Dan Cucolea

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Dan, the technical co-founder at Yahini.io. My background's a bit of a winding road – I actually dipped my toes into engineering and computer science before realizing my real passion was in the marketing world, especially the hands-on side of building things online. After years working in and then co-founding a content agency with my partner, we built Yahini to solve our own bottlenecks, and then launched it with the world!

What did it take/how did you get started?

Ha, well, getting started wasn't exactly a straight line! Both Maria-Cristina and I came from backgrounds that involved a lot of building things from the ground up – whether it was my early days in affiliate marketing and side projects after dropping out of uni, or her creative ventures. We eventually pooled our skills and launched our own content agency. And honestly? Yahini was born directly out of the challenges we faced in that agency.

We were spending so much time on the upfront strategic work for clients; hours upon hours digging into keywords, analyzing competitors, mapping things to funnel stages, and crafting really detailed content briefs. It was valuable work, but incredibly time-consuming, sometimes taking 25-30 hours before a single word got written. Around the time AI started making waves, clients naturally began asking us about it – 'Are you using AI? Could this make things faster?' And internally, we were feeling the pinch too. We thought, 'There has to be a smarter way to handle this planning phase.' So, initially, Yahini wasn't even meant to be a public product!

We started building it as an internal tool just to scratch our own itch, to make our agency workflow more efficient, cut down that research time, and get to the actual content creation faster. It worked so well for us internally that we thought 'Wait, if this is saving us this much pain, imagine how valuable it could be for other agencies, solo marketers, or founders trying to do content on a budget.' That's when we decided to pivot and really focus on developing Yahini into the platform it is today. We've been bootstrapping it the whole way, funding it with revenue from our agency work, and gradually shifting more and more of our energy into building Yahini full-time.

What does the future look like for you and your business?

The future for Yahini looks incredibly exciting, but also focused. We're right in the thick of this wild AI evolution in content marketing. You see so much generic, AI-generated 'noise' out there now, and honestly, that just reinforces our mission. The way we see it, the real value isn't going to be in churning out more content, but in creating the right content, strategically.

So, for Yahini, the future is all about doubling down on that strategic layer. We want to be the indispensable AI content strategist. That means we're constantly refining how Yahini understands your specific business context, your audience, and your competitors. We're pushing to make our funnel mapping even smarter, our keyword prioritization even more impactful, and the insights in our content briefs even deeper. We're always training and experimenting with the latest, most capable AI models – like we're using Claude 3.5 now for some tasks and looking at Gemini 2.5 – but always guided by the real-world strategy frameworks we've built from our agency experience.

We also have a pretty packed roadmap focused on making the whole content workflow smoother: deeper integrations, more ways to analyze performance, and features that help teams collaborate better around the strategies Yahini helps build. You can actually check out our public roadmap to see what's coming. On the business side, we're laser-focused on really nailing our product-market fit even further and figuring out the best channels to reach the folks who need Yahini most.

What drives / motivates you on a daily basis?

Business-wise, it's seeing Yahini actually make a difference for people. Getting feedback from users saying we've saved them hours of tedious work or helped them finally get a real content strategy off the ground – that's incredibly motivating. We built this to solve a pain we felt deeply in our own agency, and knowing it's solving that same pain for others keeps us pushing forward.

What advice would you give someone interested in doing what you do?

Start by solving a real problem you genuinely understand, preferably one you've experienced yourself. For us, Yahini came directly out of the agency grind, the hours we were burning on content planning, and the frustration that came with trying to get good outputs out of AI instead of generic slop. Then, talk to your potential users relentlessly, way earlier than you think you should. Get their feedback, understand their exact pain points, and listen hard, even to the criticism. That's how you build something people actually need.

What has been the hardest part of your business journey?

Where do I even start? :D honestly, one of the biggest hurdles has definitely been the shift in how we reach people. Coming from our agency background, we were used to more targeted outreach, building relationships with a smaller number of potential clients. With Yahini, it's a completely different ballgame. We need to reach a much wider audience, and cutting through the noise in the SaaS and marketing tool space is tough. Tied directly into that is just getting folks to fully grasp what Yahini actually does.

We've worked hard to explain that it's a content strategist designed for planning and brief creation, not just another AI article spinner. But attention spans are short these days. People see 'AI' and 'content' and often jump to conclusions. We spend a lot of time clarifying that crucial difference, that the value is in the strategy and expert-trained frameworks, not just generating paragraphs. And that leads straight into the education piece, which is a constant effort.

There's this massive wave of people just using raw AI tools to churn out content because it's easy and cheap. The hard part is convincing them that why that often doesn't work for SEO or actually connect with readers. We have to educate the market on the importance of the strategic foundation. It's battling the 'good enough, fast enough' mentality that basic AI enables.

How have you managed burnout thus far?

You know, burnout hasn't really been a factor for us, thankfully. We learned a lot about managing workload and pressure running our agency before starting Yahini. We got pretty good at managing our time effectively and are constantly looking for ways to make our own processes more efficient.

What are a few resources that you'd recommend?

For the technical side of things, especially if you're building web apps, I found Jonas Schmedtmann's courses, particularly his React course, incredibly valuable. Really solid foundation building there. On the content strategy front, I highly recommend following the thinking coming out of places like Animalz and Grow and Convert. They consistently put out deep, strategic insights into what actually works in content marketing, not just surface-level tips. And maybe a bit unexpectedly... I'd recommend a healthy dose of fantasy fiction! :D

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