u/ymc9

Someone posts something with substance, accurate and reasonably well organized, and the top comment is "AI;DR". Then everyone piles on and the actual content never gets discussed.

What I can't work out is why this only happens to writing. Nobody reacts like this to AI-written software or AI-created funny videos.

Yes, we as human are more and more apt at recognizing the patterns: em dashes, hedging, formatting. The reaction seems bigger than a style complaint, though. People sound annoyed the way they'd be annoyed at being lied to.

My first guess was effort. Reading costs me time, and if you spent none of yours (just assuming this) the trade is not fair. Except the same people will read a templated newsletter without complaining.

Is there something about language specifically? What makes code and video and other things exempt? Is this a psychological barrier that we'll eventually pass?

Technical founder here. Building the product is the natural part - vague requirement in, working thing out, ship it, move on. No drama.

Then I sat down to write marketing copy and just... froze. Cursor blinking. I'd write a sentence, decide it sounded like every other SaaS, delete it, and go tweaking some features instead. This happened on repeat, week after week. Not because I didn't have time. Because there was no forcing function, and it was genuinely more comfortable to do work I already knew how to do.

What eventually helped wasn't a burst of inspiration or a copywriting course. It was noticing WHY code doesn't freeze me: there's a spec, a scope, a definition of done, and a place the work lives whether or not I feel like doing it. Marketing had none of that. It was one giant undifferentiated blob labeled "do marketing," which is the kind of task no one starts.

So I set up a engineering-like scaffolding:

1. A fixed set of content angles. Instead of "what should I write about," I picked from a small closed list. My current list has four:

• a decision I made, including the options I rejected and why
• something I got wrong and what it cost
• a mechanic - how a specific piece of the product actually works under the hood
• a pattern I keep hearing across user conversations

Now the question is "which angle this week," which is a choice in four options instead of an infinite blank page. For getting words out of me, that change did more than everything else combined.

2. Every marketing item is a ticket - tracked as engineering work, same board. A post is a ticket. A landing page rewrite is a ticket. Testing out a channel another. It has a scope and a done state. If it's not a ticket it doesn't exist.

3. A fixed publish cadence. A committed, non-negotiable day, whether or not the piece feels good. Deadlines beat standards early on - the version of me optimizing for "is this good enough" published nothing for weeks.

4. Process tracked separately from outcomes. Did I ship on cadence? Did every planned item become a ticket? Those I can measure now. Traffic, signups, whether any of this converts - I genuinely can't say yet. It's too early, the sample is tiny, and I'd be making up a story if I told myself the numbers meant something.

5. A review loop with actual kill criteria. This is the newest part and the least tested. For every 10 pieces I check three signals per angle, none of which are traffic: does anyone reply or ask a follow-up question, does anyone quote it back to me unprompted in a DM, and do inbound questions start landing inside that angle's territory. If an angle keeps producing zero of those, it gets cut and replaced.

Honest caveat: I don't know if this works. I know it moved me from producing nothing to producing consistently, which is a prerequisite for finding out I guess, but is not the same as working. Ask me in 6 months and I might tell you the whole angle list was wrong.

The narrow question I actually want answered: where do your content ideas come from as an input, mechanically? I'm trying to figure out if my closed list of angles is a good system or a cage. Specifically, do you:

(a) keep a fixed rotation of angles/formats like I do

(b) keep a running capture list you pull from

(c) derive topics from sources like support tickets, sales call objections, search queries, community questions, or

(d) something else?

If you're doing b or c, what's the actual trigger that gets an idea into the list?

I can ship a feature in a weekend but I'll stare at a blank tweet for 40 minutes. So I built a system for marketing the way I'd build one for deploys.

Technical founder here. Backend, mostly. I have a very clear internal model of what "good" looks like in code. I have no internal model of what good marketing looks like. So for about eight months my marketing was:
- read a thread that made me feel bad
- panic-write three posts in one night
- publish one, get almost nothing, feel dumb
- go back to the codebase where I'm competent
- repeat in five weeks

The killer wasn't that the posts were bad. Some were fine. It's that nothing compounded. Every burst started from zero because I never wrote down what I did last time or why.

What actually helped was accepting I wasn't going to get “better at marketing” by willpower, and instead making it a process I could run badly and still get output from. Four pieces:

1. A repeatable frame instead of "what should I post." The blank page was the problem, not the writing. So I stopped generating ideas from scratch and started generating them from a fixed set of angles I know I can actually speak to: a decision I made and the option I rejected, a thing I got wrong and what it cost, a piece of the product I built and why it works that way, a customer conversation that changed my mind. Four buckets. When it's time to write, I pick a bucket, not a topic. It turned "be creative" into "fill in a form," which is a thing I can do at 9pm.

2. Tracking deliverables so nothing quietly dies. This was the biggest one honestly. I had maybe a dozen half-finished drafts scattered across Notion, Apple Notes, and a scratch.md in a repo. None of them were "abandoned," they just... stopped existing. Now every marketing item is a ticket with a state: idea -> drafted -> edited -> published -> (optionally) repurposed. Same board I use for engineering. If something sits in drafted for two weeks I either finish it or explicitly kill it. The explicit kill matters - it stops the guilt pile from growing.

3. Cadence over motivation. I publish on a fixed day. Not "when I have something good". The quality floor is lower than I'd like and I've made peace with that. Motivation-driven marketing meant I only wrote when I felt like a winner, which is roughly four days a year. A calendar slot means the work happens on the bad weeks too, and the bad-week posts are usually more honest anyway.

4. Measuring two different things, because outcomes lie early. This is the part I wish someone had told me earlier. If you only track signups, then early on every input looks like a failure and you quit. So I track two separate categories and refuse to mix them:

Process signals: did I hit the cadence, how many drafts got stuck, did the editing pass get faster, am I recycling the same angle too much. These I control completely, and right now they're the only thing I have real data on.

Outcome signals: traffic, email signups, qualified replies. "Qualified" isn't a vibe - I only count it if the person looks like who I'm building for, and the rule is that every one of those gets a reply and an ask for 15 minutes.

——

I want to be straight about this: it is far too early for the outcome numbers to mean anything. I don't have a track record to lean on, so anything I'd quote you would be a handful of events dressed up as a trend. That's exactly why I started logging outcome signals from day one - not because they're useful yet, but because I want the baseline to exist before I'm tempted to tell myself a story about it later. And it's why process signals live in their own column.

The bit I'm actually watching for. Fair criticism of everything above: a board and a calendar don't make you smarter, they just make you tidier. So here's the test I've set for whether this is a system or just filing.

Every qualified reply becomes a ticket with the quote pasted in - alone, each is a five-second "huh, fair" I'd forget by the next panic-writing session. What I'm watching for is three of them tagged the same way, sitting next to each other - the kind of pattern a spreadsheet of good intentions never surfaces. That's when this stops being publishing hygiene and starts being positioning: which angle to retire, which claim I haven't earned, what to lead with instead. Haven't hit it yet, but building the pipeline so the pattern can surface, instead of trusting a memory I've already proven bad, is the only version of this I trust.

So, how do you actually stay consistent with marketing when it's not your native skill? Especially curious whether anyone's made the idea generation part systematic rather than just the publishing part. That's still where I lose the most time.