Key results
The company
Firecrown Media
firecrown.comMedia and content-to-commerce platform for aviation, marine, and hobby enthusiasts.
Result highlights
- Potential $1.2M annual savings on software
- Proposal process cut from 4 weeks to 4 hours
- Monthly Discover referrals increased to 1.3M
- 26% SEO boost via AI toolkit
The story
A $60 million media company operating 50 websites and 20 magazines with a distributed team of 200 employees.
Budget tracking was decentralized and chaotic, with contributors relying on disparate Google Sheets or pencil and paper methods that offered no central visibility. Additionally, high-quality journalism often missed technical SEO fundamentals like metadata and keywords, limiting organic reach.
The product team empowered non-technical staff to build custom internal applications using Replit, moving from idea to working prototype in as little as 15 minutes. Key deployments include a budget tracking system for 45 employees and an AI-powered SEO tool that automatically generates headlines and metadata for journalists. This approach shifted development from expensive SaaS contracts to a model where business users deliver near-complete prototypes to engineering for final polish.
Scope & timeline
- 15 mins to build functional prototype
- 1 week to build production app
- 50+ employees using custom budget app
Quotes
“The amount of money I'm saving on not having to go buy software, I'm investing in people. Instead of spending $50,000 to $70,000 per custom SOW to build a feature, I can take that budget and hire people. That's been a huge paradigm shift—AI isn't taking over jobs, it's freeing up budgets to hire more people.”