u/cipi1357

My girlfriend works in marketing and runs the social for a couple of small brands plus our own. Since Claude Design launched about a month ago her workflow has shifted to being mostly Claude-driven, and the way the stack ended up sitting together has some lessons I think are on-topic enough for this sub to write up. Posting this partly to share, partly because I want to hear what other people running GTM through Claude have figured out.

Claude Design is doing more than I expected it to.

Honestly the thing that changed her workflow most isn't a clever orchestration trick, it's just that Claude Design got good enough to handle real brand-quality output. If you've used it for social you probably already know this, but for anyone who hasn't tried it on actual brand work, the trick is being aggressive about the brand context up front. She loads a small brand voice document, the exact hex codes, the font, the tone reference (formal/playful/scrappy), and a one-line description of the post structure she wants (3-slide intro-meat-cta, single-image hook, etc). With that context it sticks to brand pretty well across iterations. Without that context it drifts toward generic SaaS-pastel pretty fast.

She prompts Claude Design, iterates 2-4 rounds inside the chat to tighten the copy and layout, and ends up with a finished design in HTML. For an Instagram carousel that used to mean a Canva session and a day of fiddling. Now it's 20 minutes.

The export gap is real and it's where I lost evenings.

Claude Design's output is HTML. The "send to Canva" button is the only export path, it requires a paid Canva account, and from our Anthropic account it just doesn't work. Click the button, nothing happens. So for a while the workflow was: she'd finish the design, send me the HTML zip, and I'd manually convert it to PNGs using a Puppeteer script Claude Code had helped me write. 10-15 minutes per post, all on me, mostly at the wrong time of day.

After a couple of weeks of that I built a small tool so she could do the conversion herself (called it TryRenda, link in comments if anyone wants it. Not going into it here, it's not the interesting part). The interesting part is what it freed up: she stopped batching designs to send to me, started iterating on individual posts in real-time, and the volume of stuff she could ship roughly doubled. The bottleneck wasn't design speed, it was the manual hand-off.

Where I tried to push AI further and it didn't work.

This is the part I'd actually like input on from this sub.

I tried to AI-assist more of the workflow beyond the asset step. Specifically:

1. Reply drafting for comments and DMs. I'd take the source thread, pass it through Claude with a "here's the context, here's what we'd want to convey, draft a reply that sounds like a real person" prompt. The drafts were grammatically perfect and contextually accurate. They also sounded like marketing. Every single one. We sent a handful early on and engagement dropped immediately. Fewer follow-up replies, more "this feels like a bot" responses. We switched back to her writing them herself and the numbers recovered.
2. Outbound DMs. Same pattern. Even when the model had the recipient's profile and the angle was relevant, the message read as templated to a human reader. The signal that gets through on social DMs is "specific person responded specifically to me" and that signal collapses the moment a model writes it.

So the line we've ended up drawing: AI is great on asset creation (design, copy variants, sizing, repetitive transforms). AI is currently bad at anything where the recipient is consciously or unconsciously evaluating whether the sender is a real human. We assumed this line would soften over time and it just hasn't, at least not for our use cases.

Where I'd put a Claude agent next, if I were building it.

The gap I keep wishing for: an agent that takes one master design from Claude Design and emits N hook variants automatically. Same layout, same brand, 5 different opening lines for A/B testing. Right now she does this manually by iterating inside Claude Design 5 times. It's clearly automatable; I just haven't built it because the manual version is 10 minutes and not painful enough yet.

Curious what other people running social or GTM with Claude have found. Especially:

• Anyone get AI-drafted replies/DMs to actually land? What did you do that I didn't?
• Anyone built an asset-variant generator on top of Claude Design? Are you happy with it?
• Where's the next thing you'd automate in your stack?

Two weeks ago I launched a small SaaS called Renda. It turns Claude Design exports (or any HTML) into clean social-media-ready PNGs. Built it in 2 days because my girlfriend, who works in marketing, kept asking me to manually run the export-to-PNG workflow I had cobbled together in Claude Code.

Day one I did the obvious thing: wrote a launch post on a couple of AI dev subs and waited. It went badly. The top comments were variations of "you can just screenshot," "why would anyone pay for this," and "good luck making money, I'll just copy it." Fair, in retrospect. I was pitching a paid tool to people who could build it themselves in an afternoon. The audience was the problem, not the product.

What I almost did next was double down: write a better launch post, find more "developer" subs, repeat. My girlfriend stopped me. Her argument was sharp: the person who pays for this isn't on those subs. The person who pays for this is the one who already complained about the problem in a thread last week and never got a useful reply. So instead of writing launch posts, find those people one by one and answer them.

Here's exactly what she did, because the playbook is the part worth reading:

1. Opened Reddit search. Looked for posts and comments containing "Claude Design" plus pain words: "export", "PNG", "screenshot", "Canva", "Instagram", "manual workflow", "AI design".
2. For each match where the person was actually describing the problem Renda solves, she wrote a one-or-two-sentence reply. Specific to the thread. No copy-paste boilerplate. No link unless the conversation warranted it.
3. The bar she used was a single test: would the recipient read this and say "oh, useful" or "ugh, ad"? If she wasn't sure, she skipped. We skipped a lot.

About 50 replies later, the curve started moving. First paying user came from a comment on a thread about Canva's pricing. Second came from a reply to a Claude Design feature-request thread. Third was a DM from someone who'd seen one of the earlier replies and wanted to know what the tool was.

Where it is now, ~2 weeks in, ~$77 MRR

Small numbers. But the ratio is the part I care about: ~25% of active users are converting to paid. That's roughly 10x what I'd expect from a launch-post funnel, and it tells me the tactic is matching audience to intent in a way launch posts can't.

Three things this taught me that I didn't believe before:

1. The people calling a product unnecessary almost always aren't the customer. The customer is three threads over, asking for it without naming it. "I wouldn't pay for that" is information about them, not about the product.
2. Outbound replies into existing complaints outperformed every launch-post variation I tried by an embarrassing margin. The reason is intent. A launch post is "here's a thing." A targeted reply is "here's the thing you just asked for." Totally different signal strength.
3. The free tier is doing its actual job. About 70% of active users are on free. They're trying it for real (median use is several PNGs, not one), and the conversion to paid is happening through repeat usage rather than a hard paywall push. That makes the funnel feel honest in a way I wasn't expecting.

The discipline matters more than the volume. My girlfriend would walk away from a reply if it felt like marketing instead of help. The moment you start replying to be visible, instead of replying because the person will genuinely benefit, the tactic stops working and starts looking like spam. We never copy-pasted. We never dropped a link into a thread that wasn't actively about this exact problem.

One other thing I did in week one, separate from the reply tactic: I dropped the monthly price from £6.99 to £4.99 ($5.99) after actually doing the competitive review I should have done at launch. Hard to attribute how much that contributed, but it stopped the "absurd price" objection cold and the curve started moving the same week. Day pass stayed at £1, free tier is 10 PNGs/month, no card.

Happy to go deeper on the comment-reply playbook, the stack, or pricing in the comments.

My parents were chatting last weekend about how much they missed the 80s and 90s. Saturday morning cartoons. The snacks that don't exist anymore. When MTV played music. They said they wished they had something small to do each day that brought a bit of that back.

So I gave it a go. Called it B-Side Daily. The flip side of a single always had the better songs anyway, at least that is what my dad says.

One short edition every day. Today's is When MTV Played Music. Feels even more fitting now that MTV itself is mostly gone.

Free to play, nothing to pay for. I write each edition by hand. If you spot a mistake, tell me. I'll try to keep new ones coming for a while at least.

bsidedaily.com

Hope it brings something back.