Building An Accurate AI Content Detector With Over 2.2M Site Sessions
My name is Jonathan Gillham and I am from Collingwood Ontario. I started Originality.AI in November of 2022, which is the most accurate AI-generated content detector in the world.
We outperform the alternative detection tools on the latest and most challenging NLP models (ChatGPT, GPT-4). We are also the only tool on the market that can accurately detect Paraphrased content (using paraphrasing tools like Quillbot)
Our main feature is the AI content detector, but we also have great plagiarism and readability features too. We are a premium paid tool for professionals who publish content at scale. We are primarily used by writers, publishers, and content agencies.
We have been growing very quickly and are excited to share our story with you!
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I went to school for engineering and worked at an oil refinery for several years in Sarnia, Ontario.
I dabbled with online side hustles a lot! At that time, I was especially interested in Amazon Affiliate sites and had a large portfolio of sites that I worked on for passive income.
I blogged about my experience with different strategies, especially with relation to content creation to rank on Google as well as backlinking strategies. Doing so, I created a small following for myself. I called this blog Website Income.
In 2016, with a young family (2 young kids and one on the way), my wife and I decided to move back home (to Collingwood), so we could be closer to family, mountain biking, and skiing. I quit my engineering job and decided to take my entrepreneurial journey to the next level and made my side hustle my full-time gig.
I couldn’t see myself working in the oil refinery for my entire life and wanted to move back for a better lifestyle for me and my family. We are a big ski family and love the outdoors and we wanted to raise our family in an area that was more conducive to those things.
Amongst other ongoing projects, I launched a content service in the fall of 2016. I initially only launched it to my list of blog followers and it quickly took off. I called it Content Refined.
It mainly focused on content creation for other Amazon Affiliate site owners with the unique use of off-the-shelf content marketing tools within the editorial process. It maintained its steady growth for 6 years until I was able to make a 7 figure exit in 2022.
Having been at the forefront of a marketing agency, my original idea was to create a Plagiarism Detector that didn’t have the same challenges that I had experienced using the most common alternative (Copyscape).
Having been one of the longest and most loyal Copyscape customers for many, MANY years, there were so many things that needed to be addressed to enhance the user experience for agency use- such as having team management options, scan history options, credit top-up automation, etc.
As we started to build the plagiarism tool, the noise of the emergence of AI kept increasing, and it got so loud that we decided that we needed to shift our primary focus and started playing around with GPT-3 generated content detection (this was before ChatGPT had launched).
We hired an incredible team and figured out how to detect it pretty accurately. This gave us a headstart out of the gates when ChatGPT launched, which unleashed chaos in the content marketing world that nobody would have predicted. It has been full-throttle madness since then.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
As I mentioned earlier, the original prototype was to build a better plagiarism tool because I hated my agency's experience with Copyscape. We wanted to build an improved plagiarism detection system that had some basic functionality that was more conducive to team use.
We started investigating the ability to build a system that could accurately detect GPT3-powered tools such as Jasper.AI. Keep in mind that ChatGPT hadn’t even been launched yet, so we didn’t quite understand the havoc that it would wreak in the coming months.
Having a clever marketing plan is great, but when you have a hot trend that is going viral, you need to do everything all at once to get out of the gate ahead of your competition.
We hired a research and engineering team to see if they could build a detector that could consistently identify AI-written content VS original.
We understood that plagiarism checking wasn’t going to be enough anymore. In 2023, original content doesn’t simply mean that it wasn’t copied from another location or source and that we were going to be dealing with a much more complex problem.
This is what our prototype looked like:
The first decision we made was who we were not launching to, which was academia. We knew that there were already tools that were focused on academia and this was a world that we had no competitive advantage in.
We also knew that our tool was still not perfect and that false positives were still a problem ( and likely always will be). The devastation and life-altering consequences that a false positive can have in an academic setting are very different from the consequences it can have in other settings and it was something we just didn’t want to be part of.
We built our AI content detector which is itself an AI using supervised learning and feeding over time millions of records of both human and AI generated content.
Imagine someone sitting in a giant warehouse of content and for decades it is provided a human written article and then an AI written article identifying and understanding the subtle patterns that differentiate the two. That is essentially what our AI does.
Along the way we have had a lot of failures where models we have built and trained turned out to perform worse than previous models and needed to be killed. The iterative process of improvement being non-linear can be very frustrating but also surprisingly exciting.
The big competitive advantage we had was our affiliates within the digital marketing world that we could leverage within our industry to quickly make our target audience aware of our AI detector's capabilities. This allowed us to get in front of our first customers immediately.
Our original website was pretty low budget as they typically are at first. Sometimes you just need to get it out there and refine it later.
Financially, this project was self-funded.
The biggest lessons I learned from the launch of this company were the following:
Having a clever marketing plan is great, but when you have a hot trend that is going viral, you need to do everything all at once to get out of the gate ahead of your competition. And we did everything! Affiliate marketing, content marketing, backlink building, press releases, paid advertising, you name it we did it all at once.
Big brains matter a lot more than prestigious degrees! The disproportionate benefit/ reward from being the best pays off! Our accuracy rate speaks for itself. Talent can come from anywhere in the world and you don’t need to be a Standford Ph.D. graduate to be the best, you just need to have a big, creative brain.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Retaining customers is made easier when you have the best and most accurate tool available. The steps that we’ve taken to grow have been helped by some of the following.
1) Case studies: We spend a lot of time proving that we are the best and most accurate tool by doing case studies. Some are done internally and some are done independently by users of our tool.
a. Every time we roll out another main feature, we have a case study to support why we need that feature with data to back up why we developed things in a certain way. Some examples are these:
2) Social Media and Social Listening: AI is obviously a hot trend right now and there is a lot of online buzz about it. Our tool, being heavily used by content marketers across the world, is gaining a lot of attention. With a lot of attention comes a lot of mentions and engagement online, and that needs to be mitigated.
a. We have set up a Facebook Group that we encourage users to join so we can try and be part of the conversation as much as possible. b. We have also set up Google Alerts so that we get notified if anyone mentions us or a related topic on Google. This gives us the opportunity to respond and be part of conversations. It also allows us to understand the frustrations with our tool as well as the features that people like!
3) Facebook Ads and Google Ads: We spend quite a bit of our budget on Ad spend! We have hired a great team that manages our paid advertising campaigns for us. It’s an important part of this business and we wanted to make sure that we had the best Ad management talent available to us.
4) Content Marketing: Content Marketing has always been a competitive advantage for us given our history of owning and operating a content marketing agency! We have extensive experience and knowledge about creating content that ranks well on search engines. For this project, we created a topical marketing campaign for content clusters that we cared about ranking for. These were topics like AI, AI Writing, Plagiarism, Readability, etc.
5) Affiliate partnership: As mentioned before, we have an affiliate network of content marketers who will promote high-quality offerings. This has been essential for us as it has allowed us to expand our reach hugely while tying in our affiliates to our success from a commission standpoint.
6) Email Marketing: As our contact list continues to grow, creating thoughtful, useful, and engaging email marketing campaigns is incredibly important for us. We use email marketing to inform our users about new features, educate our users on how to properly use the tool to get the most out of it, nurture our leads, win back churned customers, and offer promotions.
If you can provide VALUE with your marketing and product, it will only do good things for your business and you will feel good about the business you’re building.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
1) We started off on Wordpress for our website but have recently made the switch to Webflow for an improved user experience! This was important since we are a premium SAAS tool to provide a good user experience in front of the gate as well as behind the gate.
Check out our new website!
2) We use LinkMink for our affiliate program. This allows our Affiliates to easily create an account and makes tracking, commission,s and management a pretty automated process. This is important because we have over 2000+ affiliates right now!
3) We use Google Analytics to track everything from traffic to conversions. We use Google Looker Studio which turns your data from Google Analytics into very useful reports and dashboards that are easy to read and share with our teamtoo make informed decisions.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
The most influential books I’ve read have been the following:
1) Traction by Gino Wickman: This book gave me the frameworkford how to run my various businesses and how to get the most out of my leadership teams. This book sets a simple and powerful framework around goal setting, focus, and growth.
2) Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh: This book is a book that I think every serious entrepreneur should read or listen to. It teaches about the unique challenges that can come up during every stage of business growth and how to design your businesses to sustain growth, strategies for managing, how to evolve with your company,y etc..
3) The Great Mental Models by Shane Parrish: This book was a great book for my mental clarity. It teaches in a methodological way how to improve your decision-making, your productivity, and how you see the world. A great book for someone who wants to work on increasing their focus and decision-making processes.
4) Measure what matters by John Doerr: Talk to any of my employees across any of my businesses and they will tell you that every business has a quarterly OKR ( objective and key results) meeting. This book teaches you how to implement this system across your organization. OKR’s focus effort and coordination with teams. They keep employees on track and link key results with objectives to crush your organizational goals.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
I have run many businesses now throughout my entrepreneurial journey. The most successful businesses that I have had have one main thing in common.
We have put a lot of work into providing our audience with as much VALUE as possible.
If you want a successful business, put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer and create content, videos, case studies, newsletters, etc.. that will feed your curiosity and answer all of your questions from the perspective of your best customer.
If you can provide VALUE with your marketing and product, it will only do good things for your business and you will feel good about the business you’re building.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes- We are currently looking for a Director of Operations Position.
[email protected] To provide job description.
Where can we go to learn more?
Hey! 👋 I'm Pat Walls, the founder of Starter Story.
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