Why I built Marsell
I kept building things nobody heard about. Marsell is my fix for the part of every project I was worst at: getting it in front of people.
By Ilya Arbabi, 6 October 2026
I built Marsell because every project I started had the same problem, and it was never the building. It was the part after: getting the thing in front of the people it was for, and getting some of them to pay.
The pattern
I'm a builder. I start things, a lot of them: I've made 50 different apps. They were good, all of them, and I couldn't get a single one in front of eyeballs, let alone the people it was for. I couldn't sell a gold bar in Times Square at 50% off if my life depended on it.
Each time, the product got made. And each time the marketing either didn't happen, or happened badly, or happened for two weeks and then stopped. Not because I didn't care. Marketing is a hundred small jobs a week, every week, forever, and someone with a product to build does the first ten and quietly drops the other ninety.
What I actually needed
I didn't need another tool. I had tools: a scheduler, a design app, a chatbot that writes whatever I ask it to. What I didn't have was someone who would do the work every day without being asked:
- read the business properly, once, and remember it
- decide what this week is for
- make the posts, the pictures and the short videos
- send them, answer, follow up
- look at what worked, and do more of that tomorrow
And someone I could trust not to post something stupid in my name.
That's Marsell. You give it your website. It reads the business, the pages, the products, the way you write, and you correct what it got wrong. Then it plans the week, makes the posts, images and short films, publishes them, runs outreach and ads within limits you set, and tells you what worked. Nothing goes out without your OK.
Why not just use ChatGPT
A chatbot writes a good post if you ask it the right question, at the right moment, with the right context pasted in. The asking is exactly the job I kept dropping. Marsell is built so you don't have to ask.
There's a second reason, and it's the one I care about most. Every model reaches for the same "creative" ideas. Ask a thousand of them for a coffee-shop ad and you get close cousins of one coffee-shop ad, a thousand times. The research on this is striking, and I wrote it up in Why every AI writes the same ad. So Marsell doesn't ask a model to be creative. It decides the creative choices first, in code, and steers each brand away from what it did last week. That's the chaos engine.
Its first job is marketing itself
Marsell is in early access, and its first customer is Marsell. The films on the home page, the posts about it and the channels with the mascots on /mascots are how I find out whether it works. If it can't market itself, it has no business marketing yours.
Your turn. Type your website and Marsell starts on it, or, if you'd rather hand the whole thing over, book a call with me.