Shipping an SEO Tool Solo, From Prototype to Production
How I founded and built Draftly.blog, an SEO blog automation tool that takes a small business from topic discovery to a publish-ready draft about 22% faster.
- Company:
- Draftly.blog
- My role:
- Founder and sole builder
- Window:
- 2024 – present
- Market:
- SEO tooling for small business
Faster blog drafting
topic to publish-ready
Built and shipped
prototype through production
Public build logs
written during the work
The 22% figure is my own measurement of the drafting workflow, not a third-party benchmark. Full source notes at the foot of the page.
The Problem
Small businesses know they should publish. What stops them isn't the writing so much as everything around it: picking a topic worth ranking for, checking what already ranks, structuring the piece, and optimizing it before it goes live.
The existing tools mostly solve the middle of that problem. They generate prose on demand and leave the owner to figure out whether the topic was worth writing about in the first place.
I run this workflow professionally, so I knew exactly where the time went. Draftly is that workflow, automated end to end.
The Approach
1. Automate the research, not just the writing
Draftly starts at topic discovery and ends at a publish-ready, search-optimized draft. The research-to-draft handoff is where small teams lose the most time, and it's the part generic writing tools skip.
2. Prototype where it's cheapest to be wrong
The first version was built in Bolt.new. That let the product idea get tested against real use before any of it was worth hosting properly, and it moved to production infrastructure only once it had actual users.
3. Build the architecture the product will need next
Draftly is moving to a headless setup: a Next.js marketing frontend on Vercel with WordPress as a headless CMS. The whole migration (security pass, three-domain plan, and execution order) was designed in a single AI-assisted session and documented publicly as it happened.
The Results
Draftly cuts small-business blog drafting time by roughly 22%, measured from topic to publish-ready draft. That's the difference between publishing consistently and publishing when someone remembers to.
It went from prototype to production as a solo build, and it ships SEO-optimized output by default rather than as a setting the user has to find.
The build itself is public. Four write-ups document the decisions as they were made, including the headless WordPress migration and an honest review of the AI models used to do it, which is a different kind of proof than a metric, and arguably a more checkable one.
What This Work Demonstrates
- I build the thing I sell. Draftly automates the SEO content workflow I run professionally. Knowing where the hours actually go is the whole reason it targets research rather than prose generation.
- I prototype where being wrong is cheap. Bolt.new first, production hosting only once there were real users. Infrastructure decisions made before you have users are guesses with a monthly bill attached.
- I work in public. The migration, the architecture, and the model comparison are all written up. Documenting the reasoning while it's happening is more useful than a retrospective, and harder to fake.
Draftly.blog
An SEO blog automation tool I founded and built, taking small businesses from topic to publish-ready draft about 22% faster.
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