From a Blog Topic Tool to SEO Coaching: How Tyler Scionti Built Centori

From a Blog Topic Tool to SEO Coaching

Tyler Scionti ran a sports website during his college years, writing articles and working with outside contributors. He later did product management at HubSpot and at startups in the Boston area, but his interest in writing and online business stayed with him. Centori was the business that came out of those two interests meeting.

The starting point was blog topic suggestion software he came up with in 2016. He learned programming and built the web application himself over about a year, then turned toward search engine optimization, or SEO, in 2018. When he started freelancing in SEO, subscribing to an outside tool at $100 a month felt like a burden, so he decided to build the tool he used himself.

After the tool produced some results in his own work, he rebuilt the software in 2020 and put it up for sale. Free signups accumulated, but they did not turn into paying customers. Users wanted features on par with Ahrefs or Semrush at a low price, and meeting those expectations was hard for Scionti as a new developer.

In 2021, he turned coaching that teaches SEO strategy into a product. Talking with customers, he realized that handing over search data alone does not produce results for them, and that they need someone to work through with them what to do. In 2022 he also prepared a cheaper product that combined a community with group coaching, and the customers on that product grew past twelve.

The software took on the job of finding keywords and tracking results in Google Search Console. Customers asked questions in the community and learned SEO strategy through monthly group classes or one-on-one coaching. Centori grew into a service that supported the whole path from looking at the data to deciding the next move.

Consultations and Writing Built Revenue

To sell coaching, Scionti had to learn sales himself. He had held a poor impression of sales since his days working in customer support, and early on he was awkward about contacting potential customers or running product demos. In 2022 he rewrote the homepage from a list of features into copy centered on the customer's problem and the results they could expect, and funneled visitors toward booking a free consultation.

Consultations were 45 minutes long. The first 15 minutes went to understanding the customer's situation, and the next 30 to explaining an approach to solving the problem along with related examples. Customers could see during the call how Scionti understood and solved their problem, and in that same conversation he proposed coaching and software.

In 2023 it became clear that coaching customers struggled at the stage of actually writing content. Scionti added a service that writes articles for customers, and that service grew revenue enough to build the base for working on the business full time. Writing, which he had long enjoyed, became Centori's main source of income.

He wound down his job at the end of May 2023 and devoted himself to Centori. A business he had run on nights and weekends for several years became the work that supported his living. The article he wrote before leaving carried an explanation that customer response had backed the decision, along with the responsibility to build an operation that pays its monthly costs and turns a profit.

In a retrospective published in January 2024, Scionti said the customer count had passed 20 and monthly recurring revenue had broken $8,000. Revenue in 2023 more than doubled from the previous year to pass $100,000, and twelve companies went through the SEO strategy program that year. With coaching and the content service joined together, Centori became a business he could run after leaving his job.

Narrowing Customers and Products Together

After revenue grew, the product lineup became a new problem. In early 2024, Centori was selling software and community at $39 a month, one-on-one coaching at $399 a month, and an agency service at $2,500 a month all at once. Customers who wanted to learn SEO themselves and customers who wanted content produced for them landed on the same homepage, which made the explanation complicated and widened the scope of operations.

Scionti pulled the core business into two parts. One service covered building the customer's content strategy and doing the writing, and the other taught the strategy and method so the customer's own team could execute it. As the target customers for the two products moved closer together, both the marketing message and the scope of work became clearer.

The content agency service combined ongoing strategy management with production and distribution. It covered identifying what the customer's potential buyers search for, drawing visitors with content that matched, and then designing the path that turns them into inquiries and purchases. The performance standard Scionti describes for the service is also tied to the qualified leads it brings in through the website.

The strategy guidance product also gained a concrete duration and sequence. The six-month growth program he described in a 2025 interview set the first month for building strategy and the following five months for guiding execution, and it was priced as a one-time fee. The old software stayed in use for internal work as well, supporting the services he delivered himself.

The way he brought in customers needed correction too. SEO content and ads gathered about 1,000 readers, but a large share were freelancers who wanted to learn SEO, not the company founders he wanted to sell the agency service to. After that he cut back on his own SEO and focused on LinkedIn, email, referrals, and direct prospecting.

A Business One Person Can Run

Scionti began to think of his work in three roles: customer work, marketing, and sales. He had to manage separately the time spent producing good results for customers and the time spent winning new customers. In a 2025 retrospective he said he had shifted his growth goal toward building deeper relationships with each customer and delivering work of greater value.

In a November 2025 interview, Centori's monthly recurring revenue was about $14,000. In months when he took on additional projects he earned more than that. A business that had struggled to sell software became a one-person service company combining strategy support and content writing.

In a June 2026 retrospective he said he had steadily handled six to eight customers at a time over the previous year. His income over that period was higher than what he had earned as a product manager, and he wrote about 25,000 words a month for customers. Customer work had piled up to the point of taking up most of his day.

On the official pricing page checked in September 2026, the content marketing service starts at $4,500 a month. The base package includes 5,000 words of content a month, promotion and distribution, ongoing strategy management, and one hour of strategy calls per month. Between calls, communication happens over Slack or email, and it is sold without requiring a long-term contract.

In a 2026 retrospective, Scionti named not rushing to hire, choosing customers carefully, and being paid enough as his operating principles. He also accepted that customers hand him work because of how he judges things and how he writes. What he built through Centori was an independent job writing customers' content and helping with their marketing, and the word he used to describe himself at the time was "writer."