I’m Shutting Down Content Goblin – A Post Mortem
John Ward
I’ve made the difficult decision to shut down my SaaS Content Goblin. It’s no longer financially viable for me to keep running the software.
Content Goblin was my tool to generate image based listicles, recipes, and Pinterest pins for the articles.
Why I created Content Goblin
For about 25 years I’ve been into creating and monetizing websites and content. I’ve run affiliate ad campaigns, built content based websites monetized with ads, and software.
In 2024, I started to dive into Pinterest monetization. Pinterest was growing fast and sending massive amounts of traffic to publisher websites. The basic model was: create a listicle, pin a bunch of pins to Pinterest, send traffic to your website, monetize via display ads.
I found I was having a hard time keeping up with the posting volume necessary to keep traffic coming to the website regularly. Then I discovered a tool called Pin Generator that helped me schedule the pins in bulk, but I still had to manually create the articles. So I started making my own scripts to help with the article generation part. Initially it was a fairly simple Jupyter notebook that evolved into a web UI.
I joined a community of Pinterest creators called Maverick Mastermind forum and started sharing my method for creating articles and pins. One of the forum partners, Jesse Cunningham, reached out to me because he thought what I was working on was cool. I gave him a demo of my tool and his initial reaction was “I could totally sell this to my audience.” I had never thought about creating a SaaS tool before this, but I thought I could probably pull it off with my background in tech. I decided to go for it.
Building the Tool
I initially coded the prototype by hand using ChatGPT as a guide to learn Python/Django. Eventually I started using Cursor to help code the site, but the coding models were still not where they are today, so it still took a lot of manual work.
I had recently left a very demanding job at a fast growing startup called Moveworks to go to another very demanding job at Meta (who later laid me off). I wasn’t sure if I would be able to support the product given that I was working 10+ hours per day.
Marketing and the Initial High
After meeting Jesse Cunningham, I decided to partner with him to promote Content Goblin to his large YouTube following. I gave Jesse a large chunk of the company to promote the tool. It seemed like having 100k+ subscribers seeing my tool would be a fair trade for the equity.
I finalized the MVP and we soft launched the initial version of Content Goblin in November of 2024. I believe the official launch was around the beginning of January 2025. We quickly hit $15k MRR with the help of Jesse’s YouTube channel. I was riding a high and thinking we were sure to hit at least $30k MRR. We talked with some other SaaS partners and they thought we could get to $100k MRR.
The Downward Spiral
We peaked at $15k MRR and had some churn, but that is expected in SaaS, especially AI driven SaaS. The churn never stopped though. One interesting note is that Jesse predicted his audience would tap out around $15k MRR.
As the sole developer and support person, I was a little bit overwhelmed by support issues given that I also was working 10+ hours per day at my day job. I kept up, but I was burning out.
Massive Fraud Attack
In March 2025, we got hit with a massive fraud attack. Scammers joined my affiliate program then used fraudulent credit cards to charge about $50k in subscriptions in a few days. This was due to me not requiring a valid email address during sign up. I did that to remove friction for users.
I caught this rather quickly and contacted Stripe to see what to do about it. They actually told me to wait for the chargebacks, which I thought was absolutely insane. Not only would it be unethical, but the chargebacks could get my Stripe account banned. So I did the right thing and canceled and refunded all of the fraud charges I could identify.
Stagnation
Users continued to use Content Goblin, but I let it stagnate due to the demands of my job at Meta. The tool was getting stale. At the same time competitors were also launching. I think I was one of the first to market in this niche, but I no longer had an advantage.
Ad Networks Clamp Down on AI Content
Around August of 2025, one of the most popular ad networks that my users used to monetize their websites, Mediavine, started to crack down on AI content and specifically listicles. Mediavine started banning websites from their tier 1 ad network and their Journey starter network. My own websites were caught in the ban. This eliminated the source of income for many of my users, causing them to cancel their Content Goblin subscriptions.
Making the Decision to Shut Down
Around the time of the initial decline, I did make an attempt to sell the company. It was hard though because we didn’t have a long running history of steady MRR and we were clearly in decline. The site did not sell.
Jesse made the decision to pivot his YouTube channel away from Pinterest as he could see the death spiral also. So I lost that marketing channel. Then I started running Facebook ads to attempt to drive some growth. I got a few conversions but CAC was way too high to make up on the backend.
I took a look at my monthly profit and we were barely breaking even. Because I relied on so many other AI model providers, my profit margin was less than 40% which is actually pretty low for SaaS from what I understand. I had a usage based credit system, so users would always pay that margin when they generated an image or article, but I also had fixed costs for the server, database, and image storage. Once the MRR was 1k, I could no longer sustain these costs. We were still slightly profitable, but it was no longer worth my time.