One of my goals over the last few years has been to become more visible on social media.
Partly because it is fun. Partly because it is inspiring to share what I am working on and get feedback from people I would never otherwise meet. But there is also a practical reason: visibility helps me find customers for my freelance business and discover people who might benefit from the products I build.
For a small company like mine, social media is probably the only marketing channel that makes sense.
I am not a startup looking for investors. My company has been around for a long time. I am not trying to become the next unicorn. I simply enjoy building useful things, solving interesting problems, and sharing what I learn along the way. At this stage of my life, that is far more interesting to me than chasing titles or climbing career ladders.
The problem is that being visible on social media is harder than it looks.
I am not a professional content creator. I am a software developer.
That said, I am not completely new to media production. Earlier in life I worked with stage lighting, spent years as a sound technician at local radio stations, and even hosted a fairly popular radio show in my hometown. I understand many of the technical and creative aspects of producing content.
What I do not have is a good system.
Like many developers, I tend to create something, publish it, share a link on a few platforms, and then immediately move on to the next project. A blog post gets published. A video goes live. A link appears on LinkedIn. And then it is forgotten. The more I thought about it, the more wasteful that seemed.
A technical article that takes an entire day to write contains far more value than a single blog post. It could easily generate multiple short videos, a handful of LinkedIn posts, discussion topics for Reddit, and content for newer distributed social media platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky.
In marketing terms, this is often called "fan-out": turning one substantial piece of content into many smaller pieces.
The problem is that I have never found a workflow that makes this easy. I have task lists, notebooks, various organizational systems. None of them helped me consistently plan, schedule, and reuse content in a structured way.
Eventually I realized that what I really needed was software.
I spent some time looking at existing solutions and discussing ideas with ChatGPT. There are tools that solve parts of the problem, but none of them matched the workflow I wanted. They also needed customization and, and time to learn how to use them. So I realized the the best solution for me probably is to build it myself.
With modern AI-assisted development tools, creating a focused application for a very specific problem is now surprisingly affordable. If I can clearly describe the workflow and requirements, tools such as Codex can help generate most oif the code.
That is how smtool was born.
smtool is a small Qt-based desktop application designed to help transform ideas into a structured content pipeline:
Ideas → Inbox → Clarify → Create → Schedule → Fan Out → Publish
It is a traditional dfesktop application built with C++ and SQLite, and designed with privacy in mind. No cloud services. No subscriptions. No accounts. Just a simple and fast tool that helps organize content production.
I can use the project itself as content.
This blog series will follow the creation of smtool from idea to working application. Each day I will document what I built, what worked, what failed, and what I learned along the way.
My goal is to have a usable version ready within five days while spending only a few hours per day on the project. Alongside the blog posts, I plan to publish short videos showing the progress and sharing lessons learned during development. If you are a developer, I hope this series provides practical insight into building small tools with AI assistance. If you are a creator struggling to organize your content, perhaps some of the ideas will be useful. And if you are simply someone who likes making tools to solve your own problems, I hope this project serves as inspiration.
We live in a time where AI is generating an incredible amount of noise and low-quality content. But it is also creating opportunities. For people who understand technology, it has become possible to build highly specialized software for personal needs at a fraction of the cost it would have required only a few years ago. I have been building software professionally for almost forty years. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of project I would never have justified building the traditional way. If it required a full week of dedicated development time, I would simply have used an imperfect existing solution and moved on. But today the economics are different. That makes projects like smtool possible.