I fired two tools and we're building the replacement

_{Day 135/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

Thursday = “open-all-the-tabs and pray the laptop fan survives.”

Today’s deep-dive: the content tech stack living rent-free on my screen — why it’s there, what I’ve ghosted, and the holes I’m still patching.

Daily drivers

• Ahrefs — my morning dopamine hit. Rank drops, backlink spikes, all here → https://ahrefs.com
  

• Penfriend — house-made. I use the production app for publishing and a scrappy dev build for whatever wild feature I’m cooking next → https://penfriend.ai
  

• GA & GSC — the broccoli. GA4 tastes like boiled socks, but query data is still free → https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/ | https://search.google.com/search-console/about
  

• Coda — runs the company, the roadmap, the grocery list → https://coda.io
  

• ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity — idea roulette. Prompt, re-prompt, ship → https://openai.com/chatgpt | https://www.anthropic.com | https://www.perplexity.ai
  

• Samsung Notes + Galaxy Tab — every outline, doodle, and newsletter wireframe starts here. Stylus > keyboard for first-pass ideas → https://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/apps/samsung-notes/

Stuff I benched (and why)

• SurferSEO — daily driver turned sparring partner. AI rewrite craze + search shift. Now I’m building the leaner version inside Penfriend → https://surferseo.com
  

• Semrush — I get the hype. Still feels like wearing someone else’s shoes → https://semrush.com
  

• Google Docs — copy-paste into WordPress once, cry forever → https://docs.google.com
  

• Notion — RIP lag monster. Coda is still king to me.

Skunkworks & side-quests

• AlsoAsked clone — DataForSEO wired into Penfriend Dev to yank PAA questions and auto-weld them into briefs → https://alsoasked.com | https://dataforseo.com
  

• Lovable — my sandbox for tiny niche apps and Penfriend prototypes → https://lovable.so (yes, the .so stands for “so many side projects”)

Gaps still gaping

• A GA4 replacement that doesn’t feel like clicking through damp cardboard.
  

• One editor to draft → optimise → blast straight into WordPress, no formatting exorcism.
  

• Syncing Samsung Notes with ChatGPT so I can search scribbles, auto-plan posts, and shove deadlines into the calendar without manual copy-paste.
  

• Unified “content health” dashboard: rankings, EEAT flags, social lift — one glance, zero spreadsheets. We’re on it.

Your turn

Hit reply with the one tool you can’t ship content without. I’ll round up the best gems (and roast the strangest) in a future issue.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "The blog post is dead, long live the blog post" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. If Samsung Notes ever adds a “turn my chicken-scratch into JSON” button, I’m retiring to a beach and letting the robots finish the newsletter.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.