What if AI could help you generate ideas for products and build them?
That’s what happened when I used AI tools to create Flowdrafter—a writing app that solves a common problem for writers. (It even became Product Hunt’s #1 productivity tool of the week!)
Can AI Coding Agents Help with Marketing?
My wife is a writing coach and I’m frequently looking for ways to help her promote her business.
Seeing how easy it has become lately to create small tools using AI coding agents such as V0, I thought it might be worth experimenting with some tool-based content marketing (i.e. creating free tools as a way to bring relevant people to her site.)
But what tools should I create?
AI Product Idea Generation
I asked Claude to list common problems writers face.
One of Claude’s suggestions stood out:
“I keep editing as I write, and it’s taking me forever to make progress. I’ll spend an entire writing session perfecting one paragraph.”
— Claude.ai (pretending to be a writer.)
This seemed like a nice problem to try to tackle!
My memory of the next part of the process is a bit hazy and, going back, I couldn’t find much in my AI chat records but I believe I looked into Reddit discussions for more context and used ChatGPT to brainstorm app ideas.
At some point, the idea for a writing app that (perhaps weirdly!) disables editing came together.
(I and/or ChatGPT may very well have been inspired by an existing tool or Reddit thread. If you’re aware of such a tool, please let me know as I’d love to mention it here.)
Rapid AI Prototyping
I used V0, an AI app development tool, to quickly create a prototype. Within minutes, I had something basic but functional. I then used Cursor AI editor to tweak and refine the app further.
Getting it live took a bit longer. I hosted it on Vercel and set it up on a subdomain of my wife’s main domain. You can check it out here: https://flowdrafter.pickupyourpen.com/.
In all, it probably took me a total of a few hours to get everything in place.
Launching to Unexpected Success
I launched Flowdrafter on Product Hunt, not expecting much. I’ve worked on other products for considerably longer that didn’t get much attention there. But to my surprise, Flowdrafter quickly became the most upvoted product of the day!
[Update: It ended up getting pipped to the top spot in the closing minutes of the day but still got a very creditable #2 spot and claimed #1 productivity app of the week.]
Results
If you remember, I got started on this as a way to promote my wife’s writing coaching service.
How effective was it?
Let’s take a look.
So far, the tool (which is on a subdomain of her main domain) has accumulated 65 backlinks (mostly as a result of doing well on Product Hunt):
“So what?” you may ask.
Before this, my wife’s site was languishing on around page 4 of the Google search results for her target phrase of “writing coach”.
Now? It’s in the middle of the first page. Much better!:
As well as winning Product Hunt’s #1 Productivity App of the week, Flowdrafter was featured in The Neuron (an email newsletter going to 500k+ subscribers) as one of its ‘Treats To Try’).
It’s more incidental, but my Reddit write-up about the experience has received 162K views so far:
This led to it being picked up on X (by Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures):
And on LinkedIn (by Kieran Flanagan of Hubspot):
And, as of 9th January 2025, it’s still pinned to the top of the ClaudeAI subreddit as a community highlight (featuring my wife’s face, which she and I find rather amusing!):
What Made This Work?
- Flowdrafter Addressed a Real Problem: Claude correctly identified spending too much time editing as a common problem.
- It Was Simple: The concept of the app was simple, making it easy to understand.
- It Was Quirky: The fact that the app helped address the problem by restricting what users can do probably seemed quite surprising and that seemed to appeal to people.
- AI Made it Easy to Try: Critically, tools like V0 and Cursor let me build and launch the app quickly. In the past it would have taken me much longer and, consequently, I almost certainly wouldn’t have done it at all.
Lessons Learned
- AI Coding Agents Can be Great for MVPs: AI tools such as V0 can do a lot of the work in creating simple front-end apps such as this. (And they’re only going to get better!)
- AI Is a Great Creative Partner: As well as being great for coding, AI can help with product ideas too.
What’s Next?
It’s been fun to see the unexpected interest in Flowdrafter on Product Hunt but people liking the concept is not the same as them using it on a regular basis. I wasn’t planning to develop it further, but its popularity means I’ll be thinking a bit more about that now.
In any case, if you haven’t tried AI coding agents like V0 yet, I highly recommend doing so. They’re going to be getting more and more powerful and I’ll certainly be continuing to experiment to see what they can do!
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