I am upset.
So I figured it would be a good time to turn on my mic and rip a rant.
This is that, but ran through my Kenbot, and then edited by me.
To start, I am here to tell you, yes you, that you are all wrong about founder-led AI content.
I have had enough of the overly complex advice floating around. I see founders either making things way too complicated or just shutting down the whole idea.
People think they need to spend hours and weeks building writing skills from scratch. Others believe they need to automate every single thought with a 47-step autonomous AI agent.
Both mindsets are costly and just plain silly.
The truth is simple: you have an opinion, you have developed taste, and that is all you need to win.
what you're doing wrong
The tactical shift I recommend is much simpler than most founders believe:
- Stop trying to automate these advanced N8N pipelines.
- Stop tweaking the perfect prompts to "humanize" rafts of content made from ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. That is overcomplicating it.
Instead, just yap for 8 to 10 minutes about something you care about.
Have an assistant interview you or take a sales transcript. Just talk about something important to you, something you have an opinion on.
Take that transcript and run it through a template. That gives you a useful draft. You are avoiding the struggle of wrestling with the writing if you are not a writer.
Simple.
In contrast to that, I typically see two main incorrect mindsets.
The first mindset is the complex one. Founders think they have to build out this complex server. They imagine it looking through all their text messages and emails, running it through Grammarly, and then back to the language model to create a draft. They have all these complex technical steps in their mind.
Look, some of that might even work.
But the cost and the complexity of building that out are not worth it. The thought there is that you need all this complicated automation to get something authentic. That is prohibitive for a lot of founders.
The second mindset is short-sighted and sad. It is the "I am a special, unique snowflake" thinking. These founders believe all technology, including generative AI, is bad and can only detract from the truth.
emotional resonance
My former business partner is low-key LinkedIn famous.
The reason he got all that fame was not by using technology to automate the parts that make him squishy and human.
He understood his own values and verbal identity. He had clear messaging pillars that mapped back to the business's goals. He showed up like an authority on these topics, sharing his life and his lived experiences.
That has sourced between 20 and 30% of our historical company revenue from his profile. HIS PROFILE.
The research is pretty clear to ya'll. CEOs, founders, and influential people telling unique stories and sharing real insights are much more compelling. This leads to more business opportunities than a faceless brand pushing out hollow content.
A scaled pure AI approach is the same. It's lame and ineffective. I do not care what anyone says.
There is no emotional resonance in that type of content.
It may fool people temporarily. You may have a post go viral. However, I believe, in the long term, we will subconsciously reject it.
Just like with ad blindness, our brain has an uncanny valley for AI content. Our brain subconsciously processes when there is no emotional depth or lived experience injected. This is just how humans consume information.
The biggest gap in current advice is that people are not nuanced in their takes. They are missing context.
the truth
All technology is neither good nor bad inherently. It is a tool. You will get out of it what you put into it.
Using the tools to edit or deploy your voice across platforms isn't just smart, it is good business. It is useful for your audience so they do not have to hear your pure stream of consciousness, but they also do not have to deal with something that is not you.
Leaning into either of those binaries is harmful and costly in the long run.
The biggest issue I see is self-interested gurus pushing overly specific advice constrained to one tool or one system.
That is probably garbage, trying to manipulate you. The best path is the right combination of resources, tools, and systems for your unique situation. Reject dogma, learn to smell it.
you don't need AI to do these 5 steps
I think of the right process as basically five steps.
These steps are about self-discovery, your business, and telling authentic stories.
You have to fill in the gaps of what works specifically for you.
1. Understand yourself. You have to introspect and think: what are my values? What are the things I cannot care about? What are the non-negotiables? That is a list of three to five things.
2. Define your business messaging pillars. What are our core messaging pillars as a business? This has to be aligned with what your customers or target audience actually want and need. These two lists should kind of piggyback off each other, but they are not the same thing.
3. Bank unique stories. You should have a starter list of 10 to 20 unique lived experiences, stories, and anecdotes banked. Keep a running list of those.
4. Just talk. Pull out one of your stories, one of your verbal identity pillars, and one of your company messaging pillars. Use any recording tool you want. Your phone, a video, or an AI chatbot. Just talk through that. You do not really need a detailed brief or to do any research to talk intelligently about something you have lived, understood your customers, and understood your business.
5. Template the draft. Once you have the transcript or the text, the fifth step is to create some kind of editing layer using generative AI or some technology. That layer takes pre-built templates for whatever content you are creating. Just upload the transcript to be used to get the draft.
This process is not only the most efficient and cost-effective for founders and CEOs. It also has the benefit of adding information gain, which
Google likes it. ChatGPT likes it. Users like it.
It will have actual emotional resonance because the imperfections in the way you talk will come through. This is going to be a unique differentiator with all the AI slop that is going around.
Don't be a dummy head
The biggest mistake founders make is either overcomplicating AI content creation with endless automation or completely rejecting technology out of a sense of misplaced righteousness.
The path to founder-led content that drives revenue is simple: understand your values and your customers, bank your unique stories, and talk for 10–20 minutes about your insights.
Use a simple template and AI to turn that authentic transcript into a compelling draft.
This method is efficient, cost-effective, and provides the emotional depth necessary to cut through the noise and create a unique differentiator.