Draft Mode: A home for the messy middle I'm a writer who ended up in B2B marketing. I lead brand and content at a startup. I play guitar, write songs, and...
I caught myself doing it again last week. Typing something to Claude like it owed me money. "This is wrong. Fix it. Don't make shit up next time." Then closing the laptop and going for my walk like nothing happened. Nothing happened, technically. That's the whole problem. I don't talk to people that way. But something about LLMs makes the leash come off. No face on the other end, no pause where…
Three years into the AI era and here I am, sitting at my iPad, no agent running, no LLM prodding me and …boom, I hit a lag. A noticeable delay between the thought and the sentence that didn't used to be there. Turns out, no surprise here, there's a debt to pay when you outsource the first draft of the thinking. Atrophy sets in. The part of the brain that used to just start — messy, imprecise, no…
Yesterday I had three things running at the same time. An op-ed in Glean. A copywriting agent in one Claude window... teaching it our voice, correcting it, feeding it drafts I'd actually sent and gotten a real response to. And in another Claude window, I was teaching Claude to think like our brand design studio. Sell sheet logic. What hierarchy means for us. What we want someone to feel when they…
This is the companion piece to The Voice Problem . That post covers why most content written on behalf of leaders sounds generic. This one covers exactly how I'm building the system to fix it — tools, folder structure, all of it. The system has two sides: their side (dead simple) and your side (where the AI infrastructure lives). The person giving you their voice does almost nothing. You do the…
If you work in comms, content, or brand, you've probably been here — you need to write something for someone on the leadership team, an op-ed or a LinkedIn post or a company-wide email or some Forbes piece, doesn't really matter which, and it needs to sound like them. So you ask for their take. They're busy, genuinely busy, back-to-back meetings, running a company, and what you usually get back is…
I've believed the same thing about marketing for my entire career: start with the story. Start with the human. Everything else is noise. I've said it in meetings. To my team. To anyone who'll listen. It's the thing I'm most sure about in my career... that the work should be human-first, not formula-first. That no one wants to read your SEO listicle. That the best content makes someone feel…
I worked with a creative director once who was buried all the time. Hands-on creative, managing a team, wrangling freelancers, doing the doing on top of the managing. No strategy time to speak of. No rebrand with a countdown clock on it. Definitely no offsite where everyone stands around a whiteboard being serious about rethinking everything. And somehow the work kept getting better. A tweak here.…
I was talking to a contractor a while back, this guy's been doing it 30-something years, started the whole thing with one truck. And at one point I asked him what makes him trust a vendor. He didn't talk about features or pricing or demos. He said, "When I feel like they actually give a shit about whether I succeed." That stuck with me. Because most brands don't operate that way. Most brands…
I've been hiring a content writer, which mostly means reading a pile of applications that all start with some variation of: "I specialize in SEO content..." "I've grown traffic 200% using Ahrefs..." "I reverse-engineer search intent to..." You get the idea. Look, SEO works. It scales. It makes dashboards go up and to the right. I get the appeal. But if your whole philosophy is "find what people…
I've never not owned social media. As a content person, it just comes with the territory. You write the blog, you break it into snippets, you build the calendar, you post it, you answer the comments, you fight the algorithm, you repost the thing that didn't land, and you do it all again next week. It wasn't glamorous, but it was mine. Now, for the first time, I'm hiring someone to do it. Like,…