A few months ago, I had the honor of being a keynote speaker at Mindvalley’s AI Summit, addressing over 100,000+ solopreneurs. The enthusiasm was palpable, but so were their concerns. Their primary need? How to leverage AI for more than just content generation..but instead to optimize a very scattered content process full of tedious manual effort and guesswork. After a week of hosting workshops with this specific audience, I realized I may have unintentionally further validated our company thesis; and it became evident that we were standing on the brink of a largely untapped market with a pressing need for innovation and efficiency.
An untapped and under-served market
I’ve been in the content marketing space for 12 years, and as a former founder of a content publishing platform catering to a demographic of solopreneurs, my connection to this market over the past decade is personal and professional. Having also coached over a thousand solopreneurs in content development, I’ve witnessed firsthand their struggles and the gaps in existing solutions, particularly exacerbated by the rise of fragmented AI content tools. This was a call to specialize and tailor a comprehensive solution for solopreneurs.
Solopreneurs (eg: online coaches) rely heavily on creating content to build their brands and grow their businesses. They are executing 20+ projects and 1000s of multi-channel content pieces a year. They have to plan, execute and manage the entire workflow from planning through publishing — all while juggling other sides of their businesses.
And yes, you guessed it, the more they scale, the messier it gets..
on average, solopreneurs juggle 6+ tools to create each piece of content and lose 13 hours of productive time per week in repetitive manual tasks.
Unfortunately, the rise of a fragmented AI tools market only widened these gaps. What was meant to be a promise in efficiency and creativity for 1 to 2 people teams became a convoluted maze of tools and applications, each offering a solution to one piece of the puzzle but never the complete picture.
On the other hand, the existing end-to-end content marketing solutions in the market are typically built and optimized for bigger teams and enterprises, neglecting a growing market of under-resourced solopreneurs eager for efficiency and innovation.
A tailored solution rooted in years of R&D
Enter, Vocable. A content automation and intelligence platform leveraging AI to help solopreneurs streamline content workflows and manage large-scale content needs with minimal effort.
We believe if we build a comprehensive source of truth with automated workflows and tailored strategy for the one-person business, we open up room for efficiency and creativity allowing individuals to focus more on their businesses without compromising content performance & scalability.
Our competitive advantage: workflows & user networks
Our product ethos is rooted in co-creation and domain expertise. We’re not dictating or guessing workflow solutions; we’re piloting and building them in collaboration with the very people who need them.
Through our time building our last content publishing company, SWAAY, we have workshopped content processes for thousands of solopreneurs in a tailored approach, and now we are bringing 5+ years of R&D into Vocable to reimagine dated content workflows in the context of AI and modern tech solutions.
Take one of our past SWAAY members and now beta users, Heather Monahan for example, a successful online coach with an audience reach of over 1M, who produces highly iterative daily pieces of content (articles, linkedin posts, newsletters..) alongside other deliverables that take months of planning and strategy (e-books, guides, speeches, courses,..).
She ran her manual content development process for our fresh eyes. We mapped out her multi-channel workflows by combining qualitative (tasks, systems used, data input/output, contingencies,..) and quantitative (frequency of execution, number of use cases, timeline,..) data. With this approach, inefficiencies are easily identified and optimized by our content experts and product team. The process map is then utilized in product development to drive the build of tailored workflows. (Note: We are applying this approach to a cohort of 50 online coaches we gathered from our network – this will collectively drive our phase 2 product workflows build).
This user-centric product approach immediately validates solutions that are truly tailored to our customer persona and gives us an upper hand in quickly adopting the market and establishing a competitive edge.
Our strategic partnership with Mindvalley, a community of ~1.7M+ solopreneurs and 240,000 online coaches deepens this connection, providing us with unparalleled access, insights and distribution. This positions Vocable uniquely, not just for rapid market entry but for creating a product shaped by and for our target customers.
Why Now?
2023 saw a growing wave of AI-powered apps that were task-specific and proved the potential (and power) of GenAI. As we step into the next wave, we are betting on customer-specific comprehensive solutions that leverage AI models to solve problems end-to-end and make end users better at their craft. So we’re confident that we’re in the right place at the right time:
- Growing Market: Solopreneurs are on the rise, projected to make up 50.9% of the US workforce by 2027, signaling a significant increase in demand for tailored solutions and services for this customer segment.
- Untapped Potential: But tech solutions have traditionally focused on larger enterprises and large teams, leaving this segment overlooked – which makes it a vast, untapped market opportunity. And luckily we know it VERY WELL!
- AI Integration: Intelligent automation is no longer just for enterprises. Advances in AI technology now enable the creation of individualized, cost-effective solutions, perfectly accessible to solopreneurs eager to automate and streamline their workflows, and we’re ready to deliver that.
The Wrap Up
Huge thanks to all our awesome early investors and users – you guys made Vocable 1.0 happen! Based on all your feedback and input, we will be hitting the accelerator on product development and getting ready for a big, public launch early 2024. This is all about making life easier for the one person teams. Imagine a world where you spend most of your time (like 80%!) on your cool projects, while all the behind-the-scenes content operations just ticks away smoothly. We’re making that happen – and it’s going to be epic! 🚀🌟
