Built a tool to target the audience that was saying “no” to my services

For the past five years, I've been working with SaaS companies on content marketing as part of my boutique agency. It's been a ride, with most of my gigs coming from WOM and me reaching out to potential clients through cold outreach.

When I started shooting cold emails left and right, I bumped into a whole new type of founder: the ones just kicking off or a few months in, with not-so-big budgets (I’m charging $3,500 per month for content).

These people loved the idea of building a content strategy, but when they heard my rates, it was a hard pass…

So, I'm sitting there, thinking, "What if there was a way to help these guys out?"
What if I could build something that takes all I know about content strategy and just... gives it to them?

Like, "Here, take this content strategy playbook, no strings attached. Go be awesome."

That's how the idea for Yahini was born – a tool that would spit out a content strategy based on my experience, without me having to charge an arm and a leg for it. Me and my co-founder have poured our experience into frameworks and guidelines to train this tool.

But, oh man, the tech part.

I'm a content person, not a coder.

The thought of trying to build this thing was intimidating to say the least. I've thrown money at developers on Upwork before, hoping for magic and getting... not magic.

So, I figured, why not just do it myself?

With my wife on design and marketing , I started learning how to code (JAMStack, using React, Hono, and Cloudflare workers for edge computing).
Here are a few things I learned:

1. Content strategy vs tech

Obviously, my content strategy background was the basis of Yahini. I spent most of my time putting together and translating common themes, templates, and content workbooks into technical requirements (e.g. prompt engineering) and this was an absolutely fascinating process and it thought me stuff about how to best explain what I’m doing to someone who’s not familiar with content strategy.

But… Although I had a pretty good knowledge of my target audience, I would have invested a bit more time in user research, alongside the things I did above.

2. Features vs launching fast.

You want everything, but you gotta pick. Obviously, the “fast, high-quality content briefs” aspect was a clear priority, but I wanted Yahini to provide value across the entire content strategy process. I’d definitely adopt a more iterative approach to feature development, releasing my MVP faster.

3. Market gap recognition.

The journey from identifying frustrated potential clients (who couldn't afford our $3,500/month service) to creating a scalable solution shows how valuable it is to pay attention to lost opportunities. This demonstrates that sometimes your "no's" can lead to your biggest business opportunities.

And you know what?

Despite all the advice out there about building an audience first, I wasn't feeling it. I've seen too many successful founders make it big without being social media influencers.

So, I'm going my own way, focusing on making Yahini awesome for the first 100 users.

Happy to share more learnings here as I start building my first 100 users, I think this would be interesting.

Also, happy to answer any questions! :)

Here's Yahini if you want to check it out - https://yahini.io/