#314 - Jon Gillham, CEO, Originality AI - on solving a global trust problem

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to win the global content plagiarism battle. My guest is Jon Gillham, CEO of Originality AI.

Jon Gillham is a tech entrepreneur on a mission. Before he started his SaaS business, he ran a content marketing agency.

Having been one of the earliest adopters of generative AI through his agency, he understood the wave of plagiarism problems that was coming, even before Chat GPT and GPT-4 were released.

That became the founding idea behind Originality AI - a company he founded in November 2022.

Their mission: help Web Publishers be sure they are producing Original Content and can hit publish with integrity.

This means: publishing unique, Human-Created content ... the kind Google and we, the readers wants!

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge of AI-generated content -and how this impacts trust. Jon shares the challenges he's faced on his journey to solve the problem. He also explains why he decided to focus on a very specific niche and not education, while he was offered contracts with brand names as big as Harvard and Purdue. Lastly, he elaborates how they are able to build extremely competitive products with just 1 simple organizational tweak.

Here's one of his quotes

We built and ended up launching the weekend before Chat GPT launched. And when Chat GPT launched it kind of blew things up. We had people coming from all different parts of the world. Academia was coming our way. User-generated sites were coming our way to say - this is now a problem that we need to wrestle with.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What to do / not to do when you want to create defensible differentiation with your product.
2. Why he turned away very big sales opportunities - and why that was a critical, but right choice.
3. How he maintained a good work-life balance (and what he learned from that in hind-sight).
4. How to outperform all your competitors on review sites.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Jon Gillham
• Website: Originality AI

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