Founders log, day one.
Am I committing to daily? Absolutely not – my ADHD could never. But today marks day one of my build-in-public journey with micro- and nano-SaaS as a vibe coder with just enough knowledge to be dangerous (to myself, mostly.)
These blogs will be my honest, and at times rambling, updates on the process of going from business educator and reluctant-to-claim-the-title-but-okay-fine “business coach” to SaaS founder. I am not necessarily leaving the business education and coaching space, nor am I ending my coaching services. Due to life and health changes, however, I am planning for the future by building revenue streams using technology, in case I may need to step away from those services.
Basically, my life is changing. I know my ideas still have value, but the world is changing, too. I’m building in public to share the ups and downs of changing with it, in the hopes that it will help you.
Today was day one of my “Founders log” here, but it was also day one of the work year for me in my regular business. Balancing starting a software company + adding software tools to my existing company + actually still running my existing company is a challenge, to be sure, but today was exciting in a way I haven’t felt in a while. I got to have some fantastic meetings with some amazing clients, and repeatedly throughout these meetings, I saw opportunities for tools (both nano-SaaS tools and the micro-SaaS one I’m building) to be useful.
I left the meetings of the day inspired and ready to take action.
The Current State of Things
Right now, there are a handful of nano-SaaS tools inside of my membership (Solo School) for ND entrepreneurs. I am expanding this greatly, intending to replace all of our workshops and classes with software tools that actually do the things for people. For now, however, most of the software tools live inside of specific programs like our core curriculum or the nano-SaaS cohort that started today.
My primary project, ALEX, is my “Pocket CMO” project. An AI-augmented marketing strategist and content marketing tool, ALEX is currently a chatbot built using PickAxe that a dozen or so users have happily been accessing for over a year now.
I am primarily a vibe-coder, in that I understand and have written some code at times but have very little desire to scratch code anything right now. I’ll be using existing libraries and AI-assistive technology for the bulk of this project. The goal is for it to be financially viable for me to make my technical debt someone else’s problem. That’s not the best way to look at it, but it’s realistic for where I am. I can have a working prototype in days/weeks, and within 6-12 months, I can have a developer making it better. My core skills are marketing, and I intend to stick with them.
The Vision
The vision for ALEX is to become an autonomous content marketing agent:
- You can chat with it to inform your strategy, create your schedule, or check new ideas against your current vision, mission, and goals.
- It can automatically generate a content calendar for you based on your strategy, SEO insights it pulls from external APIs, and social media trends research it automatically pulls in for you.
- It has digested and stored all of your content already, so using “Retrieval Augmented Generation” (a way of using LLMs by connecting them to databases of actual information, so they don’t just make things up), it will pull your existing thought leadership to fill this content calendar.
- Where needed, it will use minor AI additions to bridge multiple content pieces together to meet your goals, but primarily there will be no editing. Just repurposing of your own content.
- You’ll swipe through it like Tinder, approving or rejecting posts until your content calendar is filled with your own wisdom – perfectly aligned with your SEO strategy and current social trends, and scheduled in the background on approval.
For solo and small operators who want to share their thought leadership, retain copyright of their own words, have a smart content marketing strategy, and are sitting on a goldmine of past content in various forms that they’re not sure how to re-use, this system will be an absolute game-changer. Strategy, content repurposing, informed social media management, and scheduling, all done for you in one app.
The Best Next Step
I spent much of my holiday time refining the vision, the tech stack, the building tools, and how we’re going to get from here (a Pickaxe chatbot named ALEX) to there (an autonomous content marketing agent named ALEX) in the next few months. If you’re nerdy and want to know the technical details, the tech stack we’ve settled on is at the bottom of this article. But for right now, I need to build the very next piece of the puzzle.
And it’s got to be the content digestion.
I have an export of every Facebook post I’ve ever made, and I’m going to use it to help me build something that will turn it into a usable database of content that we can retrieve content *from* so it is actually usable.
Once that is built, everything else is importing the strategy-bot into strategy builders in the app, or pulling content from the database. The content database itself is essentially the “backbone” of the whole thing.
Decision made. Tomorrow, we get started.
ALEX’s Tech Stack
- PHP + Laravel: User auth, request handling, orchestration.
- Why PHP and not just straight up Python + React like seemingly everyone else these days? First, I know a decent amount of PHP from my WordPress days. Second, multi-tenancy (i.e. workspaces and teams with multiple users) is built in. Third, self-hosting. Most Python + React builds use Supabase (or Firebase, or some other cloud-based provider) for their database. I want data sovereignty and portability, so we’re going with self-hosted solutions and can use whatever we want.
- Python: AI processing (RAG, embeddings, LLM calls)
- Why use PHP and Python together instead of just choosing one or the other? Because they are good at different things. Python is the language of AI, data science, and machine learning. PDF parsing, data imports, vector embedding libraries like sentence transformers, those are all Python. PHP is functioning as the manager. It identifies the user, allows them in, determines what needs to be done, and “passes” the jobs to Python when needed. More secure, more stable, and faster for me to build vs. learning new things, like Django.
- PostgreSQL (pgvector): Database + vector search
- Vectors. Similarity searches + vector embeddings mean we need vector capabilities in the database, and without that, we would have to maintain a local database AND use a service like Pinecone (again, becoming cloud-dependent).
- React + Inertia.js + Tailwind: Frontend
- Inertia eliminates the need for a separate REST API layer – Laravel and React talk directly through props, which means fewer moving parts and faster development. Tailwind just simplifies CSS for awhile.
