Portfolio Log #002
This was a shorter week for me, as I spent Wednesday through Friday at an off-site for the day job (mad fun), but still managed to get a fair bit done.
Contentcron moves beyond articles
Contentcron now creates two social post drafts for every article. They use their own social brand voice, so they don’t just read like shortened versions of the article.
I also started working on automatic publishing to X and Bluesky. The idea is pretty straightforward: if Contentcron already does the research and writes the article, it should also help get that article in front of people.
Automatically syndicating the articles to other places on the web is also something I'm exploring, think reposting to Medium / dev.to and other places, using a canonical URL.
The onboarding flow got a proper rework too. More of it now runs in the background, so getting started feels faster, and the UI does a better job of explaining what happens next.
Other additions this week included a new dashboard, welcome and first-draft emails, and manual reordering for planned articles. I also fixed a scheduling issue toward the end of the week.
The Google Search Console integration is ready on my side and now needs to go through Google’s review process. Once that’s live, Contentcron will be able to connect the articles it publishes with their actual search performance.
This already works very well and I can let users in on request.
I also started posting about Contentcron publicly and the first two signups happened, which was nice to see.
See the Contentcron changelog →
Leadrack got its first users
On Tuesday, the first Leadrack user reported a few issues. I fixed it right away.
Getting a bug report might not sound like much of a milestone, but it means someone made it into the product, tried to use it for real, and cared enough to tell me when something didn’t work. Thanks Dan! ;)
A second user also signed up and successfully got a lead board running. Both are on the free plan, but they’re the first people outside my own testing to reach the core of the product.
Now I want to learn what happens next. Do the agents find genuinely useful leads? (First feedback suggest so!) Where is the setup still confusing? And what would make the product useful enough to pay for?
Modsignal gets a public registry
Modsignal now has a free registry of more than 100 software vendors.
It monitors their pricing pages and changelogs, and anyone can browse the results. I like this direction because the monitoring work does two jobs at once: it creates something genuinely useful to browse and gives Modsignal a much larger surface in search.
There are now more than 100 vendor pages that can earn impressions for searches around pricing changes, product updates, and individual companies. It’ll take time to see what Google makes of them, but the foundation is there.
From these pages, visitors can directly set up their own monitors for these and other changes.
Getting better at distribution
Every product is now connected to Google Search Console and Pirsch Analytics, so I can finally see how the whole portfolio is doing in search from the beginning.
I’ve also started talking more publicly about the products and what I’m building. Close to 400 link clicks and some signups from it. That’s a tiny sample, obviously, but it’s a good reason to keep going.
This week felt less like a building sprint and more like the products starting to leave the workshop. Contentcron got its first signups, Leadrack met its first real users, and Modsignal became useful even before someone creates an account.
Most importantly, nothing really burned to the ground, even while I was away.
Next week, I want to stay close to those early signs: help the first Leadrack users get value, understand what brought the Contentcron signups in, and watch whether the new Modsignal pages begin appearing in search.
Bonus goal: Start using Leadrack for some cold outreach!