I Spent a Year Telling Marketers to Become Builders.
Then I Became One
I wrote this article as a receipt of sorts. I started writing about marketers using AI to build and then I started building myself. I wanted to explained why I did it, what got me started and what I was able to put together on my own, as a marketer, to help develop my own proprietary framework (and, by extension, my legacy).
Are you a senior marketer (or other business role) also thinking about how to become subject matter experts and how to leverage AI to do it? If yes, I would love to hear from you so we can chat more about ways of building and how it has been helping (or not).
Just hit reply and we can get this convo going.
For about a year now, I have been writing some version of the same argument. The marketer who survives AI is the one who builds, not the one who only generates. The one who supplies context and judgment a model cannot produce on its own. I wrote about it in “The Most Important Agent in Marketing Isn’t AI.” I wrote it again in “From Manager to Architect.” I kept explaining the same idea from different angles.
And for most of that year, I was doing what a lot of us do. I was researching, chatting with many marketers and tip-toeing into different LLM models. But I was still writing the argument without fully living it.
Then I started really building. Not just a prototype to prove a point, but the actual systems I now use to run The Experimental Marketer. This is the honest account of what I made, why I started, and the one thing building taught me that all that writing never did.
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Allow me to start by explaining what was built so the rest of this article reads as something more concrete and not a thought experiment.
A research ingestion system. A content analytics system. A content writing partner. Image and photo generation. Video generation. A headless content layer and a content supply chain that connects all of it. Lovable web apps that serve as companions to my book, one app per chapter. And the workflows that hold it together, for content performance analytics, for analyzing what goes in, for drafting what comes out.
I listed this inventory so you know the lesson at the end of this was earned by actually doing the work, not by just researching and writing about it.
Now, I also need to add a little disclaimer here: Every piece of this is semi-automated on purpose. I stayed in the loop by design. This was a personal choice and I will explain the reason behind it, because it turned out to be the most important decision I made.
Why I started
The reason I started building is really more personal than what is behind most of my posts on this subject.
I wanted to try. I am a marketer who is highly involved with the technology that powers marketing. I am also a nerd at heart. At the end, I felt like I had to try.
And underneath that, there was a real pain point I have had for years. Consistency. Showing up the same way, with the same point of view, week after week, has always been the hardest part of creating content for me. Not the ideas. The consistency of execution around them. I had fifteen years of marketing experience and I still found it hard when it came to my own stuff.
So I did not begin with a grand system diagram. I began with a problem that genuinely annoyed me, and I built toward it. That is worth saying out loud, because the version of “become a builder” that floats around online may make it sound like you need a vision for an empire. You only need one pain you are tired of working around.
The build I am proudest of
Of everything on that list, the one I am proudest of is the content supply chain.
I borrowed the idea of headless content from engineering, where the content lives separately from any single place it gets published, so the same source can flow into many outputs. Applied to my own stuff, I was able to do something I had wanted for years. It gave me consistency. Consistency in how I appear as a subject matter expert, in how my point of view stays recognizable across a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, a video, a book companion. The thing I had always struggled to hold together by hand, the system now holds with me.
This supply chain connects tools that were not (yet) designed to talk to each other, and the value of it grows the longer it runs. It is not a faster way to produce one asset. It is infrastructure, and one that compounds. We will see how that distinction matters later in this piece.
Obviously, I did not invent this idea. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) defines the content supply chain as treating content like a product rather than a campaign, with each piece tracked across where it lives and gets reused, modular parts that adapt across channels, and AI handling the repetitive work while a human stays accountable for the judgment. That is a discipline written for enterprise marketing teams with budgets and headcount. But this is also very useful for the individual marketer who could now build the same thing, alone, for an audience of one brand. In this case, mine.
That alone would have been worth the effort. But it gave me something I wasn’t expecting and this is the actual reason I ended up writing this.
What building taught me that writing never did
Here is the part I could not have reached by writing another article about content supply chains.
Building one made me understand content creation as a system. Not as a pile of assets. As a system.
Before, I experienced my work the way most marketers do. A post here. A newsletter there. A video when I had the opportunity. A set of separate activities that all happened to have my name on them. They felt disconnected, because from the inside they were disconnected. Each one started from a blank slate and ended when I hit publish.
When I built my own supply chain, I had no choice but to see how the pieces actually relate. What feeds what. Where the same thinking gets reused. Where one input should produce four outputs instead of one. The system forced a clarity that no amount of writing about systems ever gave me, because writing let me describe the idea from a safe distance. Building made me hold the whole thing at once and make it work.
I like to think in systems. I like to think this about myself, and have for a while now. Building is the thing that made me prove it to myself.
Staying (on top of) the loop on purpose
Now the decision I mentioned earlier, because it is the one I would defend hardest.
I could have automated more than I did. A lot of gurus out there strongly recommend it and push optimizing for output volume. I very much chose not to.
I kept myself not only in the loop but also as its brain, on purpose, because I did not want to lose my own cognitive abilities. I have written before about the skill AI destroys first being the one you need most, the critical thinking that quietly atrophies when you stop using it. It would have been dishonest to write that and then build a system that does the thinking for me.
So my systems are semi-automated by design. They remove the repetitive weight and the inconsistency. They do not remove me from thinking and deciding. A builder who automates away their own judgment has not become more valuable. They have built the thing that replaces them. That is the line I draw, and I draw it deliberately.
Here is my suggestion, since I am asking you to do this too
I have spent this whole piece telling you I built these things. It would be easy to make it sound harder than it was, to protect the mystery around it, but I am not going to.
It is really doable. The tools have crossed the line where a marketer without an engineering background can build real, working systems to address their own pain points.
The hard part is not technical. The hard part is the shift in how you see your own work. Your daily activities look disconnected. The post, the email, the deck, the campaign, the report. They feel like a list of separate things you owe people. Learning to see them as one connected system, and organizing your work as a system instead of a to-do list, can be difficult. The tools are ready. The mental model is the thing you have to build first, and you build it by building.
What I want you to take from this
Three things, and then I want to hear from you.
You can be a builder, not only a generator. Kathleen Booth wrote recently about that divide widening inside every marketing team, and her distinction is worth borrowing precisely. Using AI to write your emails or clean up your copy is generating. It is useful, and it is fast, and it is becoming as ordinary as spell check. Building is different. Building is the system that connects the tools and compounds over time, the way the supply chain I described does. That is the line worth crossing, and it is available to you. Where I would add to her point is on what holds people back. She names a failure of imagination. I would narrow it. The thing most marketers cannot see is not what AI can do. It is that their own scattered work was a system all along (even if it is one they did not intentionally design).
Start from a pain point, not from a vision. The most expensive way to begin is to wait until you have designed the whole thing in your head. Pick the one part of your work you are most tired of doing badly, and build toward that. Mine was consistency showing up as a subject matter expert. Yours is something you already know.
Get help, and be careful whose. There is a great deal of generous, real guidance out there, and there is a great deal of confident nonsense sold next to it. Reach out. Ask. Learn from people who have actually built and will show you the unglamorous parts, not just the highlight reel. The wrong advice can be expensive in a way that is hard to see until later.
I built these systems because I was tired of being inconsistent, and I ended up understanding my own work in a way fifteen years of doing it never taught me. That is the part I did not see coming.
If you have started building something, even something small and unfinished, I want to hear what it taught you. Reply and tell me. I think more of us are closer to this than we realize.
Are you a senior marketer using (or looking into) AI to help you establish yourself as a subject matter expert and/or to help you build your personal brand? Let's chat
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