I sit down with Jonathan Courtney, host of Unscheduled CEO Podcast, to talk about the gap between building AI-powered products and actually making money from them. Jonathan walks through his four-step "Promoter Blueprint" — traffic, holding pattern, selling event, and conversion — and shows exactly how he uses Claude and Claude Code to execute each phase. This one is a wake-up call for any founder spending more time optimizing automations than promoting what they sell.
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro and Welcome Back
04:13 – The Founder’s Real Job: Promotion, Period
09:23 – The Promoter Blueprint (Screen Share)
19:38 – Using AI with Promoter Blueprint
22:52 – Inside Claude: Jonathan’s Claude Workflow
28:41 – Moving from Claude to Claude Code for Builds
30:55 – Building a $450K Webinar Campaign with Claude
37:30 – Scale Up, Abundance Over Efficiency
43:57 – Final Advice: Embrace Your Role as Promoter
Key Points
* A CEO’s primary job is promoting the business — building is secondary to getting people in the door.
* AI tools become "procrastination machines" when builders optimize systems that have zero customers.
* Every revenue engine follows four phases: traffic, holding pattern, selling event, conversion (and a loop back).
* Claude projects combined with Claude Code create a fast workflow for going from research to a shipped marketing asset in under an hour.
* The current play is abundance and scale, using AI to run five campaigns instead of one, rather than cutting headcount for efficiency.
* Off-the-shelf solutions still beat custom builds in many cases — always ask before you spend three days vibe-coding something.
Numbered Section Summaries
1) The Builder Trap
Jonathan opens with a blunt observation: too many founders treat AI tool mastery as the job itself. He compares it to building the world’s most automated restaurant and then telling zero people it exists. If you are spending days on automations and your revenue has stayed the same, you are procrastinating with extra steps.
2) The Promoter Mindset
Every successful CEO Jonathan can name — Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Peter Levels, Jason Fried — spends at least half their time promoting. The founders people know by name are the founders who show up everywhere. Jonathan frames promotion as oxygen for the business: cut it off and the business dies regardless of how good the product is.
3) The Four-Step Promoter Blueprint
Jonathan shares a framework he normally sketches on paper for clients. Step 1 is traffic (organic or paid). Step 2 is the holding pattern — newsletters, podcasts, social — where you warm people up. Step 3 is the selling event: webinars, demos, email sequences, retargeting campaigns, or direct outreach. Step 4 is conversion, and everyone who does not convert loops back into the holding pattern for the next campaign.
4) Claude as a CEO’s Marketing Co-Pilot
Jonathan walks through how he prepped for this very episode inside a Claude project — dumping a voice memo, having Claude create an ADHD-friendly outline, researching my past episodes, and auto-generating project instructions at the end of each chat. He then exported the context into a Claude MD file and moved to Claude Code to build the visual blueprint that shipped to Vercel in about an hour total.
5) From Marketing Brain to Lead Magnet in Minutes
Live on-screen, Jonathan shows his "AJ&Smart Marketing Expert Brain" Claude project — a setup loaded with books he has written, a 17,766-line swipe file of competitor emails, and custom instructions. He prompts it to generate lead magnet ideas tied to our episode and gets three strong concepts in seconds. The whole flow from podcast appearance to landing page used to take his team two to three days; it now takes half a day.
6) Less Prep, More Action
Jonathan and I agree that over-preparation is the biggest red flag in a founder. These tools are forgiving enough to learn on a live project. Jonathan jumped straight into Claude Code on a real campaign, hit the context window limit, figured out chunked workflows by necessity, and kept shipping. The takeaway: just cut.
The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends – https://www.ideabrowser.com/
LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future – from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn ‘what if’ into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/
The Vibe Marketer – Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/
FIND ME ON SOCIAL
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FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIAL
Unscheduled CEO Podcast: https://www.unscheduledceo.com/
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jicecream
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/
