Why I'm building dist0

I spent most of my career building databases, first as an engineer and then as a product manager. In 2024 I took two months to build a side project, a small tool that adds bilingual subtitles to videos. I thought building it was the hard part. I'd post it on YouTube, share it on Twitter, write a few SEO articles, and people would find it. It wasn't that simple.

So I tried what everyone recommends. First were the AI writing plugins for WordPress, but pure AI slop is exactly what Google's helpful content updates were built to bury, so those posts went nowhere. Then I paid for Ahrefs and Semrush and followed their advice exactly: one article for every keyword they marked as low difficulty. Still no clicks.

The difficulty scores turned out to mean little for a new site. A "low difficulty" rating assumes you already have some authority, so the pages they rated easy landed around 60th or 70th for me. The keywords these tools push are also mostly head terms: big, broad, and the ones everyone competes for. The long, specific questions a new site can actually win barely showed up, partly because keyword databases only see 15–35% of real searches in the first place.

Eventually the real problem became clear. AI made writing nearly free, so every keyword worth having is already crowded. Trying to beat a page that already answers a question well is a fight you usually lose. The opening is the opposite: the questions Google hasn't answered well yet. You can read the signs straight off the search results page:

• the results mix different goals — some pages sell, some just explain
• small or unknown sites are sitting on the first page
• the top pages are old and out of date
• none of the results actually answer the question asked

Those are the ones a new brand can win.

dist0 grew out of that. Instead of starting from a keyword database, it reads Reddit for the people describing your problem in their own words. A real thread has everything a keyword leaves out: the context, the frustration, the way someone actually phrases it. And it's fresh, because they posted it this week, not because a tool guessed at its volume. Every day dist0 turns those threads into a Reddit market brief and sends it to you on Slack or email. It points you to Reddit threads where a genuinely helpful reply fits while people are still looking for an answer, questions worth writing about, and problems you could solve with a free tool, a feature, or a small offer before a competitor does. For the writing, dist0 does the research and the outline, then leaves the article to a real person. It won't write AI slop for you.