#292 - Diary of Creating My Own AI Assistant, Part 1

I have a confession. I have been low-key obsessed with AI for the last 2 years, and I've been trying really, really hard to not let it consume me because I know myself. I'm a nerd. I come from a big family of nerds, and when something shiny and technical shows up, I wanna pull it apart. I wanna figure out how it works. I wanna build something cool with it and then build something cooler. But I'm also a business owner, and I've watched a lot of people disappear down the AI rabbit hole for weeks at a time and come back with, well, not a lot to show for it. So I've been doing this dance for the last couple of years, and what happened recently has completely changed everything. And that's what I wanna tell you about today. Hey, hey guys, I'm Kate McKibbin from hellofunnels.co and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. Today's episode is a bit different. It's not a strategy episode, it's not a framework. It's really a diary entry. The real honest story of how I ended up building my own AI content assistant, what that process actually looked like, and why the content coming out of it is better than anything I was producing when I was spending 10+ hours a week doing it manually. This is part 1 of a 2-parter. Today I'm talking about the content system. Next week, I'll be taking you inside the bigger picture, what I'm calling my CEO command center, but we'll get to that. All right, let's dive in. So here's how the last 2 years have gone for me with AI. When ChatGPT first hit the mainstream, I was fascinated immediately. I could see the potential straight away, but I also knew my natural tendency. I'm the kind of person who'll spend 3 weeks setting up a perfect system to save me 1 hour a day. And as much as I love that, that's not always a smart use of a business owner's time. So I kept myself on a leash. I'd watch it, I'd watch it, I'd watch it. I'd see new features come out, see people doing cool stuff. And then every few months I'd hit this point where I'm like, nope, damn it, I'm going in. And then I'd spend, you know, a few afternoons deep diving, refining stuff, having my mind blown, putting some pieces in place that would pay off beautifully in terms of getting time back and making things better. And then I get to a point where I go, okay, enough now, back to focusing on business as normal. And then that cycle would repeat. New features would come out, new capabilities, and I'd feel that pull again. I think a lot of people are feeling this right now, this constant tension between I know AI could be doing more for me and but I also can't justify spending 3 weeks setting up something to save me 1 hour. It keeps coming to these tipping points though, where I think, okay, now it makes sense to jump in and go to that next level. And then you step back again. That's been my pattern anyway, exactly that over and over. And these last couple of weeks were definitely a let's go all in moment. So a few things happened at roughly the same time that kicked off what I'd call my most serious AI upgrade yet. First was ChatGPT itself. I don't know how closely you've been following the news, but some of the things that have been happening with OpenAI politically over the last few months, honestly, it's terrifying. I won't go into all of it, but it got to a point where I was like, I need to get off ChatGPT, which was a big deal because the bulk of my AI setup was built there. I was using Claude on the side, mostly just for content creation, because honestly, I was kind of being a tight ass. I was already paying $20 a month for ChatGPT and $20 a month for the base level of Claude, and I didn't want to have to up my subscription to the $100 level for Claude. I think a lot of people are in that boat. You're like, yeah, I'm just gonna, you know, keep ChatGPT because it's cheap. But knowing what you can get out of Claude when you actually commit to it properly, that was really nudging me. The second thing was Claude Cowork. Now you've probably heard people talking about Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Claude Bots, basically these features where AI can run in the background on your computer and actually do things without you. Not just answer your questions, but take action. And I'll be honest, when I first heard about that, it terrified me as a business owner, as just a human, as someone who takes cybersecurity pretty seriously. The idea of giving an AI autonomous control over my computer, hard pass. No, absolutely not. I don't care how cool the demo looks. You are not having something running in the background accessing my email and my browser and my files and just kind of doing stuff without my knowing, that's a no from me. And I think for a lot of people, that's been a big blocker. Well, I hope it has, because otherwise you're in for a world of pain. So the cool stuff we're seeing, it requires you to be able to hand over way too much control and risk. And yeah, the risks are just not big enough for the payoff. But then I started to see people showing you that you could get the benefits. Without really opening yourself up to those bigger risks. How you could use Cowork in a way, or even just using Claude and the projects inside Claude and the skills there, that's still really connected and really powerful, but without giving it full autonomous control. So no bots running wild on your computer, no sketchy permissions, just smart connected systems that you control. That got my attention. And then the third thing happened. My little brother, who is a massive nerd like me, he's actually an app developer. Uh, and these days pretty much all apps are built with AI, so he's deep in this world. Well, he gifted me some of his time for my birthday, which is, to be honest, best present ever, because I knew if I was going to do this, I wanted to do it properly. I was really concerned about the safety stuff, and on top of that, I wanted to do things that you can't just naturally do out of the box. I wasn't here to scratch the surface. I wanted to build some epic stuff and I didn't want to spend weeks and weeks going through YouTube videos trying to figure out how to do it. So this was kind of like the perfect storm. So he sat down with me and helped me set up the foundations, custom integrations that connect all of our key business tools and data into one central place. Which I'm calling our business brain, and then super smart strategic skills that layer on top. And the combination of these things, that's what unlocks everything. Now, I've always had two areas where I focus first whenever I do one of these AI upgrades. They usually are reporting and content. Now, I'm going to talk about the reporting side in part two next week, because today I want to talk about the content. And here's the thing. I already had a really good content system. Our Cash Money Content system was very systemized, very structured, and it already had made a massive difference. Before I had any systems in place, content was probably taking me 10 to 12 hours a week. With Cash Money Content, got down to under an hour because I'm a bit of a perfectionist. For most people using the system, it was much less. So this particular upgrade wasn't necessarily about saving time. I'd already solved that problem. What I wanted was to uplevel my content. I wanted to make it even better because here's what's happened with AI. Being fairly good at content has become the standard. Everyone's using AI to write their stuff now, which means pretty good doesn't cut it anymore. You have to be excellent. You have to create stuff that hits people right between the eyes, that makes someone stop and go, wow, they're speaking directly to me. And I knew there was a level above what I was doing. I could feel it. I just hadn't been able to unlock it yet. So that's what I set out to build, an upgraded AI content system that would take good content and make it freaking amazing. And that's what I want to walk you through today. And not just that, I'm actually running a workshop where I'm going to help you to walk through building it out for yourself live. Now, next week in part 2, as I said, I'm going to tell you all about the broader CEO command center, the reporting, the daily briefings, the client management stuff, which is so juicy, but today let's talk about that content system. Okay, so here's the workflow that I've built out inside Claude. As I said, you can use some Claude Cowork or even just with your standard Claude, but you do need to have a Pro account. This is what I had been dreaming about for months, and this is what it looks like now. So step 1 is the pulse check. Before I plan any content, I kick off a research process, and this is the part that when you see it happen, you go, oh wow, that's why the content coming out is so much better. This skill goes out and researches my recent content from the last month, looks at what we posted, what worked, what didn't, what got good open rates on emails, what got engagement and reactions on Instagram, but it doesn't stop there. It also goes out and researches the general market. What are people in my space talking about right now? What formats of content are doing well on similar accounts? What's getting a lot of conversations versus just likes, what are people talking about in forums. And then this is the bit I really love. It looks at what our actual clients and prospects are saying. It goes through support tickets. It reads through conversations happening inside our community. It looks at what people are literally writing in their own words right now. It compiles all of that into what I call a pulse check report. It takes a couple of minutes to process. I read through it, and now before I've written a single word of content, I know exactly what my audience needs to hear. Step 2 is the editorial meeting. This I do once a month. I open up my virtual CMO skill and we basically plan out the month together. Not from scratch every time. We always have a rough plan, but the world moves fast and this is where we customize it. So if I was planning on promoting one product, but the pulse check shows me that people are talking about something else entirely, we might pivot. We plan out the dates, assign the purpose of each week. So we've got, say, a promotion in week 3. We know that weeks 1 and 2 need to be planting the seeds, bringing people on that journey, making sure they're problem aware and engaged before the promo kicks off. This whole thing is done mostly via voice note, me just chatting back and forth. The CMO asks me questions, I just respond, and it takes about 20 minutes, and we've got the full month mapped out with dates, phases, talking points for each week. If you've got the original Cash Money Content Prompts, this is the upgraded version of what we were already doing. Same cadence, but just on another level. Step 3 is a weekly content creator. I take that weekly brief from the editorial meeting and I open up a new conversation because we gotta be smart with our Claude usage, right? But also because of the way these systems are set up now, it can see all the background information from previous steps anyway. So none of it's lost. None of that nuance disappears. Previously, I was doing my editorial planning in ChatGPT and then bringing it across to Claude to write the content. And I found we're losing a lot of the nuance in that handoff. Now it's all in one place, all connected, and all informed. The very first thing I do is a brain dump for the pillar content for that week. So for me, my pillar content is a podcast episode, just like this. The AI suggests some topics. We might go back and forth a little bit until we land on the best one. It suggests some titles and some angles. Then I voice note everything that I want to cover, all my words, all my stories, all my opinions, all my expertise. Then the AI takes that very messy brain dump and cleans it up into a well-structured, well-ordered script. Again, using my own words because it's taken it from my brain dump, but organized beautifully. Now, step 4. Hooks and social content. So using the pillar content, which case the podcast, as the backbone, it pulls out the best bits, the quotes, the aha moments, the truth bombs, the stories combined with the other talking points we agreed on in the editorial meeting. Then it brainstorms hooks for each talking point. And here's where the extra refinement layer comes in that takes us from an 8 out of 10 to a 12 out of 10. Before those hooks get to me, they actually go through a quality check skill. My AI social media manager skill reviews every single one for tone. Is it a cliché? Does it sound bro-y? Could 100 other people have said this? Is it weirdly specific enough that you wouldn't scroll past it? It checks, it improves, and only after it's approved does it come back to me for the final say. I pick the ones I like, and then from that, it creates all of my social content. We do these one by one so I can read each one and give a bit of feedback. This process takes maybe 10 minutes. All right. Step 5, the emails. So same process as the social, same quality. All the emails for the week get written following the plan. They're informed by everything we've already created and talked about. If I'm doing 4 or 5 social posts a week, plus a couple of emails, Depending on how much I prattle on for the podcast episode, this whole process is about 30 minutes once a week, and then everything is written. Okay. I need to pause here because this is the part where I'm going to tell you something exciting. I am showing people how to build this exact system live on Tuesday, the 21st of April. That's Melbourne, Australia time. So it's going to be Monday, the 20th of April for most everyone else. It's called the Cash Money Content Upgrade Workshop, and it's a 2-hour live session where I'm going to walk you through how to set up your own content command center inside Claude using the latest Claude updates. You're going to be building yours in real time. By the end of the 2 hours, you will have a fully working system customized for you, your niche, your marketing plan, your preferred types of content. This isn't just for coaches, by the way. You could be in e-commerce, real estate, literally any industry. We're going to show you how to customize it, how to train it, how to make it the machine that runs your content over and over again. Tickets are just $97, which is kind of crazy when you think about the amount of time you'll save and the impact it will have on your business by being able to produce such high quality content on demand. And if you already have the original Cash Money Content prompts, Check your inbox because we've got a special discount code just for you. Now, this is a hands-on workshop, guys, so spots are limited. If you want to grab yourself a ticket, head to the link in the show notes. Okay, right, let's get back to the good stuff. Okay, so you've got the podcast scripted, you've got the social content written, the email's done, but there are two more steps that take this to the next level. So step 6 is the auto-publish setup. Once all the content is approved, the system takes everything and sends it through to my project management tool. For me, that's ClickUp, but you could be using Notion, Asana, Monday, whatever you prefer. I now have a content calendar set up in ClickUp and the system populates it all. So I can see that on this date, these emails need to go out. On this date, these social posts are being published. It assigns each task to the person who's responsible for scheduling it. It's all color-coded by content type and status. And inside each task is everything you need. The caption, the text for any slides or videos. Scripts for the podcast or face-to-cameras, email copy, all ready to go, copy, paste, and schedule. I'm not doing any of it manually anymore. It just appears and it's done. All right. Step 7, the visuals. Now I'm going to be honest because I'm still refining this part because I find there are a few different options here and I'm going to walk people through what they are and how to choose the best one for them on the workshop. My preferred setup is honestly because it's so simple and so fast that I barely think about it. Like if I'm doing 5 posts a week, 2 of those posts are B-roll reels. One is a talking head I'm recording anyway, and the other 2 are mini carousels that are just 2 slides each. I pretty much just copy and paste the text across. It's fast enough that automating it doesn't really save me any time, but there are options to send them straight to Canva where you literally just drop it in and it pre-populates everything for you. You have to go in and tweak it slightly, obviously, but there are also options where if your design is simple enough, Claude can actually create the carousel images for you. Can't do video yet, but I'm sure that's not far away. But for carousels and graphics, it's an option and it's really cool. Okay, here's why I got so fired up about this that I decided to create an entire workshop around it. This is not just about time saved. Yes, going from 10+ hours a week to about 30 minutes is insane. But the real winner here is the quality because of the— because of those research steps at the beginning, because the system actually knows what my audience is talking about this week, what's working, what's not. The content is so much more strategic. Every piece has a job. Every post is saying something specific to my audiences actually right now. And because of those refinement and quality checking steps where the content gets reviewed and tightened before I even see it, what lands in front of me is genuinely excellent, not AI generic slop, not something 100 other coaches could claim as their own specific punchy sounds like me on my best day content. Then you add the fact that it populates my calendar automatically, assigns my team to the task they need to do, can create the visuals. I'm sitting here going, this is crazy. This is absolutely crazy. And it is so much fun. I love our original cash money content scripts. They're amazing. I get daily messages from people telling me how much they've changed their lives, but this is the next level, and this is why I had to show you this live. So guys, the Cash Money Content Upgrade Workshop, as I said, it's happening Tuesday, 21st of April, 9:00 AM Australian Eastern Standard Time. It's gonna run for 2 hours. Together inside, we'll build you your own content command center in real time, customized to your business. Tickets are just $97. Which is a steal. My team thinks I'm crazy for only charging that much. And if you already own the Cash Money Content, don't worry, go check your inbox. We'll be sending you a discount code shortly. Grab your ticket to the link in the show notes and I'll send you everything. Next week in part 2, I'm going to tell you what happens when you take this beyond content. Daily briefings, reporting, client management, pipelines, a full CEO command center. This is when things get really wild. I'll see you next week.