This SaaS startup uses AI to help small businesses create sharp, targeted content
Founded in 2020, Gurugram-based content intelligence SaaS platform Scalenut offers an AI-powered research and writing tool to help marketing strategists with planning, research, and creation of content.
Advertising has changed with the evolution of technology, and has ensured that content is truly king.
Every website now features digital ads that await a prospective user every time they click on a site. There is no limit to how a potential customer can be reached. Tools like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ensure that every advertisement is viewed by a specific target audience. However, it can be tough to tailor these ads for every single campaign, especially to a large audience.
Enter , which is attempting to automate processes like SEO through artificial intelligence (AI). In essence, Scalenut is a software as a service (SaaS) company for content creation.
“We are a content automation SaaS platform that helps businesses scale their SEO content. We are building the entire content lifecycle management platform, to potentially research, plan, and measure content,” Mayank says.
For the last two years, Founders Mayank Jain, Gaurav Goyal, and Saurabh Wadhawan have helped marketing strategists plan, research, and create content for their customers.
From L to R - Gaurav Goyal, Saurabh Wadhawan and Mayank Jain
Creating scalable content
Scalenut spoke with nearly 100 small business owners across the world to understand core issues. From their conversations, the founders noted that businesses often struggle with figuring out what kind of content to generate.
While these businesses were investing in SEO heavily, the investments failed to generate a favourable outcome.
“Our platform is used to scale the search for their SEO content, create SEO content, and also the popularity. All of that is driven predominantly by AI and machine learning algorithms,” Mayank says.
The SaaS platform helps small businesses and mid-market businesses to scale content and grow sustainably through organic marketing.
One of Scalenut’s offerings includes a natural processing technology that assists with research. It brings up all content related to the topic and gives content reports out of a single targeted keyword, which helps clients with SEO.
Organic traffic refers to clicks generated without the interference of advertising. This type of traffic becomes especially crucial when businesses spend a lot of money for paid media campaigns on Google, Facebook etc. Over time, this method becomes unsustainable, which is why they look at building organic channels to drive more clicks to their websites.
The company launched its SaaS platform software in January 2022. But before the official launch, it released a beta version between September 2021 and December 2021 for a limited set of users who received a subscription for lifetime access.
Users are allowed to try the product for seven days for free. Post the free trial, users can choose to upgrade to any of the premium plans, or are moved to Free Forever plan (after seven days, they can continue to use the platform for free with limited features and limits).
Getting the clicks
According to Mayank, the success of businesses like Hubspot and Canva has intrigued entrepreneurs, with many of them wanting to replicate a similar playbook.
Except, there isn’t an easy way to do this.
“There are a lot of tools, but they're very verticalised. Businesses face a lot of challenges in putting the stack together and hence it becomes difficult to scale content,” he says.
This is also what drove Mayank and his team to build Scalenut. In 2020, the same year that Scalenut was formed, it also released its first product, a Talent Network. This platform helps connect clients to certified content creators to generate content. It was following this that the existing SaaS platform was launched.
“We help businesses scale their organic content in a very cost-effective manner. So, businesses can scale content and drive organic traffic,” Mayank says.
Organic traffic is a key metric to enable sustainable businesses. If you spend most of your budget on advertising across Google and Facebook, over time this would mean that you would need to generate more traffic to ensure your ads are consistently viewed. This is why ultimately businesses need to focus on building out organic growth.
“Understanding all this, we started building a platform last year in July and released a beta version in September,” Mayank says. “We built an intuitive self-serve and affordable content marketing platform that businesses can just go on to and start scaling. And that's predominantly the problem we're trying to solve.”
The planning and research tools are developed in-house and are proprietary to the company. Thecontent creator was built on Open AI GPT 3 technology, a type of machine learning technology that takes cues from internet data to generate text.
Scalenut has integrated with American SaaS firm Semrush, allowing its users worldwide to use Semrush and Scalenut in tandem to power their SEO and overall content marketing. It also integrated with Copyscape for its plagiarism application and is working on integrating with Wordpress.
Scalenut's SEO Research Report
Who is Scalenut for?
The SaaS startup caters to two kinds of clients: Small businesses and mid-market enterprises, with a primary focus on the US and the UK markets.
Apart from small businesses, Scalenut works with some larger startups within the India. These include Snapdeal, PharmEasy, Foyr, Hubilo, and Mosaic Wellness. Currently, Scalenut has 1,000 paid customers and 100,000 users across the globe signed up to use the free version.
Its primary mode of business comes from the SaaS platforms. One of the features, Cruise Mode, creates research-backed SEO blog posts of over 1,000 words within five minutes. It blends the entire product of SEO research and AI writing
The path ahead
Scalenut raised $3.1 million in a seed-stage funding round led by Saama Capital and Amit Singhal (Former Senior VP of Google and Head of Google Search) last month.
Its closest rivals are SurferSEO (for SEO research), Jasper (AI writing), and Conductor (for larger enterprises).
“We are looking at a huge market of over $200 billion. With rapid digitisation, businesses have to create and scale content at speed. That's the only sustainable way to build large brands,” Mayank says.
Scalenut is predominantly focused on English-speaking nations and will look to expand to non-English-speaking nations, soon. “In addition, we would be further looking at other channels to help businesses grow organic traffic,” Mayank says.
Edited by Akanksha Sarma