autoBlogger

I've been building Shopify apps independently for several years now, but autoBlogger started because of a problem I had myself as a Shopify merchant.

I knew regularly publishing fresh, useful content could be valuable. The problem was actually doing it.

Coming up with topics, researching them, writing articles, finding images, adding links, optimising everything and then remembering to do it all again the following week was exhausting.

So I started building autoBlogger.

The idea was pretty simple: what if the blogging process could genuinely run itself?

From an auto writer to an automated blogging platform

autoBlogger was built specifically for Shopify from the beginning.

I didn't want to build another general-purpose AI writer where you type a prompt, get 1,000 words back and then have to do everything else yourself.

The goal was always automation.

You tell autoBlogger about your store, products, audience and what you want to achieve. From there, it can continually create and publish content without you having to sit down every week and think, "I really need to write another blog post."

The product has changed enormously since those early versions.

Today, autoBlogger uses a multi-pass AI writing and editing process rather than relying on a single prompt and response. It can research and develop topics, create structured SEO-focused articles, intelligently link to products and existing content, select imagery, create metadata, schedule publishing and keep the blog running automatically.

It can also use recommendations directly from Google Search Console to help identify content opportunities based on the store's real search data, score articles for SEO before publication, and automatically share published content to social channels.

I've also gradually added things like contextual backlink features and integrations with some of my other Shopify SEO tools.

My aim has become pretty straightforward: make autoBlogger the best-in-class option for Shopify merchants who want to automate their blog, rather than simply another AI article generator.

Still completely solo and self-funded

The slightly unusual thing about autoBlogger is that there isn't really a company behind it in the traditional sense.

It's me.

I'm the founder, developer, support team, product manager, marketer and, occasionally, the person frantically investigating why something has broken at an inconvenient hour.

There are no investors and no VC funding. autoBlogger is completely self-funded.

If a merchant contacts support with a problem, they're talking to the person who writes the code. If somebody suggests a feature and it makes sense, I'm also the person who can decide to build it.

Being solo obviously has limitations, but I think that direct relationship with merchants has played a huge part in making autoBlogger what it is today.

Twice selected as a Shopify Staff Pick

One of the things I'm most proud of is that autoBlogger has been selected as a Shopify Staff Pick twice.

For a completely independent app built and supported by one person, getting that recognition from Shopify meant a lot.

But the thing I value even more is the feedback from the merchants actually using it.

autoBlogger has been around long enough to accumulate genuine reviews from real Shopify merchants, and I've always been pretty obsessive about keeping those reviews genuine.

Why genuine reviews matter to me

This has actually become something of a personal crusade.

The Shopify App Store is incredibly competitive, and reviews have a huge influence on which apps merchants trust.

Unfortunately, I've also watched apps climb the rankings while accumulating what appear to be enormous numbers of questionable or incentivised five-star reviews.

When you're competing as a small, self-funded developer and earning reviews organically from merchants who genuinely use your product, that's incredibly frustrating.

I've become quite vocal in the Shopify developer community about fake and incentivised reviews and have repeatedly pushed Shopify to take the issue more seriously.

It might not be the world's most relaxing hill to die on, but I think genuine reviews should actually mean something.

I'd rather autoBlogger have fewer reviews that came from real merchants than hundreds that were manufactured to make the app look more popular than it really is.

Where autoBlogger is today

What started as a way of solving my own frustration with constantly creating content has turned into a fairly comprehensive Shopify blogging platform.

It's still being actively developed, and I'm still adding and refining things constantly.

AI has obviously changed enormously since I first started working on the app. The challenge now isn't getting an AI to produce 1,000 words. Almost anything can do that.

The interesting problem is everything around it.

How do you consistently choose worthwhile topics? How do you use actual Google Search Console data to uncover opportunities? How do you make the content relevant to a particular store? How do you naturally incorporate products? How do you connect new articles with existing content? How do you avoid generic AI filler? How do you score and improve the SEO before publishing? How do you distribute the finished article socially? How do you edit and check the first draft? And, perhaps most importantly, how do you make all of that happen without the merchant having to manage it every week?

For merchants looking for an AI blogging app for Shopify, I want autoBlogger to be the genuinely hands-off option: research, Search Console-driven recommendations, writing, editing, SEO scoring, linking, imagery, scheduling, publishing and social sharing handled as one automated workflow.

That's the problem I'm trying to solve with autoBlogger.

Not "AI that can write a blog post".

A blogging system built specifically for Shopify that can actually run the process for you.

If you're a Shopify merchant and want to see what I've been building, you can find autoBlogger here:

https://apps.shopify.com/autoblogger

And if you're another solo founder, I'd be interested to hear your experience too. Has staying solo ultimately made your product better, or have you reached the point where being the person responsible for absolutely everything has become the biggest constraint?