Sydium

I have a confession that's kind of embarrassing for someone building a social media tool.

I hate posting on social media.

Not in a cute "I'm so busy building" way. In a real, I-open-the-app-stare-at-it-for-ten-minutes-close-it-and-go-back-to-writing-code way. I've been doing this for months and I still can't post consistently without my own tool doing it for me.

That's basically the whole origin story. I couldn't do the thing, so I built a thing that does it.

But there's more to it than that. And if I'm going to build in public I should probably start with the actual truth.

I spent 15 years building software I didn't care about

I started coding when I was 21 in Romania. Mobile apps, games, whatever I could get my hands on. Some of them were genuinely fun to build and I learned a ton - how to ship, how to deal with users, how to build something from nothing. I did some enterprise work too, small stuff, nothing huge.

It was a good run for a long time. But somewhere around year 10-12 something shifted. The projects started feeling interchangeable. The decisions I disagreed with kept piling up - features I thought were pointless, architecture choices that made me cringe, sprint planning meetings debating button colors. All compounding into this feeling of why am I doing this for someone else.

I didn't have a dramatic exit moment. No "I walked out of a meeting and never came back" story. I just started building Sydium on nights and weekends like every other solo founder who can't afford to quit their job first.

Yeah there are 50 social media tools already

This is the question I get most and it's fair. Why build another scheduling tool when Buffer exists.

Here's my honest answer. I researched all of them. Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, Metricool, Sprout Social, Publer. Every single time the same pattern: the tool does 70% of what creators need and makes the other 30% painful. Or it does everything but costs more than what I pay for rent in Romania.

But the real reason is simpler than market analysis. The social media management market is worth $32 billion and growing at 24% per year. A crowded market doesn't mean "go away." It means people are paying for this and the existing players got comfortable.

Buffer was revolutionary in 2013. Hootsuite was the answer when "social media manager" became a real job. But those tools were built before AI could write a decent paragraph. Before one person could realistically manage six platforms with the right software.

Most of them just bolted on a "generate caption" button onto the same scheduling interface from 2015. And called it AI.

I wanted to build something where AI wasn't a feature you click. It was the whole point. Sydium learns how you write - your vocabulary, your tone, your weird emoji habits - then creates content that sounds like you, schedules it, and publishes. You review once a week or let it run on autopilot.

What I got wrong (a partial list)

I'd be lying if I said any of this went smoothly.

The brand voice system was terrible at first. It analyzed your posts and produced this weirdly formal version of you. Like if someone read your tweets and then wrote a cover letter in your style. Technically similar vocabulary. Completely wrong vibe. That took months to fix and honestly it's still getting better every week.

I spent two months building analytics nobody asked for. I assumed people wanted charts. Turns out creators want to know "is this working" not "here's your engagement rate broken down by day of week with a 30-day rolling average." The analytics are simpler now. Less impressive looking, more actually useful.

Then there's everything that isn't code. Writing landing page copy? Figuring out pricing? Dealing with Instagram's API that breaks things without warning and then you spend three days debugging something that was working fine on Tuesday?

"The product with a sizable market and low competition wins even with bad marketing. But in the same market, the product with better marketing wins every time."

That quote keeps haunting me. After 15 years of thinking code quality was everything, it stung.

What 332K weekly impressions taught me about my own product

Here's where it gets interesting.

I've been on X seriously for about four months. At peak I hit 332,000 weekly impressions. Not from ads, not from threads - from replies. Turns out replying to other people's posts is worth 13.5x a like in the algorithm's eyes. One good reply on a viral thread gets more visibility than a week of original posts.

My best reply got over 1,300 likes. Most of my original posts barely break 100 impressions.

The guy building a social media tool was getting more traction from leaving comments than from posting content.

It taught me something about the product though. Creators don't just need help publishing. They need help being seen. Content creation is maybe 30% of the battle. The other 70% is distribution - getting anyone to look at what you made.

Every tool I was competing with is optimized for the 30%. Create and schedule, create and schedule. But the hard part was never creating and scheduling. The hard part is creating something that performs and getting it in front of people who care.

That realization changed what I'm building. Not just a publishing tool. Something that actually understands what works and adjusts over time.

Building from Romania

I don't usually talk about this because it feels irrelevant. Software doesn't care where you wrote it.

But it shapes things. The obvious part is cost. My burn rate is a fraction of what it'd be in San Francisco. Firebase hosting, AI API calls, a domain name. No office, no employees, no kombucha budget.

The less obvious part is the isolation. There's no co-working space full of other founders here. No meetups where someone says "oh you should talk to my friend at Y Combinator." When I tell people locally that I'm building a SaaS, most of them ask what SaaS stands for. My accountant asked me to explain recurring revenue. Twice.

The indie hacker community is mostly online which helps. But it's still just you and a laptop most days.

What building in public means here

I'm building in public but not the "day 47 of my journey" kind that's mostly content marketing wearing a trenchcoat. More like: here's what I'm working on, here's what the numbers actually look like, here's where I'm stuck.

The next big thing is making the AI autopilot smarter about performance. Right now it creates content in your voice and posts it. But it doesn't yet learn from what worked and adjust the next batch. That's the gap. When it can close that loop - write, post, see what performed, adjust, repeat - that's when it goes from convenient to genuinely useful.

I'm also adding more platforms. Every new platform is a week of OAuth headaches and API documentation that was clearly written by someone who hates developers.

The honest version

I don't have thousands of users. I don't have a hockey stick growth chart. I don't have a revenue screenshot with a rocket emoji.

I have a product I use every day. A small group of early users who actually give feedback. A list of things to build that's way longer than I'd like. And the weird contradictory feeling of building a social media tool while still being bad at social media.

Some days I think this is working. Other days I look at the gap between where Sydium is and where it needs to be and it feels enormous.

But I've spent 15 years building software that solved problems I didn't care about for people I'd never meet. Sydium solves a problem I have. The people who use it actually talk to me about what they need. That alone makes it worth it even on the bad days.

If you're a creator or a small agency and social media is eating your hours, you can try it free at sydium.com. No credit card.

If you're a fellow founder building something, I'm here. If you think building another social media tool is stupid, you might be right. I'll find out.