The life and death of DraftStudio, a cold email copywriting assistant

We are officially discontinuing DraftStudio, a cold email copywriting assistant. DraftStudio helped re-write emails, generate spintax, and preview spintax for approval.

DraftStudio went into alpha in April 2023. We ended up with 59 users who used the product a total of 2,605 times. A little over a year later, we're shutting DraftStudio down. 

It was built on Glide, a low-code app builder. DraftStudio was one of several bets we'd placed in our previous life as a HubSpot and outbound sales agency. 

OutboundSync was the last, and most successful, SaaS product developed by Intro CRM. It was so successful that OutboundSync spun out into its own company and recently joined TinySeed, a B2B SaaS accelerator for bootstrapped companies.

Like OutboundSync, DraftStudio was born out of our agency work. It was built specifically for Smartlead and supported Smartlead's spintax formatting.

Why I built DraftStudio

The primary use case was saving myself time when shipping outbound campaigns for clients.

To give you an idea, you started an email with "Hey", it would generate permutations of that greeting (e.g. Hi, Hello, Hi there) that would be used in Smartlead.

The idea is that using more dynamic text improves email deliverability. And the more emails that land in the primary inbox, the better. But generating spintax manually is annoying.

Initial MVP/alpha release

We used Glide to provide some helpful things like saving favorites, copying spintax to your clipboard, and making it easier to use than ChatGPT's chat interface.

For the purposes of this blog post, I will categorize the MVP/alpha release as a ChatGPT wrapper product. Which means that it had a basic UI but the core function was to provide a front-end to ChatGPT prompts.

Thanks to Glide, the app loaded quickly, had a secure login, and had the basic features I wanted to build. Without hiring a developer. Here's what it looked like when we brought it to market:

The nice thing about Glide is that I was able to quickly build the concept and get it into the market.

This was possible thanks to the team over at LowCode Agency. While the product itself wasn't a breakout hit, we were able to get it into market and learn quickly. 

Adoption and traction

Initial users were acquired by organic LinkedIn posts and through my participation in several WhatsApp and Slack communities in the outbound sales space. 

Something about it did appeal to people. It even got featured by cold email expert Jed Mahrle in his Practical Prospecting newsletter. (Thanks, Jed!) 

The top 20% of users accounted for 89% of product utilization. You can see an entire distribution across the entire user base below.

Within this overall utilization, you can see how each major feature was used by each user below:

Here's a pie chart with an aggregate look across the entire userbase:

While the product had thread major features (rewrite emails, generate spintax, preview spintax), it was the spintax feature that got the most traction. Generating spintax was the one feature I'd originally wanted the most, spent the most time building, and promoted the most. 

The rewrite feature numbers are inflated here as we tested different ways of doing this, including generating up to four variations of a single email, essentially overweighting the utilization number in these charts.

The preview feature was the weakest and something that needed a lot more work to get right. One way of doing this that I thought about was using a transactional email provider like SendGrid and sending copies of all those emails to the user to review. 

Top user feedback

Overall, DraftStudio was useful! It led to booked meetings and drove revenue.

I'm super grateful to everyone who took time to try the product, provide feedback, and use it for their campaigns. 

Top users were engaged, provided feedback, and were happy to share testimonials like the ones below.