Content / Social Media SaaS · 21 days (MVP)
Newsly — AI-Powered News & Trend Scanner with Auto-Posting
The founder of Newsly is a solo creator who posts on LinkedIn 5x/week. He spent 90 minutes a day reading TechCrunch, HackerNews, and 8 other sources, then 60 more minutes writing posts. That's 12.5 hours a week of content work for a 1-person business. He hired me to build "the system that does what I do, in 10 minutes a day instead of 2.5 hours."
Newsly — AI-Powered News & Trend Scanner with Auto-Posting
Client: Newsly (SaaS startup, paying user 1)
Industry: Content / Social Media SaaS
Timeline: 21 days (MVP)
Stack: Next.js 15 · Supabase · Claude API · Buffer API · LinkedIn API · n8n · Vercel
Slug: /case-studies/newsly-ai-content-platform
The problem
The founder of Newsly is a solo creator who posts on LinkedIn 5x/week. He spent 90 minutes a day reading TechCrunch, HackerNews, and 8 other sources, then 60 more minutes writing posts. That's 12.5 hours a week of content work for a 1-person business.
He hired me to build "the system that does what I do, in 10 minutes a day instead of 2.5 hours."
What I built
A three-layer system:
Layer 1: Scanner (n8n, runs every 4 hours)
- Pulls from RSS: TechCrunch, The Verge, HackerNews, Product Hunt, Reddit r/startups
- Stores raw articles in Supabase
- Deduplicates by URL hash
Layer 2: Trend Analyzer (n8n + Claude, runs every 6 hours)
- Pulls last 24 hours of articles
- Sends to Claude with prompt: "Find 3 emerging themes that aren't yet over-saturated. Return JSON with theme, supporting articles, and confidence score."
- Stores themes in Supabase with article references
Layer 3: Web App (Next.js)
- Founder logs in, sees trending themes ranked by confidence
- Clicks "Generate post" → Claude writes 3 variants in his voice (he uploaded 50 of his old posts, system prompt embeds his style)
- Founder picks one, edits if needed, hits "Schedule"
- Buffer API queues it for posting
Key engineering decisions
- Claude over GPT for content generation. Claude's voice control is dramatically better when you give it 50 sample posts as style reference. GPT-4 was too "LinkedIn-y."
- Stored themes separately from posts. A theme might be reused across 3 posts over a week. Decoupling them meant we could surface "themes you haven't covered yet."
- Supabase pgvector for similarity. When the founder asked for "trending themes that don't overlap with what I've already posted," I embedded his last 30 posts and filtered new themes by cosine distance.
- Buffer over native LinkedIn API. LinkedIn's API has aggressive rate limits and weird approval requirements. Buffer abstracts all of that and supports cross-posting to X.
The numbers
- Founder's time: 12.5 hrs/week → 45 min/week (94% reduction)
- Posting consistency: 3–4 posts/week → 5 posts/week, every week
- Engagement: Founder reports ~40% higher avg engagement (better-timed, theme-driven)
- MVP cost: $2,200 fixed price + $30/mo running cost (Claude + Supabase + Buffer)
What I learned
The AI doesn't replace the founder — it kills the research and the first-draft work. The founder still reviews, still picks, still edits. That 10% human-in-the-loop is what makes the output sound like him and not like every other AI-written LinkedIn post.