This is the first post in a series I'm calling the Heist Build Log — the real, unpolished story of building Heist while running everything else. No case studies. No "10x your engagement" nonsense. Just what actually happened.
The problem was me
I didn't start Heist because I spotted a gap in a market report. I started it because I was the gap.
I knew exactly what I should be doing. Post consistently. Show up on LinkedIn. Keep the blog warm. Turn one good idea into a week of content across five platforms. Every founder, creator, and marketer knows the playbook. The problem was never knowing what to do — it was finding the ninety quiet minutes a day to actually do it, on top of building a product, answering customers, and trying to have a life.
So the content didn't happen. Or it happened in a panicked Sunday-night batch that I'd burn out on by Wednesday. Then a three-week silence. Then guilt. Then another Sunday-night batch. If you've lived that loop, you already understand why this company exists.
The tools weren't the answer
I tried the obvious fixes first. Schedulers. AI writing tools. A folder of "content templates" I downloaded and never opened twice.
Schedulers solved the wrong half of the problem — they'll happily post for you, but only after you've already written everything. The blank box was still mine to fill. And the generic AI tools had the opposite issue: they'd write endlessly, but everything came out sounding like a press release from a company that didn't exist. Confident, fluent, and completely off-brand. I'd spend more time rewriting the AI than I'd have spent writing it myself.
The gap nobody was filling: a tool that already knew my brand, my voice, and my audience — so the first draft was actually mine, not a stranger's.
That's the whole idea behind Heist. Not "AI that writes." A system that remembers who you are and turns that into a month of on-brand content faster than you can make coffee.
What I actually wanted
I wrote down what would have to be true for me to actually use a tool like this, every day, without the guilt loop:
- It has to know my brand cold. Voice, audience, the things I'd never say, the offer, the rules. Once. Then forever.
- It has to do the boring part. Not just drafting — scheduling, publishing across platforms, retrying when something fails, and telling me when it can't.
- It has to turn one idea into many. A blog post should become a LinkedIn post, an X thread, an Instagram caption — without me copy-pasting and reformatting for an hour.
- It has to get better the more I use it. Learn what performs. Stop suggesting the stuff that flops.
- It has to fit into the tools I already live in — not become another tab I forget to open.
That list became the product roadmap. Most of the posts in this series are the story of building each one of those bullets — and the roadblocks that nearly killed a few of them.
Why "Heist"
Because that's what it feels like to get your time back. Consistent content used to cost me my evenings and weekends. The goal of Heist is to steal that time back — to walk out with a full content calendar and leave the busywork behind. A clean getaway from the Sunday-night batch.
What this series is
Over the next several weeks I'll publish the honest build log: why I threw away the first version of the product entirely, how I taught a machine to sound like a real brand, the pricing decision that scared me, the "scroll wars" that ate two weeks of my life, and the bet I made that you should be able to run your entire content engine from inside ChatGPT or Claude.
Some of it is a victory lap. A lot of it is me being wrong in public. All of it is true.
If you're stuck in the same loop
You don't have to read seven posts to get the point. If you're the bottleneck in your own content — if you know what to post and just never have the time — that's the exact person I built this for.
Start a free trial of Heist. Spend ten minutes teaching it your brand, and let it draft, schedule, and publish your next month of content for you. No Sunday-night batch required. If it saves you the evenings it saved me, you'll know within the first week — and that's roughly how long it takes to wonder how you ever did this by hand.
Next in the series: why I deleted the first version of Heist and started over from zero — and why that was the best decision I made.