Hi Reader
I built a SaaS because I was paying nearly £400 a month for developers to still tell me no.
That is honestly where this starts.
Not with a grand vision. Not with market research or a pitch deck.
With a billing notification and the realisation that I was spending serious money every month on an infrastructure that, with the right tools and enough stubbornness, I could just build myself.
Let me back up.
Like a lot of people in the online business space I have been deep in AI tools for a while now.
But unlike a lot of people, I'm not interested in hype. I'm focused on building things that are meaningful and providing training that is valuable.
So you can imagine my frustration at not being able to get a product to where I wanted it to be, whilst paying through the nose for it. 😤
So over the last couple of months I've gone really deep with what is known as vibe coding.
For those who have not heard the term, vibe coding is essentially using AI tools to build real software without being a developer.
You describe what you want, iterate on what comes back, make decisions, ask questions and gradually something real takes shape. Not a prototype. Not a mockup. Actual working software.
I want to be honest about what that process looks like because it is not as clean as the highlight reel suggests.
There were moments I genuinely did not know if what I was building was structurally sound.
Moments where the AI confidently produced something that looked right but had a security flaw I only caught because I thought to ask. 👀
Moments where I hit usage limits at 11pm and begrudgingly had to stop and go to bed.
But I kept going.
Because for the first time I was building something exactly the way I wanted it. No developer telling me that feature was out of scope. No roadmap I seemingly had no influence over. No compromises I did not choose myself.
The product is called Relavo. 🚀
It lets you build AI assistants trained on your own content, deployed on your own website or course portal, fully branded as you.
Your knowledge stays yours. Your audience never sees a third party platform. They see you.
I built it because I wanted it for myself first.
I wanted to move away from a core custom ChatGPT issue...I wanted proper protection for my IP, full control over the experience my audience gets and features that actually matched how I work.
When I couldn't do that with what I already had, I got to building it myself.
The fact that other people might want the same things came second.
That is what this newsletter is about. Every week I will be sharing something real from the build. The wins, the decisions that kept me up at night, the lessons I only learned by getting stuck and figuring my way out.
Building in public, but the honest version. Not the highlight reel.
Next issue I will get into the Meta verification wall. The moment I discovered that connecting Facebook and Instagram to your platform is not just a technical problem, it is a bureaucratic one, and what I did when I hit it.
If you are building something with AI, or thinking about it, or just curious what it actually looks like from the inside, stick around.
This is going to get interesting.
🧡 Toni