Conversion.ai Acquiring Headlime is Bad News for Headlime Users

The GPT-3 copywriting space is heating up with the news of Copy.ai raising close to $3 million in a round led by Craft Ventures earlier this month and now Headlime, the popular GPT-3 tool for copywriting being acquired by another similar tool, Conversion.ai.

Artificial copywriting space is a relatively new concept that’s taking off, but it is evolving as new pricing models are introduced to fund this space. There has been a big surge in startups offering tools based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 model which is considered to be the gold standard when it comes to artificial copywriting. And the recent acquisition of Headlime by Conversion.ai points towards the industry maturing in a way. While it’s still a long way off to expect the AI writing space to consolidate, it definitely makes people outside of this industry sit back and take notice. This is serious business after all with some real value add for the customers.

Headlime’s Danny Postma scores a big win

Let there be no confusion as to who gains the most with this deal. Danny Postma, who almost single-handedly built Headlime to what it is right now is bound to gain big. Neither Headlime nor Conversion.ai has disclosed the financial details of the deal, the general expectation is that the value is high enough for a bootstrapped single-owner business. The About page on Headlime lists just three people being part of the team, which includes a copywriter and a customer support rep. Postma will transition into a strategic role within the Conversion.ai team, which is again a piece of great news for him personally.

Postma is almost like a poster kid of the SaaS Lifetime Deal (LTD) space. He ran a very successful LTD campaign late last year, that too on his own website instead of going to established platforms like AppSumo. While Headlime existed even before they adopted OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, the genuine success came with the LTD campaign. “Revenue exploded, with a 100% MoM growth since November 2020,” confirms Postma in his blog post announcing the acquisition. Suffice to say, his initial customers who supported Headlime and bought the Lifetime Deal were responsible for the change in fortunes.

Early backers lose out

While it’s clear that Postma is winning big with this deal, there is one stakeholder who may feel like they were dealt a raw deal – Headlime’s LTD buyers. The LTD was sold with a promise of lifetime access to Headlime with all future enhancements included. Postma is keeping up his promise, but partially. While LTD buyers will continue to have access to Headlime, there won’t be any fresh development happening over there. Here is the summary:

• Headlime and Conversion.ai will remain to be independent for now.
• Headlime customers will continue to have access to all existing tools at Headlime.
• Conversion.ai has already started to integrate Headlime features into its platform.
• If and when they decide to let go of Headlime, they promise to port Headlime customers to a ‘comparable plan’. Mind you, there is no LifeTime plan on conversion.ai
• Conversion.ai founder, Dave Rogenmoser has made it clear on some Facebook groups that Headlime users won’t get most of Conversion.ai features and Headlime won’t get any additional features either.

It’s quite apparent why the early backers whose faith in the work ethics of Danny Postma and his vision for Headlime may feel they lost out on a fair deal here.

But this is great news for Conversion.ai customers. Postma is an impressive addition to the team and they will soon get some unique Headlime features like AI Landing Pages. It’s not like Conversion.ai couldn’t replicate the features provided by Headlime but having someone like Danny Postma join their team must have lured them to go for this deal. And not to mention the existing subscriber base of Headlime which is one of the oldest tools in the Artificial Copywriting space.