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From Frustration to Solution: Building Wopa - Write Once, Publish Anywhere

You know that feeling when you finish writing a great blog post and then realize the real work is just beginning? Yeah, that's exactly where my story with Wopa started.

I was trying to blog about a boilerplate idea that I wanted to build. Spent a solid weekend writing it up, felt pretty good about the content. Then came the "fun" part - actually getting it out there.

The Cross-Publishing Hell

First stop: Medium. Copy, paste, fix the formatting. The code blocks looked weird, so I had to mess with those for 20 minutes. Then Dev.to - different markdown, different image handling. Oh, and the syntax highlighting broke, so that's another 15 minutes gone.

Then my personal blog. Then Hashnode. Hey, might as well throw a version on LinkedIn too, right?

Three hours later, I'm still reformatting the same article for the fifth platform. At this point I'm wondering why I even bothered writing the thing in the first place.

But here's what really got to me - I write most of my drafts in Notion. It's just... better for writing, you know? Clean interface, great organization, no distractions. Problem is, getting stuff from Notion to these publishing platforms is a nightmare. You lose formatting, code blocks completely break, and images? Forget about it.

Wait, This Can't Just Be Me

So I started digging around. Reddit threads, GitHub discussions, random Twitter rants. Turns out I wasn't going crazy - tons of developers were dealing with the exact same thing.

Found one thread where someone was maintaining an actual spreadsheet to track where they'd published what. Another person just gave up entirely and stuck to Dev.to only, even though they wanted to reach different audiences.

The Notion thing kept coming up too. Lots of people draft there because it's such a good writing environment, but then they're stuck manually recreating everything elsewhere.

I'm sitting there thinking, "Okay, this is definitely a real problem.”

The Lightbulb Moment

I was complaining about this to my friend over coffee (classic developer move, I know), and they basically said, "Dude, you build stuff for a living. If this bothers you so much, why don't you just... build something?"

Fair point.

The idea seemed simple enough - write once, publish anywhere. Let people create content however they want (especially in Notion since that's where so many of us already are), then automatically distribute it.

Sure, there are some tools out there that kind of do this, but they're either super limited, way too expensive.

Building the Thing

I decided to just start building. The plan: get an MVP together quickly, see if this is actually worth solving properly.

Tech Choices

Next.js + Tailwind felt obvious for the frontend. I needed something that could handle rich text editing but also had decent SEO. Tailwind kept things moving - when you're trying to validate an idea, the last thing you want is to get stuck debating CSS architecture.

Supabase for the backend made sense. I'm honestly getting tired of building auth systems from scratch, and I wanted a proper relational database that I actually understand. Plus the API generation is pretty neat.

Google OAuth + Notion integration was crucial. Google because everyone has an account, Notion because that was literally half the problem I was trying to solve. I wanted people to be able to pull their existing content directly instead of starting from scratch.

Vercel for hosting because it just works with Next.js. Push and it's deployed. Done.

The Development Reality

I'll be real - using modern AI coding tools made this way faster than it would've been even a year ago. Instead of constantly googling API docs or trying to remember how authentication flows work, I could just describe what I needed and get working code to start from.

Still had to understand everything and make sure the architecture made sense, but the initial velocity was crazy good.

The trickiest part wasn't the tech stack - it was dealing with all these different publishing APIs. Every platform has its own weird quirks. Medium's API is okay but limited. Dev.to's is actually pretty solid. Some platforms (looking at you, LinkedIn) barely have usable APIs at all.

What I'm Actually Building

I'm putting together the first working version of Wopa, maybe it will be called something different, I still need to think about domain names. The core idea: solve this cross-publishing headache once and for all, especially for people who already write in Notion.

As I've been building, I keep thinking about all the different ways this problem shows up:

• Your library documentation that needs to live on GitHub, your docs site, and Dev.to
• Release notes that should go out everywhere people might see them
• Tutorial series that work better on different platforms for different audiences
• Personal branding stuff that needs to reach people wherever they hang out The Notion angle feels particularly important here. Based on everything I've seen, tons of developers draft in Notion because it's just a better writing environment. But then they're stuck manually rebuilding everything for actual publishing.

Looking for People Who Get It

I'm still pretty early with Wopa, but I'd love to talk to people who actually deal with this stuff. If you're someone who:

• Writes technical content and cross-posting makes you want to scream
• Uses Notion for writing and wishes there was a magic button to publish everywhere
• Has ever spent an entire evening reformatting the same article for different platforms
• Just thinks content distribution shouldn't be this painful I'd genuinely love to hear what you think. What would actually make this useful for how you work? Which platforms do you avoid publishing to just because it's too much hassle?

I'm trying to build something that solves real problems for real people, not just scratch my own itch.