I acquired a SaaS for ~5 figures to solve my content problem

In 2023 I bought a SaaS called Cuppa AI. I actually found the product on twitter, run by a very talented engineer in the UK. 

I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on content for various media companies. In one consumer health company, it cost us around $200-$500 for each SEO optimized article. This adds up pretty quickly. Not forgetting the 20 hours of edits!

This isn’t just an isolated problem for a single company. It’s industry wide and affects small business + agency owners alike. I spent over a decade in media, and have seen many agency founders complain about long lead times and high costs for low output. 

This is an issue. Large swathes of would-be customers that prefer to consume content before buying are being ignored - either because it takes too long or costs too much for founders to scale this channel.  

I eventually became tired of the media content game in 2022 and looked into using SaaS to solve my previous life’s challenges. I started building, acquiring and scaling a portfolio of products that I found useful in my day to day.

But the content issue was still there. 

So I started to look for ways to reduce the time + cost content burden for my own portfolio.  

I initially discovered Cuppa using it for my own personal pains of content research, editing, publishing, and scaling. But then I saw potential. I wanted to turn it into an end to end solution for the content gap that myself and other business owners weren’t taking advantage of because of time, cost, or other priorities. 

I sent a DM. Then a few calls later, I acquired it in June 2023. 

I chose cuppa vs other competing products for a few reasons: 

• The founder gave excellent support during and post acquisition 
• It already had a large, loyal existing user base
• I’d personally used it and solved a pain with it. I saw the potential to solve many others for more people like me 
• The founder has put a ton of quality and care into it. There wasn’t a risk of picking up a patchy product, plus it already had great social distribution 
• It naturally fits my expertise from the ‘other side’. I was the original customer of it, so I knew I could evolve it with features that could create content at scale without losing the human touch 

Since then we’ve added a lot of new stuff:

• Chat with articles
• Image generation for articles
• API keys to reduce cost
• Brand / persona voice custom prompts 
• Month on month iterative content improvement 
• Full stack content team that blends AI and human editors for agencies

I’m still in full build mode with the team. I want to take it to a place where agencies and SMB owners can trust the AI + human content model enough to see this product as a no-brainer for their biz. I don’t believe in AI slop - there’s enough of that out there - I DO believe in using AI to do the grunt work, but to always have that human element a machine can’t quite mimic. 

We have a lot more to get through, but I’m very excited about it.

View of the done for you content workflow