How Jasper grew to $80M ARR by lowering the AI learning curve

Lowering the learning curve

When you’re building a new product, particularly with new tech. There’s always the same problem. The learning curve for users.

Your aim is to make this as low as possible. Because the longer it takes for a user to learn how to use your product. The more likely they’ll give up and churn.

This was even more complex for Jasper who were working with completely new tech for most people: Generative AI.

Powerful results. But overwhelming for most.

Jasper were super intentional about lowering, and in some cases removing the need for learning how to harness the magic of AI. Giving you the best results without the need to go underneath the hood.

Jasper is a masterclass in making complexity, approachable.

🔬 How this looks practically:

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

🎭 1. Make it familiar

I have a question for you.

Do you understand how generative AI works?

Like do you really understand? Or did you just add thanking Sam Altman to your morning ritual? Because same.

And I would take a guess that the type of person reading this (yes you) is significantly more tech savvy than the average person. So if you don’t understand the nuts and bolts of Sam Altman and Elon Musk’s love child going through a custody battle, I can’t imagine many do.

Many people still feel extremely overwhelmed using a tool like ChatGPT. And anything less mainstream? Not happening.

(I have a theory that the older someone is, the more likely they are to use Co-pilot. Let me know if I’m missing out though)

Take prompting (telling the AI what to do and how). You consider it simple. You might even be a wizard at it.

But your 65-year old mother doesn’t even let GPT know “it’s an expert at the task” before asking her question.

But what does all this mean for Jasper?

Well, Jasper understood this feeling and built to remove it.

They took away all the AI fluff on their interface and just gave you something simple.

And importantly, something familiar. Something that looked more like what marketers were used to.

A UI they felt comfotable with.

And the result? Jasper felt approachable - they had removed the feeling of being overwhelmed by AI for many.

All the value. All the wow of AI. With none of the headache.

Pure AI bliss.

Plus for the majority of people, their results were better with Jasper. Because not only has Jasper fine-tuned it’s underlying AI models (something we spoke about in-depth last week if you missed it), but it’s just a much better at telling the AI what to do than most people.

And consider that Jasper first launched three years ago, before ChatGPT even existed and it amplifies everything we just spoke about.

Easy to use. Better results. Home run Jasper.

🫂 2. Community-led

Your customer is the most important person on your team.

At the end of the day, you are building for them. And the best way to do that is to constantly engage them.

Gaining deeper insights into their:

• Thoughts

• Feelings

• Workflows

• Problems

• Processes

It’s hard to deeply grasp these things if you don’t immerse yourself into your customers and their sub-cultures.

The companies that win are the ones who are closest to their customers.

So Jasper wanted to talk with their customers directly and often. So they built a community for daily interactions with (and between) their users.

The community became an instant hit. It felt like talking to your friends - there were inside jokes flying around, sub-communities forming, and importantly conversations about Jasper:

• How it helps make their lives better

• What they want to see

Often this conversation didn’t even involve the Jasper team. Community members were helping each other out.

When done right, like Jasper did, community has the power to be a moat.

And because of it, Jasper were building:

• Strong trust in them

• Deep empathy of its users

• FOMO about leaving the community

• Voice alignment (you know how your users talk)

• Positioning that moved the needle

• Product direction (you have direct access to users)

Jasper had brought its community along with them for the growth journey.

I’ve seen this community play run a few times. It’s hard to get right. You need to be super active and you need to hustle to get it off the ground.

At the beginning you have to stimulate a lot of the conversation and be the one responding.

But once you get it right, it’s absolutely killer.

🎬 3. Remove the blank canvas

If you caught last episode, we spoke about how Jasper rushed to the lead by focusing on scaling quickly. And it worked. Marketers were flocking to Jasper.

They now had to keep them here.

Any of you who write content know the hardest part is the beginning.

What to say. How to structure it. What format to use.

Endless options but a blank page in front of you.

Jasper didn’t want its users to suffer like so many have. So they started creating templates to give every new user a starting point. Whether this be a facebook ad copy, a blog post, or a product description.

Jasper wanted to make sure you got straight to the value.

Which brings me to me next point on this. The quicker you can deliver value to your users, the more likely they are to activate and the more likely you will retain them.

What does this mean practically:

The sooner and as frictionless as possible that you can give users this aha moment, the more like they are to become active users who end up paying and staying.

(If you’re interest in diving deeper on reducing the time to value as a growth lever, I go more into it in one of the earlier editions on Loom.)

And that’s it for the Jasper deep dive folks. As always it’s been a pleasure - looking forward to chatting next week. Same place. Same time (although I’ve been experimenting with this a bit if you’ve noticed) for a brand new series of The Zero to One.

It’s been your host,

Sheldon

My picks to take your business to the moon 📽️

• Why you don’t need to innovate to win (link)

• A more in-depth Jasper deep-dive from my fellow South African Jaryd (link)

• Usedul AI prompting strategies (link)

Tools of the week 🔨

• Hyperbound: AI Sales Role-Play & Upskilling Platform.

• SwellAi: Repurpose Audio or Video Content for Every Marketing Channel.

• Replit: Build software faster.