Distribution, distribution, distribution… 😅 

But before that, let me put myself in the customers’ shoes and complain about HeyEcho.

Table of Contents

• Hero images now served through a CDN

• How I use HeyEcho

  • Deciding the topic

  • Bulk creation

  • Publishing

  • What else?

• Struggling with distribution

  • Traffic from blog posts

  • On-demand blog post examples

  • What about outreaching SEO agencies?

• Is OpenAI DeepResearch a competitor?

• Conclusion

Hero images now served through a CDN

Finally! I was very annoyed by this.

Until last week the hero image was inlined in the blog post itself by using its base64 encoded PNG image representation as the source. The markdown would look something like:

![Hero image](data:image/png;base64,iVBO....<VERY LONG STRING>)

When copy-pasting the raw markdown my editor was not very happy. 😅 

These images are also not cached by the browser, and they were not processed or compressed at all. They were the direct output provided by DALL-E, and they were as big as 3MB! 🤯 

This finally changed!

The images are now resized to up to 1200px width, and compressed and converted to WEBP. The quality difference is barely noticeable, but they’re now around 60KB in size. 🥳 

But the most important thing is that they’re served through a CDN so instead of having a very long string the source is just a link hosting the image.

How I use HeyEcho

Unfortunately, not many people have used HeyEcho yet, so the roadmap is mostly based on my personal pain points. So I’m sharing how I’m using HeyEcho and what I see missing.

Deciding the topic

Ouch! 😭 

This is the first thing I miss. HeyEcho asks for a topic to generate a blog post. But how do I decide on the topic? I’m not that creative… 🤣 

This is what I did:

1. copied the description of HeyEcho extracted by HeyEcho and gave it to ChatGPT,

2. asked ChatGPT to provide a list of macro topics (SaaS Content Marketing, AI in Marketing, etc.) that are related to the provided description of HeyEcho,

3. asked ChatGPT for each macro topic, 1 by 1, to come up with a topic that would fit a blog post and give a score,

4. manually copied all these in a spreadsheet, sorted by score, and marked those that I plan to generate and publish.

This process is just a one-time step so I wouldn't bother much until I finish all the topics ofc. But these simple steps suggested a 2 years timeline of daily posts. 😅

However, it has some limitations:

1. I need to manually mark those that I decide to generate,

2. I need to manually remember or map the row to the actual blog post,

3. I need to copy-paste the topics in HeyEcho one by one and wait for it to finish.

It’s a pain. 😣

From here my process is that every Monday I pick and generate blog posts for the whole week and schedule them one per day. It takes around 4mins to generate a blog post. After that I’d need to copy-paste each and schedule, let’s say another 3mins each. Considering that I’d need to generate 7 blog posts, the total is a few less than 1h. I’d like to do this for both HeyEcho, NextCommit, and HaveYouHeard, and this means 3h each Monday just for this.

Compared to actually writing the actual blog posts is way less! But still, 1h per project is a lot that’s why so far I’m dogfooding only for HeyEcho. 😅 

This brings us to the next section.

Bulk creation

I don’t want to wait for the post to finish before generating the next one. 😡 

To be fair, even right now it’s not strictly necessary to do so, but if you don’t wait it could error. 😬 

Simply because it hasn’t been designed to work async. How cool would it be to have a table of topics and have a button “Generate“? I’d need to just click, click, click, and come back once they finish. 🤩 

As a bonus, having an email notification once done would be awesome.

Publishing

At this point, I have an easy-peasy way to pick and generate content at scale. 💪 

But I still need to copy-paste each in the blog. To be honest, this is not the worst part that I’m experiencing right now, but that would be very handy!

For HeyEcho and NextCommit I’m not using a CMS. I simply copy-paste the markdown so you can imagine that it’s not much of a big deal. I guess many potential users are using CMS like WordPress, Webflow, etc. so that would be a great one to have.

Remember that I recently moved the images to a CDN? Before that, my process included saving the hero image locally, and manually uploading it to a CDN. I let you imagine how much time I was wasting… 🙄 

The greatest thing about automatic publishing is that it splits the process into decision-making of which topics and the actual execution of putting the blog posts live. In my case, for example, I’d allocate the time every Monday to just click and decide the topics and just let HeyEcho publish as scheduled. 🚀 

Depending on the user, someone who wants more control might want to have a review step.

What else?

• Topic planning,

• bulk generation,

• auto-publish with scheduling,

These are the most pressing things that I have on my wishlist as a user. I have many other ideas, like automatic internal linking, providing personal insights, etc., but they don’t matter if I don’t find a way to get the first paying customers.

Struggling with distribution

Not news right? 🤣 

As I mentioned last week, I’m currently focusing on inbound and put on pause outreach, but I’m thinking about it.

The problem is again the time! Too many possibilities and not much time to do everything. 😅 

Maybe I should teach my daughter and my wife how to cold call. 🤣 

For the past projects posting on ProductHunt has always been the single initiative that at least was bringing traffic. I’m considering launching there once at least topic planning and bulk creation are done.

Traffic from blog posts

26 blog posts so far! 🥳 

And none of them indexed by Google yet, and some have not even been discovered! 🎉 

WTF… 😅 

Well, not much to say here other than let’s wait.

On-demand blog post examples

I explained this last week, and I tried doing the same on social media. But even in that case not much interest, unfortunately. It’s also true that I don’t have much following so it’s not that of a surprise, but trying was still due.

What about outreaching SEO agencies?

They say that the effort in selling—finding customers, building trust, handling objections, and closing the deal—often remains the same regardless of price.

So I started wondering if SEO agencies or marketing agencies would be a nice outreach target.

Agencies have recurring demand and need efficiency as they juggle with multiple clients, which means that they’d need a high volume of blog posts generated. Maybe an idea could be to let them use it for a single workspace/client and for free as a way to land and expand.

I’ll think more about this. 🤔 

Is OpenAI DeepResearch a competitor?

A few days ago I noticed that OpenAI DeepResearch landed also for Plus users and I tried it.

Damn, it’s Deep, really Deep! 🤯 

I tried a few queries and for the first one, it took 25mins and used 400+ sources, and for the second one 12mins and used 200+ sources.

My first reaction was “c’mon! really?“. I felt like I’d need to compete with OpenAI. 😅 

But after thinking about it:

• they position DeepResearch (I also saw an ad on LinkedIn) as a tool for education and academics,

• they won’t solve problems strictly related to TOFU SEO like keyword analysis, internal linking between multiple generated documents, etc.

• it could actually be good for marketing by making HeyEcho the “DeepResearch for Blogs”

• solving the topic planning, publishing, internal linking, etc. that are specific to blogs is valuable also for further differentiating from ChatGPT.

Conclusion

As always, lots of work to do. 😅 

If you’re interested in following my journey, make sure to subscribe or follow me on Bluesky, X, and LinkedIn!