BM—13.3 / THE WRITING WAS NEVER THE JOB / EN Article · teardown

The writing was never the job.

Published30.08.2026

AuthorAli · Boosted Mode

Reading8 min

From the seriesWriting · BM—13

The largest AI writing tool reached a billion and a half in valuation, then lost almost half of its revenue. It wrote well. The problem was somewhere else — and it's the same problem behind the three subscriptions you no longer open.

This is a teardown, not a product comparison. Three parts: what that tool got right, where it stopped, and the four questions worth asking any tool before you hand it a card. At the end I write what mine doesn't do either, so this doesn't turn into an ad.

01 — What happened BM—13.3.1 / THE FALL

It didn't fall because it wrote badly.

It wrote well from the first day. What changed wasn't the quality of the writing, it was who still needed to pay for it.

1.5 bn $ valuation

The peak. Cut internally by about 20% to roughly 1.2 billion, at the same time as the change of CEO.

54 % revenue lost

From a peak of around 120 million dollars to roughly 55. ChatGPT had arrived in the meantime.

3 × in the enterprise segment

The part usually skipped: in the large-company segment they tripled their revenue in a single fiscal year. The move was a good one.

Writing became the thing anyone can do, free, in a browser tab. A product that sold writing and nothing else was suddenly left with one argument, and the argument could be had elsewhere.

And here is the part most people telling this story skip: they didn't collapse. They moved. They stopped selling to the single person with a personal brand and moved to marketing teams inside large companies — and in that segment, over the last fiscal year, they tripled their revenue. The decision was a good one. It just left behind exactly the customer this article is about.

The ground I'm standing on is open — but it's open because somebody lost money on it and left, not because nobody saw it. It's worth saying before anything else, because it's also the reason the rest of this article isn't a list of checkmarks.

02 — What they got right BM—13.3.2 / THE PART THEY GOT RIGHT

They built exactly the layer I'm building. And they were right about it.

A machine that writes without knowing who you are produces text that sounds like nobody. This layer isn't a feature — it's the foundation.

Their product has a context layer: brand voice, a knowledge base, a visual guide, a style guide, audiences. You load it once — a website, a few texts you wrote — and it analyses how you speak. From there on, everything the tool produces reads out of that layer.

Here it's called Brain and it's the same thing in a different vocabulary: who you are, who you sell to, what you offer, how you speak. Every engine reads out of it.

I'm saying this inside a text that is supposed to sell my product, because it's the proof that the hard part was identified correctly by someone who put a billion behind it. If a tool tells you it doesn't need this layer, it's telling you its writing is generic and hoping you won't notice.

The difference isn't that I have a Brain and they don't. It's what happens after Brain.

What the Brain actually is The five layers the engines write from, so they write like you and not like a general-purpose model. Where the eleven steps come from The previous article: how many steps a post takes and what they add up to in a month. Written in Romanian.

03 — The border BM—13.3.3 / THE STEPS THAT REMAIN

A post takes eleven steps. Writing is one of them.

These are the same eleven steps counted in the previous article. I didn't draw a new inventory to make my number work — I took the published one and switched off whatever a writing tool doesn't cover.

01You find the idea
02You decide the format
03You write what you say
04You get ready
05You film four takes
06You pick the take
07You edit it
08You add subtitles
09You write the caption
10You pick the hour
11You check whether it worked

The two lit steps are everything a writing tool solves. The other nine stay on you — and the other nine are the part that takes the time.

What comes out at the end	Writing tool	This machine
Text in your voice	yes	yes
Images	yes	yes
A produced video, ready to upload	no	yes
Publishing to your own accounts	no	yes
Raw material spoken, not typed	no	yes
Calendar and approval	partly	yes
Entry price	$69 / month / seat	249 € / month

Their price is the public one at the time of writing: $69 per month per seat billed monthly, $59 billed annually.

The last row is the one that gets misread, so I'll write it out: I am not cheaper. On a single seat they are three to four times cheaper, and cheaper still on annual billing.

The right comparison isn't price against price, it's price against how many of the eleven steps disappear from your evening. If all you need is writing, buy writing — I mean it, it's a smaller expense and it solves exactly what you have.

04 — What to ask BM—13.3.4 / FOUR QUESTIONS

Four questions, before you hand over the card.

These are the questions I would ask, including about my own product. Three out of four have a good answer here; one doesn't, and it's written in the next section.

Question 01 What comes out at the end — text, or the piece ready to upload? If what comes out is text, the editing and publishing steps stay yours. It isn't a trap, it's a border — but you need to know where it runs beforehand, not on the third evening. Checkable in five minutes, on their own features page

Question 02 Where does it get what it knows about me, and how often? If the answer is "a good prompt every time", the tool has no memory: you start over on every piece. If it's "a profile written once", ask who writes it — you, in a form, or someone who interviews you. The difference only shows on the tenth piece

Question 03 What gets counted on the invoice? Almost nobody asks it, and it shows in month three. Here, only the finished pieces you accept are counted: a render that fails, a piece you refuse because it doesn't sound like you, a redo — none of them subtract anything. Hours burned on a bad piece are my cost, not yours

Question 04 What happens to what I produced if I leave? Do the files stay yours, or do they go dark with the subscription? Here they stay. The question gets asked before you go in, because afterwards it isn't negotiable any more. Read it in the terms, not on the sales page

05 — The limits BM—13.3.5 / WHAT MINE DOESN'T DO EITHER

What this machine doesn't do.

If this section were smaller than the one before it, the article would be an ad, and it would lose the exact thing it was written for.

It doesn't produce without limitIt renders one at a time, on a real machine: one explainer video takes up tens of minutes of that capacity. That's why the tiers carry numbers — 8, 20 or 40 videos a month — and why, past a certain total across all clients, the "I want more" button says "let's talk" instead of selling hours that don't exist. Posts and written texts are unlimited because they are cheap to produce, not as a gesture of generosity.
It doesn't publish without youEvery piece goes through an approval screen. If you want something that posts by itself while you sleep, this isn't it.
It doesn't send cold messages for youOn the Application, that part doesn't exist. It stays in the System, where there is a human hand behind every message.
It doesn't invent things you never saidWhich means that if your profile is empty, the first pieces will be weak. The machine doesn't compensate for an unfilled Brain — it amplifies it.
It doesn't show up in your placeThe raw material — your face, your voice, what you have to say — stays yours. I moved the production, not the presence.

All the numbers, in one place The Foundation, the System, the Application. What is a project, what is a subscription, and where each price comes from. What the machine looks like from the inside Profile, orders, approvals, calendar, publishing. The real screens, not a mockup.

If all you need is writing, there are good, cheap options.

If what you need is the piece — ready to upload, in your voice, on your calendar — that is a different category and it's bought differently. You can start without a card: a single subject, taken end to end, so you see what comes out before you pay anything.

Enter the application See the prices