.

You’ll find our telephone number on the bathroom wall of your local gas station.