How do companies build their brands as they try to scale? The choice is between paying for exposure or developing your own content to attract and retain potential customers. The second option is preferred by many, especially as the cost of paid media continues to rise, but content development can be time-consuming and requires specialist skills. Enter shell nutannouncing a $3.1 million round of funding today that thinks it has the answer.
Scalenut is an artificial intelligence-powered platform that aims to automate large parts of the content creation process for companies pursuing growth through this path. “We want to help businesses use content to scale sustainably,” said Mayank Jain, who co-founded the company in 2021 with Gaurav Goyal and Saurabh Wadhawan, and launched its first products earlier this year.
Scalenut’s platform allows content creators to build a structure for a piece of content on a given topic, based on the keywords they want to use, the existence of content on the same topic published by others and how it performed, and taking advantage of publicly available information on the subject. Once that structure is in place, Scalenut’s AI technology will develop a concept of the content, which the creator can edit and refine before publishing.
The idea is to automate much of the heavy lifting of content creation. The platform does the research that the creator would normally spend a lot of time on, identifies the type of content that performs well in a particular area, and generates a first draft of the final work.
“Basically, we’re giving creators more time to spend on the creative aspects of content generation,” says Jain. “We don’t take that away from them; we try to free up time that they would otherwise have to spend on the more mundane elements of the job, from conducting research to building keyword lists.”
User feedback suggests they save about a third of the time they spent on each project, says Jain. That means they can create content faster – and create more content – giving businesses a means to quickly build larger audiences. “It’s a much more efficient way to pursue content as a way to scale your business and expand your customer base,” says Jain.
So far, Scalenut has focused its platform mainly on freelance content creators and the writers employed by agencies specializing in content creation. Over time, however, it expects its target customer base to expand to medium and large enterprises where content creation is done in-house.
The platform is particularly good at creating relatively formulaic content – listings, product guides, product comparisons and reviews – but this is the kind of content that brands need to produce in bulk. Reducing the cost and time required to create such content is therefore vital.
A one-stop-shop for content creation is invaluable in this regard, says Jain. “SEO and content marketing teams juggle multiple tools for thorough SEO research, content creation, optimization, and performance measurement,” he emphasizes. “Not only is it inefficient, but it also leads to siled team efforts based on broken insights and incomplete strategy – this is why most companies struggle to scale content marketing successfully.”
The challenge is all the greater given the number of companies publishing competing content, Scalenut said. The pandemic has seen companies around the world ramp up their digital operations – whether they were offline or online before the crisis – creating a crowded market where everyone is struggling to make themselves heard.
Scalenut founders Gaurav Goyal, Saurabh Wadhawan and Mayank Jain
Scalenut’s customer base is growing rapidly. The product operates on a software-as-a-service basis, with users paying in three price tiers from $29 to $149 per month, depending on how much functionality they need and the volume of content they want to create. Since the launch of the first paid product in January, revenues have increased by 50% monthly, says Jain.
Today’s fundraising should help accelerate the company, with the money earmarked for building out Scalenut’s technology stack and for product development. The platform currently only works in English, but other languages are on the agenda.
The funding round is led by a funding round led by Saama Capital and Amit Singhal, a former senior vice president at Google who served as head of Google Search. It builds on a $400,000 starting round led by Titan Capital, First Principles VC, AngelList, Abhishek Goyal and a number of other leading angel investors.
“As content consumption increases globally, content is a key driver of business growth,” said Ash Lilani, managing partner at Saama Capital. “A common problem businesses face to power their organic marketing is meaningful content scaling – there’s no easy way to scale content, and Scalenut solves just that with its robust AI platform.”
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