A fourth-year Drexel University student took home the top prize at the college’s Baiada Incubator Competition on Friday to grow his artificial intelligence marketing startup Typeskip.
Basil Khan, a Drexel undergraduate studying computer science, won $12,500 along with one year of free residency at the Baiada Institute for Entrepreneurship, legal services from Morgan Lewis and pro-bono accounting services from GMS Surgent.
Typeskip specializes in generating marketing copy for small e-commerce companies using AI. The startup turns keywords and one-liners about products into fully descriptive advertisements in minutes. Users can also choose the keywords they want to target for search engine optimization.
Khan founded Typeskip in June. He previously ran his own small e-commerce company that generated $500,000 in revenue when he was 19 years old, he said. Oftentimes he felt shut out by large brands with the budgets for advertising agencies and spent hours crafting content rather than focusing on sales.
“The current solution is just outsourcing or going to platforms which give you shoddy copy for a high markup,” Khan said. “Or another one is learning the skill yourself, which can take years to master. And when you're wearing multiple hats, that's not really a possibility.”
Typeskip trained its AI to write marketing copy using advertisements from companies like Apple and Amazon. The website is plagiarism free, Khan said, and each description put out by Typeskip is uniquely generated.
The startup is targeting small e-commerce operations like sellers on Etsy, Amazon and eBay and drop-shipping businesses — companies that sell items that they purchase from a third party. Annual global retail e-commerce sales are expected to surpass $5 trillion in 2022, according to Statista.
Typeskip charges $29 per month for 25,000 words generated and up to 10 users on the account.
It now has more than 100 users, and Khan said the company is breaking even with revenue from those customers and funds it won from a previous competition. He is expanding the company through guerrilla marketing on Facebook and Reddit, content creation and his existing connections in the e-commerce industry.
Aer Cosmetics, a sustainable mascara startup, took second place in the competition, winning $7,500 cash as well as two hours of pro-bono accounting consulting services from GMS Surgent, one year of free residency space in the Baiada Institute for Entrepreneurship and a reserved spot at Drexel’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic. FocusFlag, a company producing flags that attach to computers to signal that a user is busy, finished in third place and won $5,000 as well as residency at Baiada, an hour of pro-bono services from GMS Surgent and 10 hours of free marketing services from Argyle Interactive.
The other startups presenting on Friday were restaurant app FUD, travel planning company Aylaya, and job search site CareerCaddy.
