Last Friday I went to a friend's birthday dinner. About 20 people, good mix of backgrounds. My friend is a software engineer at a big company, so this wasn't a room full of people who are unfamiliar with tech.
Naturally, I love asking and paying attention to how people talk about AI. It helps me get a pulse on how differently people see this moment we're in.
Here's what surprised me: out of roughly 20 people, almost none of them had ever tried Claude Code or any agentic AI coding tool. Most people knew ChatGPT and Claude for conversational stuff, but that wasn't really surprising. That's been the case for about a year and a half now.
I'm sharing this because something kind of hit me that night.
Hours before that dinner, I was at home on a Friday afternoon, vibe coding my first SaaS product. Completely by myself. Just me and Claude Code, figuring out how to automate one of the most challenging parts of building and growing directories: backlinks.
The Backlink Problem
If you've followed my content, you probably know that link swaps are my favorite way to build backlinks.
Building backlinks is a mysterious endeavor for a lot of people getting into SEO, but there are a lot of ways to go about it.
You can buy niche edits. You can buy them from link marketplaces. You can create content that people naturally want to link to overtime (the way Google wants us to build links).
Or you can do a link swap, which is when you find a website that's already giving a backlink to your competitor and reach out to ask them to swap that link for yours. In my experience, it's the lowest cost but highest quality method out there.
The problem is that the process is tedious and manual.
I've wanted to automate it for years, but it always felt like I'd need to hire a team of developers or find a technical co-founder to make it happen. And honestly, I never felt comfortable with either option. I understood the process in a way that would be incredibly hard to articulate to someone who doesn't live in the SEO world.
So when I sat down on that Friday afternoon and realized I could actually build this myself with Claude Code, it kind of broke my brain a little.
The first version of the tool - it's 50% functional. Still lots to build, test and improve.
The Technical Marketer Era
Here's the realization that keeps hitting me lately.
I'm not building this SaaS because I had some grand startup idea. I'm building it because I ran into a real problem growing my own directories, and for the first time in my life, I don't need to hire anyone to solve it.
Think about what that actually means. The person who understands the problem is now the same person who can build the solution. That's new.
Two years ago, someone like me, a marketer who taught himself SEO and fell in love with building directories, would have had two options: pay a developer who doesn't fully understand the nuance of how backlink outreach works, or find a technical co-founder and spend months trying to communicate every edge case.
Both of those paths felt like a nightmare to me, so I just never did it. Now I'm building it myself on a weekend with Claude Code.
p.s. it's also really fun to get distracted building features that don't have anything to do with making my tool work better...like this claude wrapper where I can talk to myself about backlinks and SEO!
It's awesome because I understand exactly how the process should work because I've done it manually for years. I know the edge cases because I've lived them. And instead of trying to translate all of that to someone else, I just... build it.
I think this is the part that's hard to explain to people at birthday dinners.
It's not just that AI can write code. It's that the people who deeply understand real problems can now build real solutions without needing permission or a technical team.
The same skill set that let me build directories, being a marketer who learned just enough to be dangerous, is the same skill set that's letting me build a SaaS product. I understand the distribution side and I can now build the product side. That combination didn't exist for someone like me until very recently.
So What Does This Mean
I don't know if this becomes a real product that other people use. Right now I'm building it for one reason: to grow my own directories faster.
If I can prove it works for myself first, maybe I'll build a production version someday and that would be awesome. But even if I don't, it's genuinely fun to build, it will probably save me a lot of time, and it could eventually become another way to help people grow their businesses.
The bigger point is this: I never would have found this SaaS idea if I hadn't been in the trenches building directories. The idea didn't come from scrolling Twitter or brainstorming in a notebook. It came from doing the work, hitting a wall, and realizing I could now build my way through it.
If you're building directories or really anything online, you're probably sitting on problems right now that could become products.
The difference in 2026 is that you don't have to wait for someone else to build the tool for you. You can be the person who understands the problem and the person who builds the solution.
That's the era we're in, and I still don't think most people realize it.
