Software is Content. Content is Software.

DEEP DIVE

Software is Content. Content is Software

I’ve used TinyWow for years – to compress a PDF, remove a background, and so on. I always saw it as a quiet site, a drawer full of useful tools.

Then I looked under the hood.

Roughly 3 million visits a month. A growing layer of AI-powered micro-apps. And a low-effort monetization model pulling in six figures a year – all without a blog, funnel, or ad campaign.

When I first saw those numbers, it hit me.

Software is content.

TinyWow doesn’t teach anyone anything. It wins on pure utility, and that’s why it works.

Because most people, for better or worse, aren’t scouring the internet for lessons.

They’re looking for leverage.

Creation Is No Longer The Bottleneck

It has never been cheaper to spin up software. You can scaffold a functioning SaaS with serverless back‑ends and free credits for literally zero dollars.

Meanwhile, “good enough” writing has been completely commoditized by AI. If anyone can generate 2,000 words in two minutes, the value of average content rounds to zero.

As a result, the edge for content teams and creators is starting to shift.

One direction it’s moving: from publishing words to shipping usefulness.

Interactive apps, dashboards, Gumloop workflows, Custom GPTs, n8n recipes, Lindy agents – these are fast becoming core content assets.

Micro-Apps & PLG

Here’s the mindset shift:

For content teams: Treat micro‑software as the new blog post. Tools that answer a question or automate a step earn trust faster than text does (and show better page dwell times, too).

For SaaS companies: Your product is the content. In a world of self‑educating buyers, a freemium tier isn’t a pricing tactic – it’s the article, the webinar, the case study rolled into one…

Okay, But What Does That Look Like?

Let’s look at a ridiculously successful micro-app, built long before AI.

It’s called Sleepyti.me. You plug in your wake-up time, and it will tell you when to fall asleep to complete full sleep cycles.

One input. One output. That’s it.

Since launching in 2021, it racked up over a million backlinks from over 4,500 unique domains.

No blog. No newsletter.

Just a dead-simple tool that ranked for the right term and did one thing well – so well it got acquired and rerouted to power someone else’s SEO strategy (Sleepopolis).

But here’s my point:

This playbook worked before AI. Now it’s 10× easier.

You could rebuild SleepyTi.me with your vibe coding tool of choice — Replit, Lovable, Bolt, etc. — in an hour.

Or better yet, build your own.

Find a question your audience keeps asking. Then answer it with something they can use, not just read.

From there, the decision’s yours:

• If it’s an SEO play, optimize the page and leave it open.

• If you want emails, gate it.

However, you set it up, it’ll likely look and work better than Sleepyti.me ever did. And it won’t take long.

Start Building

This isn’t about replacing writing. It’s about expanding the toolkit.

Because our job as content marketers and creators isn’t just to tell stories. It’s to deliver value, in whatever form delivers it best.

Sometimes that’s a blog post. Sometimes it’s a workflow, a micro-app, or a Custom GPT.

So the next time you sit down to write, ask yourself:

What’s the most useful thing I could publish?

Then go build it.