marketer meets ai // proof of work
not to look cool, but to solve business problems
Yesterday, we talked about proof of work. Or what we really mean: proof of value. That article is your foundation. Think of it like the base curry for all our dishes. Whether you're making butter chicken, paneer handi, or veg curry, same base. Critical foundation. Otherwise, you're just building another college project. And we don't want that, do we?
Why this series exists
Everyone is scared of AI. I’ll be lying if I said I am not worried. I don’t know what will happen after 10 years. But I do know who will thrive in 3-5 years. For sure.
And yeah, everyone wants to show they can "do AI". But they have some weird doubts about building here. Especially mid-senior folks.
”I am a senior professional with 8 years, will building a tool downgrade me? I am a team lead.”
"Udayan, I am a senior engineering manager. I have 12 years of experience. Should I really be building tools now? I mean, I used to lead a team of 12!”
I’ll just share one story for about 10 days back. A head of marketing role was open for a 400 people company. (Hired via GX, oh btw you can post jobs for free in GX. Click here.)
It dragged on for 3 months (like most senior roles right now). The person who got the role had just 8 years of experience, vs 13 years who didn’t. The 7-year person built proof to showcase their taste AND automate their entire content pipeline. The CEO (hiring manager) said, "We need builders now, not just thinkers.”
Senior and mid senior folks, this series is for you only baba. Not as effective i think for VP roles in finance, M&A, & Legal. But doesn’t hurt to build. Who knows what’s next with AI.
What to expect?
Next few days, I’ll pick one function per day. Today is marketing.
Now marketing has a million sub functions. Brand, social, performance, seo, content, partnerships, community and some more made up ones.
I'm not covering all of them. I'll take one specific example and show you how deep you need to go. For the rest, I'll point you in the right direction.
Sidenote: For folks who are not in marketing, and following this, good. Pay attention cause the pattern of how I am approaching this applies to your functions too.
Ready? Let's build.
Let's say you want to crack a creative strategy role. Specifically, short-form video strategy. Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, doesn't matter.
Sure, you could show past work.
Or create some shorts yourself.
The second one is great tbh.
But want to stand out with AI?
Solve the actual business problem with AI.
Let’s go back to Dhanda 101.
Here's what every creative strategist knows but rarely articulates:
Simple equation.
Video views = number of posts × average views per post
Let’s break both of them down.
1/ Number of posts =
editing bandwidth + creative strategy bandwidth
2/ Average views =
hook quality × editing × topic relevance × timing
Look at this equation.
Really look at it.
If you're doing 10 shorts a month at 50k average views, that's 5 lakh views monthly. want 50% growth? you need 5 more shorts. Or you need your avg views to go up by 50%. Creating 50% more videos is def more predictable to get the growth.
Can AI help you create 5 more shorts?
100%. You could probably do 30.
But here's where most people fuck up.
"Look, I can generate 100 scripts!"
Wrong game.
The blocker was never a script.
Each short takes 4 days.
Ideation & scripting 3-4 hours.
Recording and production 1 day
Editing and publishing 2 days.
To achieve our goal of a 50% increase in output. Your team can only do so many in parallel. That's your bottleneck.
What if each short took
2 hours instead of 2 days?
Let’s understand how ↓ ,
But please remember yesterday's principles.
We're not building to look cool.
We're solving business problems.
So we take all the input levers of our equation for views and create a system with AI for every single lever.
Step 1: Hook
The hook determines 80% of your video's success. First 3 seconds. That's all you get.
Traditional approach: brainstorm 10 hooks, pick the best one
AI approach: generate 100 hooks, test against performance data, pick top 5
Here's how:
Feed your top performing
hooks into the model
Extract patterns
(question hooks, controversy hooks, visual hooks)
Generate variations
based on what worked
Score each against
your criteria
We’re pattern matching against proven winners.
Step 2: Script
Validated hook + topic goes in.
A script matching your brand voice comes out.
That goes into adding emotional peaks to the script
And then?
And then it goes into evaluation.
This output needs to go through your evaluation, and it keeps looping until the evaluation is met.
The simplest way of defining evaluation:
think of evaluation like the way you tell GPT, after a prompt, change this, change that. That change is something you're saying off 10-15 things you definitely wanted. That’s an evaluation criterion.
Step 3: Visual storyboard
Input: final script
Output: storyboard.
"0-3 seconds: close up of phone showing bank notification"
"3-7 seconds: reaction shot, concerned face"
"7-15 seconds: whiteboard animation of concept"
Each shot is mapped to an available asset that you can upload to the system.
Step 4: Automate parts of editing
The base cut, the audio cleaning, colour grading and the first draft of the edit can all be automated. What about other sub-brands? Here’s me nudging in the right direction. It’s simple only. Look at the business problem. Solve a sub-lever with AI.
Hey! Remember, your real advantage
Tooling isn't your moat. Anyone can prompt.
Your advantage?
Taste. Judgment.
Knowing what works.
You know the user.
You know what hooks them.
Which transitions feel smooth.
Which CTAs convert.
That experience gets encoded into the system you build. You can encode taste in the system you build.
Putting it all together
We started with
A Business problem: not enough views.
We identified the constraint:
Content creation speed.
We built systems to 10x
the speed while maintaining quality.
The focus here?
Solving a core sublever of the business.
If you want to showcase any AI skills,
I would say you should do it this way.
The tools don't matter
But if you’re curious.
Click here to find all of them.
But honestly? You can figure this out. The beautiful thing about AI is that once you start building, you can ask the AI itself for the next step.
"Hey Claude, I built a script generator. How do I do x?" It'll tell you in detail.
What actually matters: motivation
Tools are there. Tutorials are there.
What's scarce?
People actually building.
Find others creating proof of work.
Share progress weekly.
Call out excuses.
This is why we built GrowthX.
Not for the content. For the accountability.
Remember the article about building with accountability? That's the difference between planning and shipping. It covers in detail how to build momentum.
Your move
Tonight, pick your sub lever.
Build to solve that business metric.
The market's bifurcating.
There are strategists who direct humans. And strategists who direct humans plus machines. Guess which ones get hired?
You spent years building judgment.
Taste. Strategic thinking. Now you can encode that into systems that scale. Or you can keep writing process documents while someone younger builds the future.
Seniority plus ai is lethal combo.
It's a multiplier for your experience. Making your judgment scalable. Turning your taste into systems.
Next week we look at engineering, then design, product, analytics and people function.
But tonight, ask yourself this.
If someone with half your experience but twice the automation ability applied for your job tomorrow, who would win?
Note: A bunch of you folks mentioned you prefer reading in title case, and hence all the upcoming editions here will be formatted to help you consume better.
But if you love reading in small case, like I do, click here.
Curiosity. Intent. Empathy.
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