Ruben Lozano

After leaving Lyssna, I started job hunting — and quickly realised I had no real system.

No proper tracking. Rewriting the same cover letter answers from scratch. Forgetting the answers I'd already written to interview questions. And the low motivation after impersonal rejection emails landing in my inbox.

So I built Job Notebook.

It's a web app I developed using Lovable that helps you:
→ Track every application in a kanban view
→ Import job descriptions via a Chrome sidebar
→ Spot skill gaps between your profile and the role
→ Generate personalised cover letters (always read before sending!)
→ Store your interview Q&A answers so you never repeat yourself
→ Work in "seasons" — start, search, land something, close the season
→ Track KPIs like reply rate and time-to-interview

The stat that genuinely kept me going: landing 1 marketing job takes an average of 120 applications and 130 days. Once you know that, each rejection feels less like failure and more like progress.

Currently looking for beta testers. If you're in the middle of a job search, comment below or send me a message — I'll get you access. And if you know someone who could use this, please do share this post.

Building tools for problems I've seen across dozens of startups — that's the kind of work I find genuinely exciting.

This week I launched UTM Studio — a UTM management tool I built because I was tired of seeing the same issue everywhere: teams tracking campaign links in Google Sheets with zero consistency, zero history, and zero visibility.

UTM Studio includes:
→ A Chrome sidebar extension so you can copy UTMs without leaving your tab
→ AI-powered search across your full campaign database
→ Campaign history showing who created what and when
→ Templates and best practices to keep teams aligned

If this sounds familiar — and I suspect it will — I'm giving free access to a small group of early testers in exchange for honest feedback.

Drop a comment or send me a message. Happy to talk about it. 🙌

Something changed for me this year — and it started with a futsal group chat.

Every week, the same problem: how do we create balanced teams? Who's been rating well? Which games did we win? So I did what any reasonable person does... I built a web app for it. No coding background. Just a weekend and a tool called Lovable.

That app — Futsal Squad — started getting used by people outside my group. Which made me think: if there's a real need here, why not take it seriously?

So I kept going. I built four more tools I actually use as a marketer — a UTM builder, a job search tracker, a content tool, and a football team manager. All things I was already paying for somewhere else.

And that's when the uncomfortable question landed:

If I can build this stuff without being a developer... what's stopping everyone?

I've been thinking about it since. My honest take is that two types of SaaS products will survive this shift:

The ones with real network effects — where the value is the data and the community, not the interface. You can clone an app. You can't clone the user network built over the years.

And the ones with deep expertise baked in — where the product reflects a decade of domain knowledge that no prompt can compress.

Everything else is becoming a weekend project for someone like me.

I'm curious what this community thinks. Are there other moats that hold up? And if you're building something — how are you thinking about this?

Something personal I wanted to share with you all.

April 2nd was my last day at Lyssna — and not for the reason most people might assume.

Growth was happening, but not at the pace the business needed. In a growth marketing role, that's the contract — you're measured against trajectory. And the trajectory wasn't where it needed to be. I was honest about that, and we agreed to part ways.

It's not the easiest thing to admit publicly. But I think there's more value in being real about it than pretending everything went to plan.

I'm genuinely grateful for my time there — two years of real challenges, and a team that I'll always look back on fondly. Truly one of the best groups of people I've worked with.

Now I'm looking ahead. I grew up competing in sports, chess, and construction work in the summers, learning to code at night. Losing was always part of it. You lose, you learn, you come back with better homework.

This is just more homework.

If anyone in my network knows of growth marketing opportunities — or just wants to chat — my inbox is open. And if you've been through something similar, I'd love to hear how you navigated it. 👇

Reddit doubles down on AI search and ads.

- AI-powered advertising tools drove significant revenue growth
- 6M weekly users adopted Reddit Answers (their AI search tool)
- They're integrating AI deeper into core search functionality.

Insights? AI in Marketing is not just OpenAI, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude, Reddit is already there and many more to come. Your users are now in places where you didn't expect and learning about your startup from other voices that are not yours on your website or directory websites.

B2B SaaS takeaway: AI tools that solve real user problems = revenue growth.

Definitely, the time to start experimenting again with all the channels and be more unique and organic like never before.

For SaaS Marketing Leaders: What AI features are driving growth in your platform?