I Vibe Coded the Backlink Tool I Always Wished Existed
A hundred days, 1,500 commits, and no coding background — a full walkthrough of the SaaS built to automate cold-outreach backlink building.
Posted
5 days ago
Duration
Format
Demo
sincere
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4.1K
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
The bottleneck in backlink outreach was never the emailing — it was the hours of manual research needed to find the right small sites and personalize each pitch, and that is the exact process this hundred-day vibe-coded SaaS automates.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You build directories, SaaS products, or content sites and know backlinks matter but dread the manual research of finding prospects.
You've hit a wall doing cold outreach by hand and want to see what a non-technical builder automated after living the pain themselves.
You're weighing an Ahrefs subscription and want to see exactly what it unlocks for a link-building workflow.
SKIP IF…
You want backlinks without doing any outreach — this system still requires vetting leads and sending real emails, just faster.
You're not willing to pay for an Ahrefs API key — the tool's most useful automation depends on it.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
After landing a high-authority backlink through one personalized email in 2022, the creator spent a hundred days building a SaaS that automates the entire cold-outreach backlink process he still believes works better than any other link-building method. The tool takes a keyword, reverse-engineers which sites already rank for it, pulls their backlink profiles via the Ahrefs API, filters out low-quality or unresponsive-type prospects, extracts and verifies contact emails, drafts personalized pitches, and schedules automated follow-ups — either hands-off through an Autopilot mode or step by step through a manual pipeline. A cheaper backlink-data API was rejected after a head-to-head test showed it returned data that didn't match Ahrefs, on the reasoning that bad data would undermine the whole system.
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Origin story: a single personalized backlink email landed a high-authority link that helped grow a directory to 90,000 monthly visitors.
00:51 – 01:51
02 · Link swap vs. link insert
Explains the two cold-outreach asks: swapping a competitor's existing link for yours, or asking to be added alongside it — inserts are more common.
01:51 – 04:27
03 · Building Autopilot: keyword in, vetted leads out
Autopilot walkthrough: reverse-engineers the SERP for a keyword, pulls competitor backlinks via Ahrefs, filters spam, drafts personalized emails, and handles follow-ups automatically.
04:27 – 05:57
04 · Manual pipeline: Discovery to Extraction
Step-by-step manual demo: Link Discovery turns a keyword into a competitor list, Link Extraction pulls and filters the sites linking to those competitors.
05:57 – 07:24
05 · Qualify Sites, Review Leads, Draft and Send
Qualifying prospects surfaces verified emails and screenshots; leads are scored into tiers; emails are drafted, scheduled, and tracked for live backlinks.
07:24 – 08:10
06 · FAQ: do you actually need Ahrefs?
A CSV-import path exists for users without an Ahrefs subscription, at the cost of personalization quality; understanding cold outreach itself is still required.
08:10 – 08:58
07 · Protecting email domain reputation
Why cold outreach needs a dedicated sending domain, not a personal or business inbox, and why low, targeted volume beats mass sending.
08:58 – 10:10
08 · Why not the cheaper DataForSEO API
A head-to-head test against Ahrefs showed the cheaper backlink API returned data that didn't match — a data-trust decision, not a cost decision.
10:10 – 11:49
09 · What 100 days of building actually looked like
Reflection on the isolation, long hours, and detachment of shipping something at a high standard without fully understanding the underlying code.
11:49 – 12:42
10 · What's next
The build phase is over; marketing and iteration become the new focus, alongside more directory and SEO projects.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A single personalized backlink email sent in 2022 helped grow one directory to 90,000 monthly visitors at its peak.
A link swap asks a site to replace a competitor's existing link with yours; a link insert asks to be added alongside it — inserts are the more common, lower-friction ask.
The best cold-outreach prospects are small blogs, not high-authority sites like Forbes, because small sites actually respond.
A cheaper backlink-data API returned millions of backlinks that didn't match Ahrefs' results for the same site, so the lower cost wasn't worth the accuracy loss.
Sending backlink outreach from a personal or business email risks damaging that domain's sender reputation — outreach needs its own dedicated domain.
A hundred targeted cold emails a month beats spraying thousands, because a low, consistent send volume is what protects domain reputation.
The biggest design goal for AI-drafted outreach emails was making sure they didn't read as AI-written.
A CSV-import option removes the Ahrefs dependency entirely, though it trades away most of the tool's automated personalization power.
The real work of building a product doesn't start until after launch — marketing, iteration, and distribution become the new job.
A hundred days of building at eight to twelve hours a day, with stretches of total social withdrawal, is the actual cost behind a single demo video.
Takeaway
Manual outreach still beats scale — remove the drudgery, not the personalization.
LINK-BUILDING PLAYBOOK
Cold backlink outreach works because it's personal and targeted, not because it's automated at volume — the win is removing the research grind while keeping every email genuinely relevant.
01The 2022 email that started it all
One well-targeted, highly relevant backlink can outperform dozens of generic ones — it grew one directory to 90,000 monthly visitors at its peak.
The best backlink prospects are found by studying a direct competitor's existing backlink profile, not by cold-searching for random sites.
02Link swap vs. link insert
A link swap asks a site to replace a competitor's link with yours; a link insert asks to be added alongside it — inserts are the lower-friction, more common ask.
Reaching out with a swap only makes sense when you're a genuine substitute for the competitor being replaced.
03Building Autopilot: keyword in, vetted leads out
A well-designed cold-outreach system does five things end to end: find who's ranking, pull their backlink sources, filter for quality, personalize the pitch, and schedule follow-ups.
Automated follow-up sequences that drip over one to two weeks recover replies that a single email would lose.
04Manual pipeline: Discovery to Extraction
Keyword-based link discovery works by reverse-engineering which sites already rank for your target term, then pulling every site linking into that competitor set.
Filtering prospects by domain rating, page traffic, and link count before reaching out removes low-quality sites a raw data pull won't screen out.
05Qualify Sites, Review Leads, Draft and Send
Scoring leads into tiers before drafting emails focuses personalization effort on the prospects most likely to convert.
The single biggest quality bar for AI-drafted outreach emails is that they must not read as AI-written — genuine personalization is what earns a reply.
06FAQ: do you actually need Ahrefs?
A manual CSV-import path removes the Ahrefs dependency entirely, trading away automated personalization data for flexibility on cost.
Understanding how cold outreach works — not just having a tool — is still a prerequisite; tooling accelerates a process you need to understand first.
07Protecting email domain reputation
Never send cold outreach from your primary personal or business email — bounces and non-responses tank that domain's sender reputation and can break normal business email delivery.
A dedicated outreach domain, sent at low, targeted volume, protects deliverability far better than mass sending ever could.
08Why not the cheaper DataForSEO API
Before trusting a cheaper data API, test it head-to-head against the industry-standard source on the same query — a mismatch of millions of records is disqualifying, not a rounding error.
Choosing a data source is a data-trust decision, not a cost decision — bad data poisons everything built on top of it.
09What 100 days of building actually looked like
Building something that requires deep focus for months often means fully disconnecting from other people for stretches — set expectations before you disappear into a build.
Not fully understanding the code you're shipping creates a real feeling of detachment, even when the end result works and meets a high bar.
10What's next
The real work starts after launch: marketing, iterating, and getting the first users deserves the same intensity as the build phase.
Building varied projects instead of repeating the same format is a legitimate strategy for staying engaged over a long creative career.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Link swap
A backlink tactic where you find a site linking to a direct competitor and ask the owner to swap that link for yours instead.
Link insert
A backlink tactic where you ask a site to add your link alongside an existing one, rather than replacing a competitor's link — a lower-friction ask than a swap.
Domain reputation
A sender's trustworthiness score with email providers, damaged by high bounce rates or low response rates, which can get outreach emails routed to spam.
Domain Rating (DR)
An Ahrefs metric estimating a website's backlink authority on a 0-100 scale, used to filter out low-quality prospect sites before outreach.
Ahrefs
A paid SEO tool providing backlink and keyword ranking data; several of the demoed tool's automations require an Ahrefs API key to function.
“I still don't know how to code. And so there's a weird detachment when it comes to building something and trying to build it at the highest standard.”
Honest admission that undercuts the typical vibe-coding hype narrative.→ Newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
12:12
“I'm a variety guy. I can't have vanilla ice cream every day.”
Memorable personality metaphor for why he won't just keep building the same directory format.→ IG reel closer↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphor
So in the last one hundred days, I did nothing but vibe code my very first SaaS, and I wanted to talk about it. So why did I spend damn near a thousand hours and over 1,500 commits in the last one hundred days building this thing? Well, I was curious to see how far I could take vibe coding, but I think the main inspiration for this was a singular email that I sent almost four years ago in December 2022, and it landed me my very first high quality back link.
The reason I don't really mind sharing it now is because, honestly, since I started making videos, so many people have copied this directory. I think I have, like, 30 different competitors now, so I don't mind inviting a few more.
At the time, I had just finished creating my first directory. It was in the thrifting niche. You might have heard about it.
I've kind of talked about it a lot. And it was this backlink that ended up getting me rank one page one and eventually growing this directory to 90,000 monthly visitors at its peak. It was super relevant.
It was full of traffic both in the root domain and the referring page, and it was just overall like an actual entity, an actual asset that was linking to me. Now if you know anything about how I like to build backlinks, the way I even found this person and this website to reach out to to begin with was just popping in a competitor in Ahrefs, clicking on the backlinks, and looking at what other links and websites are pointing to my competitor.
And I kinda talked about it in the last video that I posted a couple months back. I call this a link swap, not to be mistaken for a link exchange where you agree to exchange links, but one where you find a direct competitor and you just ask the website owner to swap your competitor's link with yours. But I think the more common approach is called a link insert where you basically do the same thing, but instead of asking for a link swap, you just ask to be featured somewhere on the page.
And that's maybe because you're not really a direct substitute for that competitor, and oftentimes that's pretty rare. So three months ago when I was starting to build out my first SaaS, I was just trying to replace the manual process that was tearing my soul apart.
Every single project, every directory that I built, I knew once I built it and I started ranking for some keywords and I optimized the on page SEO, I would need to worry about backlinks. And as someone who spent thousands of dollars experimenting with all of these different backlink methods, my favorite way is just to be super upfront and just do very targeted emails and just ask for a link insert or link swap.
That's literally it. So I was thinking, what if I could just build a way to make that whole entire process way easier? Whether I build a directory, whether I build a SaaS, which is what I did, I can use the SaaS to grow the SaaS, uh, or literally anything else because anytime you're doing SEO, you're probably going to put a big emphasis on backlinks.
And that brings me to my favorite feature of the entire app, which is called autopilot. And you basically type in the keyword you wanna rank for. You can tweak settings, but I set it up so that the default settings are honestly really really good at filtering any spam, doing the proper research, writing great personalized emails, and then you can just hit start autopilot.
This is gonna take a little bit of time depending on how many emails and how many people you wanna reach out to, but let's just say I wanted to reach out to 25 people. It's gonna do everything from reverse engineering the search engine results page for that keyword. It's gonna plug those websites in to Ahrefs, which yes means you do need the Ahrefs API key, extract emails from their website, extract other information that's gonna be really valuable for personalizing the email.
When you come back, what you're left with is a vetted list of actual high quality backlink prospects that are pointing to competitors defined by any website that is currently ranking for your keyword, and then you're left with this list of prospects that are pretty much ready to get emailed immediately. Here's a list of a bunch of different websites that you can check out.
You can click on them, see if they're kind of relevant and to your liking, if they're approachable. Right? That's another thing that was really, really important with this app because if you hit up a Forbes, they're not gonna even email you back.
No one's trying to waste their time with that stuff. So you can go through these manually if you want or you can just go and send the emails. I even built automated follow ups so that if they don't see the first email or don't respond, you can slowly drip out follow-up emails over the next week or two.
Uh, you can manage the inbox and the conversation here directly in the app, and then, of course, you can track any backlinks that go live. Pretty cool feature if you ask me. I think I built it out of sheer laziness, which is kind of ironic, but what's actually happening in the back end can be tweaked and controlled to any which way that you like.
And in order to build this feature to begin with, I had to build the foundation, which is if you wanna manually go through the pipeline and see everything that is happening, you can do that. And I'll show you a really quick example of doing this manually.
So let's just say I wanted to build backlinks to my existing directory, the binfinder.com, and I wanted to target the keyword goodable bins. It is a low competition keyword, gets tons of traffic.
So I would type in the keyword goodable bins in link discovery. And what link discovery does is it reverse engineers the search engine results page for all the websites that are ranking for Goodwill pins and maybe similar keywords that are really relevant. It's gonna spit out this list of different competitors that you can then check mark if you want.
What you're doing here is you're selecting the competitors that you want to grab the prospects backlinks from. And I'm gonna bring them over to link extraction. Now, won't go through everything because there's so many little features that I built, but link extraction basically allows you to pull those prospects, those websites linking to your competitors, and you can set different filters if you want.
For me, like to reach out to small blogs because I know my chance of getting response is way higher, and it's gonna basically filter based on Doctor, page traffic, link domains, all of this stuff that I have been storing in my brain for years. There's also tons of spam filters and all of this amazing stuff that you will probably never even see that's built under the hood, but it's designed to just literally get rid of all of the low quality websites and spam that you would otherwise still see in Ahrefs.
And just as a heads up, link discovery and link extraction do use the Ahrefs API, which, yes, means you do need an Ahrefs account. Talking more about that later, but I understand that this is not gonna be for everyone, and Ahrefs is already really expensive.
But with that said, after link extraction, you can go to qualified sites. You can click on any number of the competitors that you brought over and qualify them. This is gonna get you the email addresses of the prospects that you wanna reach out to.
It's gonna verify those email addresses. It's gonna screenshots that you can use for your emails or follow ups. It's also just gonna capture so much detail that's gonna go into personalizing your email draft.
This is gonna take some time, but after it's finished, we're gonna go into review leads. You can see all the different leads and whether we scored it in a tier or b tier lead. And from here, you can simply check mark some of the leads, start drafting emails, and that's where you're gonna see your personalized emails.
And if there's one area where I spend the most time on besides the qualified sites area, it was making sure that these emails didn't sound like Total AI. That was my biggest goal with this. From here, can just select the drafted emails and then you can schedule them, send them out.
Same thing with the follow ups. You can just select them and schedule the follow ups. That's kind of like a quick look at what I built.
It was a crazy journey to say the least. I mean, I think I definitely chose a very difficult SaaS to build as my first SaaS product and I definitely gave into scope creep, but, uh, you know, it is what it is. Now, have this tool that I could use on my directories or on literally any other business that I start.
It's for SaaS products. It's for ecommerce stores, directories, literally anything that you wanna build links to via cold outreach.
Now if you made it this far into the video, you might have some questions like, Frey, did you really say that you need Ahrefs to use this tool? Technically, no. I made a way that if you wanted to, you could import your own CSV.
You don't need Ahrefs, although it would be a massive downgrade in terms of, like, how well the email sound and stuff like that. But you can, like, manually curate what prospects you wanna reach out to and then just upload them and still utilize the tool. But honestly, yeah, I kinda feel like you do need Ahrefs.
You also need a general understanding of how cold outreach even works. This is an area that I had to educate myself on, but basically the TLDR is that you don't wanna just send out emails from your personal or your business email. That is going to put your email at risk because there is something called your email domain reputation.
What happens is that with enough emails bouncing or going to spam and just not getting any responses, it ends up tanking my email domain reputation and it might even just not allow me to use that email like for normal everyday business stuff. And so what you wanna do is you wanna grab a separate email domain, or you can use another tool if you want.
There's a bunch of different email tools that kind of warm up emails for you and all that. I don't think you need that because we're not sending a million emails a year.
We're sending a very targeted 100 emails a month. This is not a spray and pray method. This is more like automating the accuracy and aim of a sniper, but at scale, um, even if that scale is very, very high.
Another question people might ask is, Frey, why didn't you use the data for SEO API or another kind of SEO backlink data API to make this way more accessible to everybody? The short answer is I tried that, and I wanted to do that.
And what I had to do was I had to test the data for SEO API for their backlink data extremely thoroughly, and I basically concluded that the data for SEO backlink API is absolute trash, respectfully.
I'm talking about instances where I would look up a website's backlinks in Ahrefs and then do the same with the Data for SEO API, and I would get literally millions of additional backlinks that Data for SEO pulled for me for that same website, none of which actually matched Ahrefs' backlinks, if that makes sense.
At the end of the day, the question wasn't whether or not I wanna make this app accessible or which API is cheaper. Obviously, it's gonna be data for SEO. It's which data is more trustworthy, and what is the consequence of having poor data?
Because data for SEO, again, it wasn't wrong by a little bit. It was wrong by a lot of bit.
And I tested it out with multiple different examples, and I was like, where the hell are they even getting this backlink data? Who knows? Maybe the data for SEO API will get better over time, in which case I'd be more than happy to figure out ways to make this tool more accessible.
Now the last thing I wanna talk about is just the overall vibes, the experience, the journey of shutting off the outside world and just being a total degenerate sitting in this chair for literally, like, sixteen hours some days, but probably more accurately, like, like, eight to twelve hours a day. You know?
Maybe get some food, maybe go on a quick walk. But yeah. No.
This was extremely degenerate of me. Hopefully, I'm kinda seeming or sounding normal, but I've had multiple people email me or send me texts or messages asking me if I was okay because I just get into this weird zone where I just don't talk to anybody and I just wanna build, especially if I'm really into it.
I stopped working out, terrible sleeping schedules, so many emotional roller coasters when it came to whether or not this is even worth it. And what I'll say is that I think when I stopped posting on YouTube oh, that's my cat.
Like, months ago, I was looking for something that I could kinda pour my heart and soul into, something that would genuinely be helpful or something valuable. And I was just scratching my own itch very, very hard, I guess.
But it was really tough. I think it's easy for me to be like, oh, everybody should be vibe coding and you can create anything. And it's true.
I really do believe that. But there's, like, a real feeling of a disconnect after you build something like this because the one thing that I have in common with three month ago fray is that I still don't know how to code. And so there's a weird detachment when it comes to building something and trying to build it at the highest standard, but knowing that you don't fully understand like the nuances of the code.
You can try your best, which I think I did, but, um, that was kinda weird. For me, the real work doesn't even start until after you've launched. And then now it's the fun part where marketing and talking about it, improving it becomes the new game.
And so I'm really excited about that. That's gonna be really fun because I could use this SaaS to build the SaaS, just get backlinks, do SEO on my own product. I still plan on building directories.
That has never once been something that I don't wanna do anymore. It's more just like I'm a variety guy. I can't have vanilla ice cream every day.
I kinda want some mint chip, you know, some chocolate. If I have this opportunity to build something like a total degenerate because I live alone and I just have two cats to feed. Otherwise, I'm pretty much totally free, then why not do it?
And that was kinda my whole mentality. With that said, uh, feel free to check it out. I'll link the app in the description below.
There's a ton of other SEO and directory stuff that's happened behind the scenes in the last three months, so I'll probably make videos around that. Uh, but let me know what you think. Let me know if you're building something cool.
Appreciate you guys watching. Thanks so much, and I'll catch you guys in the next one. See you.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
In one hundred days and over 1,500 commits, Frey Chu built the backlink outreach tool he says he always wished existed — an entire cold-email research-to-send pipeline built around a single method: the one personalized email that landed his first high-authority backlink back in 2022.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:14concept
Link Swap vs. Link Insert
Link swap — ask to replace a competitor's link with yours
Link insert — ask to be added alongside the existing link
Two cold-outreach asks derived from studying a competitor's backlink profile in Ahrefs. Swaps require being a genuine substitute for the competitor; inserts are the lower-friction, more common ask.
Steal forany cold backlink or partnership outreach campaign
03:10model
Autopilot Outreach Pipeline
Reverse-engineer the SERP for a keyword
Pull competitor backlinks via Ahrefs API
Extract & verify prospect emails
Filter for approachable (small) sites
Draft personalized outreach email
Send + automated follow-ups
Track live backlinks
An end-to-end automation of the manual outreach process: from keyword to a vetted, emailed, and tracked list of backlink prospects.
Steal forcold outreach for backlinks, PR, or partnerships
04:30model
Manual Link-Building Pipeline
Link Discovery
Link Extraction
Qualify Sites
Review Leads
Draft Emails
Send / Schedule
The same outreach process broken into discrete, user-controlled steps for anyone who wants to inspect or override the automation at each stage.
Steal forteams wanting granular control over an automated outreach process
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
12:31link
“Feel free to check it out. I'll link the app in the description below.”
Soft, low-pressure close after a personal/vulnerable reflection — points to the product link and future content, no discount code or hard sell.
A hands-on benchmark-and-demo breakdown of Claude Opus 5's launch, stacked against Fable 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Kimi K3 across reasoning scores, cost, and a dozen live-generated apps and games.
Two AI coding models get the same prompts — a data-driven economy site and an endless flight simulator — and split the win, but only one of them costs half as much.
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