Why we built Deaku
Oscar Ferguson spent three years growing a tech commentary channel to 80,000 subscribers — while using nine different tools to run it. Notion for briefs. Google Docs for drafts. Buffer for scheduling. TubeBuddy for YouTube analytics. Mailchimp for the newsletter. Another spreadsheet to track what was performing.
The breaking point came in early 2023 when he spent a full Sunday afternoon looking for a draft he had written two weeks earlier. It was in a folder inside a folder inside a workspace in Notion, referenced by a brief in a different database, linked from a row in a spreadsheet. He found it 40 minutes later. He never used Notion again after that week.
Deaku started as a weekend script that pulled his idea list, ran it through an early GPT-3 prompt, and output a structured brief to a single text file. Within a month, two other creators he knew were asking to use it. Within six months, Fuel Ventures had agreed to back it as a real product.
Today Deaku is a small, focused team of eight, based in London. We are in private beta with 300 creators and counting. We are not trying to build a general-purpose AI writing tool. We are building a production workspace for people who create content as a primary activity, not a side project.
