KeX Keyword Generator: SEO Tool for Founders Who Hate SEO Tools

When you first read the title, you might have thought:

“Why would I care about your SEO tool if you literally said I… hate SEO tools?”

I’ll get to that in a second –

I was staring at a number that made me feel professionally stupid: $1,116.

That’s what I was really paying per month for my $130 SEO subscription.

The rest? My time. 17 hours of it, every single month, clicking through dashboards I barely understood.

When I started Eightception, I tried the traditional SEO route. I followed graphs, calculated formulas, spent HOURS finding the right “keywords”…

But in reality – I still had no idea whether it would work or not.

The Real Cost of SEO for Startups

SEO is NOT something every small team can afford…

And it’s also not something every large team can do well.

Here’s what my typical “keyword generation process” looked like: Open SEMRush. Stare at 27 different tabs. Click on Keyword Magic Tool. Get 847 suggestions. Spend 45 minutes building a spreadsheet to compare them. Still have no idea which ones will actually work.

TONS of hours are spent in front of those HUGE dashboards…

And you’re barely using 15% of the software even if you do manage to understand it.

Not to mention all the hours you’re losing – which you could invest elsewhere in your business and get a MUCH higher ROI. Every hour in a dashboard is an hour NOT building your product, talking to customers, or shipping features.

The History of KeX And How It Started

My partner and I at ITEM8AI (our AI & Automation studio) are both builders – seasoned product experts and startup founders ourselves.

In short…

We love building and launching cool sh*t.

We’ve worked with a lot of marketing departments at global companies…

So we totally understand how painful SEO can be.

Big tools like SEMRush or SpyFu are amazing.

They’re powerful. They’re packed with features.

But here’s the problem: They take massive amounts of time to use.

• You’ll pay $130+ (and your time) a month, and then realize you’re only using 15% of the functionality.
• And if you’re not a full-time SEO pro… you’re STILL left guessing. You’ll still use the “promised keywords” and wonder why you’re not getting any results.

When we started building our own new products in 2025, we fell into the same trap.

So I feel you.

I purchased subscriptions like SEMRush and SpyFu. Spent (way) too many hours on them.
Got tired and overwhelmed.

And as any entrepreneur knows – time is the MOST precious asset. How much is 1 hour of your time worth? THAT’S the true price of the software.

But builders don’t have endless hours to sink into dashboards.
We have products to launch and customers to serve.

So we thought:
What if we had software that would do all the work by itself?
What if you could just paste in your article, get fast SEO optimization, and completely forget about keyword research?

The Birth of KeX, the Keyword Generator

At first, we decided to build KeX for ourselves. It was supposed to be an internal tool – nothing more.

A tool that would help us make our own pages visible for my blog on Eightception, our websites, and our new products at ITEM8AI.

Our philosophy was simple: launch fast, fail fast, move on.

We used KeX internally for months. Testing and refining. Making it work exactly how WE needed it to work. To make it goddamn easy to get our pages visible.

After a while of developing… Testing and refining…

A consulting client, another startup, casually asked me: “What’s that tool you’re using to optimize content? Can we use it for our site?”

That’s when it hit us: We’d accidentally built something other people needed!

Now we use it for ALL our products. We literally use Kex for Kex’s own content 🙂

What 503 Reddit Posts Taught Me About Fast SEO and Keyword Research for Startups

I went full obsessive-researcher mode. This HAD to be a product for other founders.

I processed over 220,000 Reddit posts from builder communities. AI-analyzed them, categorized their pain points, and studied their motivations.
(Well… I built and politely asked my AIs to analyze them…)

Cherry-picked 503 posts that absolutely screamed frustration.

Then I used AI (RAG-assisted) to build synthetic personas that represented real builders in the wild.

It confirmed what we suspected:
Builders, like you, DON’T want a million features. They need less friction. Who would’ve thought?

You don’t want to “become SEO experts.”
You just want to write about whatever YOU want to write about.

And then – simply ask a software to put the right keywords, meta descriptions, etc.
No, you can’t say it’s not true – the research says it is.

Read more about this approach in my IndieHackers post.

Building Affordable SEO Tools: Our Philosophy of Cutting, Not Adding

Here’s where most SaaS companies go wrong: They keep adding features.
It’s always “WE NEED MORE BUTTONS!” More dashboards! More personas!

With KeX, we pretty much went the opposite route.
We cut functionality.

No 27-tab dashboards. No features to justify a $130/month price tag. No “comprehensive reporting suite” that takes 2 hours to understand.

We cut target personas (KeX is NOT for everyone).
And cut everything that distracted from the core job-to-be-done…

Which is: serve builders to just want to build their products and write their blogs about whatever THEY want to talk about.

Changing SEO & Content Paradigm: Who is the King?

Spoiler: Content Is.

We changed the order of steps too:

• From the good old pre-AI approach:
  • “please SEMRush, tell me what will make Google care about me so I can force myself to write a blog about some random topic because a keyword tool told me to.”
• To:
  • You simply write the content YOU want to write.
  • And then… You ask KeX to optimize it for SEO.
  • Back to building and investing your time into things that will ACTUALLY move the needle.

And look…

KeX is not here to make you an SEO fan or a PhD-level analyst.
It’s a single-purpose, high-speed tool that does one job really well: Make your page visible, fast.

So if you’re a professional SEO guy, an agency, or someone who loves chunky dashboards – you’ll hate KeX.

However…

If you’re a founder or a creator who just wants their page to be VISIBLE without spending ages on startup SEO… KeX is for YOU. 

At the end of the day…
SEO should serve your business, definitely NOT the other way around.

Fast SEO and Content Optimization: How It Actually Works

You write the article, or product description, or a draft landing page. Use your voice, your opinions, your common sense – instead of making some AI regurgitate the same incestual content it spits out for everyone…

Then you paste it into KeX.

KeX analyzes your content, checks real SERP data, and gives you fast content optimization:

• The primary keyword strategy (just 5-10 keywords instead of 1000)
• Transparent reasoning behind every suggestion
• Title and Meta Description recommendations
• A slightly and naturally improved text that includes these keywords

No black box. No “trust us.” Just data you can verify yourself.
Make the changes. Publish. Move on.

Takeaways

If you’re a builder who wants to move fast, here’s what you should remember:

• The true cost of SEO tools isn’t the subscription — it’s the hours you lose inside them.
• If YOU’re struggling with something, there’s a market of people with the same problem.
• Research where people complain – 503 Reddit posts gave us more insights than any market research report could.
• Ruthlessly remove everything that isn’t core to the job-to-be-done. Say goodbye to some of your target audience personas.
• Solve for speed – Builders need fast SEO answers in seconds, not comprehensive dashboards they explore for hours.
• Make it tribal – “Not for everyone” is a feature, not a bug. Own your niche.

If you’re a builder who’s tired of complex SEO tools, you can try KeX here.