My Early AI Business Failure

The year was 2011, I was deep into affiliate marketing and AdSense with content websites. On the side I had created and launched a dozen different WordPress blogs.

Things were getting unwieldy. The backups, updates, monitoring, designing, and writing content for all these websites was a lot of work, and it easy to miss things that broke.

I knew that keeping the content fresh and updated was key to ranking on Google. Even back in 2011 I been already been blogging for over a decade.

I wanted to scratch my own itch and build some tools that could automate the management of these WordPress installations. As with all things that get automated I wondered about how big of a scale this could get. Would it be possible to manage 100 blogs? 1000?

At a certain scale, writing blog posts for these websites becomes an impossibility, so I started looking into an approach called content spinning. This used an earlier approach of AI techniques called Natural Language Processing to re-word and re-arrange other written content so that it appeared unique in the eyes of Google.

I built it and it worked!

This platform could crawl the internet and compile the latest news, and interesting data into dozens of fresh blog posts every day.

This was the first SaaS business that I built and launched with paying customers. I was pumped.

A customer could simply load in a domain name, a list of keywords to target for the blog content and select one of several available themes. The system would then install WordPress, configure it with users, themes and plugins and it would start the processes to crawl the internet for related content that could be re-purposed.

It was almost entirely hands off.

I used it to launch and run over 60 websites.

The launch went well, and I had a perfect number of users to build off of.

And then it happened.

The same month that I launched Automatic Blog Machine, Google rolled out a major overhaul of it’s search engine and it was insanely good at finding websites with content like what was possible to generate with the NLP approaches I was using. It was immediately able to flag and de-rank all these websites.

With no other better approaches for automated content generation, and better AI still a decade away the users slowly churned. The defeat was de-moralizing, and instead of pivoting this into what could have become a decent WordPress management and hosting service I lost the motivation to keep it going.

At the time I learned the wrong lessons from this experience:

Google can stomp you out of business in an instance

Timing is just part of the random chance involved – I lost.

However, with more experience under my belt I can say that it should have taught me some different lessons:

Persevere in the face of challenges – there are always challenges.

Pivot if necessary.

Success is a mental game as much as it is about execution.

What seems like bad timing might just be the natural course of competition and innovation required to stay ahead.

Hopefully you found this story entertaining. If so, let me know. Thanks for reading.