Introducing Mynah

Today I’m announcing the thing that came out the other end of those two years. It’s called Mynah, and before I tell you what it is, I want to tell you how it got made — because the how is the part I’m most excited about.

The models got better. That wasn’t the important part.

Two things changed over the last eighteen months. The models got dramatically better. But the change that mattered more was quieter: I worked out how to put myself into the process. Not my typing. My voice, my judgment, the things I actually believe, and the people I’m actually trying to reach.

To do that I went back to basics. To Eric Ries and the build-measure-learn discipline of lean thinking. To Simon Sinek and the idea that you start with why and let everything else follow from it. I read those principles less as startup advice and more as instructions for teaching a machine who I am. Out of that I built my own system — my brand, my voice, my mission, and a clear picture of who I serve — and wired it into how the content got made.

The difference was immediate. The writing stopped pontificating and started solving problems for actual people. It sounded like me because it was working from a real model of me, not guessing from a prompt.

I’m glad I didn’t build another app.

By the fall of 2025 the system worked well enough that I started thinking bigger. Maybe this could be an app. People sign up, and I run the whole thing for them.

The more I looked at that plan, the more it looked like a trap. The models were changing month to month — sometimes week to week. An application would mean chasing every one of those changes forever: rebuilding tools, updating infrastructure, keeping the lights on. On top of that came everything else that comes with running a product for other people — accounts, password resets, the support queue. And I didn’t want to meet that queue with a chatbot. Being handed off to a robot when you’re stuck is a bad experience, and I wasn’t going to build one.

So I took a page from 37signals: what if I just sell the kit? Build it well, hand it over, and let people own it — the way you used to buy software in the 1990s, download it, and keep it for good. Except now there’s something you couldn’t do back then. You can open it up and change it. Never touch it and it still works. Or bring it into your organization, branch it, extend it, and turn it into something more powerful than what I shipped.

That reframed everything. Mynah stopped being an app I run and became a library of tools you own — individual skills, inside a framework that makes sense, that keep working with whatever the newest model happens to be.

The game changer: I built a tool to build the tool

Here’s the part that changed how I’ll work from now on.

To make a kit people could own and adapt, I had to build something first — a system whose only job was to build the product. Not the product itself. The factory that produces it.

Think of it as putting up the building before you make anything inside it. First you construct the factory. Then you populate it with the marketing team, the product researcher, the customer success team, the operations folks. Then each part of that operation can make its own work — some of it lands, some of it doesn’t, and the ones that land become the product. It’s AI all the way down: infrastructure that builds the application that builds the kit that then sells.

That sounds like a detour. It was the opposite. Because the factory exists now, I can build the next product the same way, and the one after that. The thing I actually made over these two years isn’t only Mynah. It’s a repeatable way to build — grounded in the same time-tested product thinking that made the content work in the first place. This has been the most fun I’ve had building anything, precisely because so much of it was figuring out how to do it differently.

So what is Mynah?

Mynah is a content creation assistant you install and own — a collection of skills and prompts, not another app to log into.

Once you have the kit you need, you start by teaching it about you: your mission, your vision, your values, and your ideal customer. From there it gives you a working staff, each one a specialist:

• A researcher that validates your ideas and finds what’s missing before you build on them.
• A writer that drafts in your voice.
• A style checker that holds every piece to your organization’s standards.
• An editor that shapes the draft into something publishable.

It also builds reviewer personas out of your ideal customer profile — stand-ins for the people you serve — so your audience critiques your work before it goes to market, not after. And every one of these is editable. Once it’s installed, you control what each of them does and doesn’t do.

Underneath it runs a simple framework in three moves: Observe, Distill, Crystallize. It takes in what you’re looking at, asks you the right questions, and frames the idea. It does the research to validate it and surface what’s missing, then assembles a concept for your approval. Once you sign off, it writes. Then it turns the finished piece into social content across every channel you use — and you can add channels, change them, or generate cover imagery to go with it.

You own all of it. Use it exactly as shipped and never change a thing, and it still earns its place. Or make it yours.

The difference shows up in the one measure I actually care about: work I’m willing to publish. Two years ago, a good month gave me a single piece that cleared that bar — researched, and in my own voice. Now a good week does, at the same standard and a fraction of the effort. The system didn’t only make the work faster. It made a real cadence possible.

Why I built it for small businesses

The tooling that makes this kind of thing possible has mostly belonged to large companies — the ones with the budget and the staff to wield it. I don’t think it should stay that way.

Right now nearly everyone is strapped, and nearly everyone is trying to work out how to actually use these tools in a way that pays off. Small businesses and organizations should be able to reach for the same setup the big players have — to get the ball rolling, to get their story out, whether that’s a grant-funded project or a product nobody’s heard of yet. I’ve already seen the difference it makes in the small things I’ve run through it, and I believe it works both ways: up toward unique problems at a macro scale, and down to the one-person shop trying to be heard.

If a tool like this makes someone’s job a little easier, helps them provide for their family, and gets their work in front of the people who need it — that’s the whole point. That’s what Mynah is for.

What’s next

Mynah is ready today. You can find it at getmynah.com, take the kit, and make it your own.

There’s more coming. I ran a stretch of work on video content that didn’t fully land yet — I’m going back to it, and I expect to have something to show before the end of the year. And because the factory is built, whatever comes next gets built the same way: deliberately and yours to own.

Also, if you see anything amiss, lemme know. I can sick my AI on it. ;-)