🎙️ How I AI: How the founder of Morning Brew built a Claude content machine that never runs out of ideas

Alex Lieberman, co-founder and co-managing partner of Tenex, built a Claude-powered content machine that scans Slack, Notion, Gmail, and meeting notes to surface 15 ranked content ideas daily, then uses a personal voice guide and six interviewer personas to generate drafts. Lieberman argues that AI slop is a people problem, not a model problem, and that a reinforcement loop comparing drafts to published versions improves the system over time.

🎙️ How I AI: How the founder of Morning Brew built a Claude content machine that never runs out of ideas Your weekly listens from How I AI, part of the Lenny’s Podcast Network How the founder of Morning Brew built a Claude content machine that never runs out of ideas | Alex Lieberman Tenex Listen now on YouTube https://youtu.be/1 jlukb7gm4 • Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Gc2VpGheLewqzz4VxX1r9 • Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-the-founder-of-morning-brew-built-a/id1809663079?i=1000777544732 Brought to you by: —Power AI agents with clean web data Firecrawl —Build customer engagement campaigns from a single prompt Customer.io Claire sits down with Alex Lieberman, Co-founder and Co-Managing Partner of Tenex, to dig into the AI content system he’s built inside Claude. Alex walks through how he finds ideas, gets interviewed by AI, codifies his voice, and runs drafts through a “Writer’s Council” before posting. Biggest takeaways: The blank page is the real enemy of consistent content, and an AI Oracle makes it disappear. Alex’s Oracle scans seven days of Slack, Notion, Gmail, and meeting notes, then surfaces 15 ranked content spikes each day—half from internal sources, half from the X and LinkedIn accounts he follows. Writing is actually the easy part; knowing what to say is where most people stall. Map your current workflow before you touch any AI tool. Alex’s process started with drawing out every step of content creation as it already existed, then rebuilding it from scratch with no constraints. He found that most companies discover huge inefficiencies in this step that have nothing to do with AI at all. AI just forced them to look. AI slop is mostly a people problem, not a model problem. Alex’s framing here is blunt: the only time the Content Machine produces slop is when the person being interviewed doesn’t share interesting enough ideas during the interview. The model is shaping clay, not inventing ideas. If the clay is bad, the sculpture will be bad. Your voice lives in a Markdown file, and that file changes everything. Alex’s Content Machine pulls from a personal voice guide that captures his top-performing posts, hook formulas, content structures, and even specific language patterns like “self-deprecating confidence.” The system drafts against that file, which means it’s calibrated to how Alex actually writes rather than to some average of the internet. A reinforcement loop is how your AI system gets better every time you use it. After every piece, Alex’s Content Machine compares the original draft to the published version, extracts generalizable lessons, and asks if they should be added to a permanent lessons file. Over time, the system stops making the same mistakes. This is the kind of feedback loop most people never build. The interview panel is the step most people skip and the one that matters most. The system deploys six interviewer personas Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, Larry King, Howard Stern, Barbara Walters, Michael Barrow that ask follow-up questions until they’ve extracted enough specifics to write something real. Alex voice-to-texts his answers via Wispr Flow, so every sentence in the final draft traces back to something he actually said. Your employees are your most underleveraged marketing channel, and most companies are actively suppressing them. Alex ran a version of employee content at Storyarb called “Own the Internet,” and it drove 40% of all inbound leads that quarter. At Tenex, he launched the Creator Cup with $5,000 in prizes to make posting feel like a team sport, not a chore. His argument to skeptical CEOs: the fastest way to lose a great employee is to make it impossible for them to build a personal brand. A bootstrapped company can out-distribute a venture-backed one if it’s willing to show the work. Alex’s case is simple: Tenex can’t rely on TechCrunch coverage or top-tier investor mentions, so the team’s content is the visibility strategy. If the Creator Cup gets him one great engineer, the $5,000 prize pool pays back many times over compared with a recruiting agency fee. For bootstrapped companies, distribution isn’t optional, but the whole game. The Writer’s Council won’t let a draft go out below a 9 out of 10. Six writer personas including a character Alex calls “the AI slop allergist” each score the draft and run a revision loop until the aggregate clears the threshold. That scoring mechanism is also what keeps Alex from having to manually police every post, so the system holds its standard even when he’s in a hurry. Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode: How I AI: Alex Lieberman’s 6-Step Workflow to Beat AI Slop: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/alex-liebermans-6-step-workflow-to-beat-ai-slop https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/alex-liebermans-6-step-workflow-to-beat-ai-slop ↳ Build an AI Content Machine to Beat Writer’s Block: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/build-an-ai-content-machine-to-beat-writers-block https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/build-an-ai-content-machine-to-beat-writers-block ↳ Create a Personalized AI-Powered Job Board for a Smarter Job Hunt: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/create-a-personalized-ai-powered-job-board-for-a-smarter-job-hunt https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/create-a-personalized-ai-powered-job-board-for-a-smarter-job-hunt ↳ Launch an AI-Powered Employee Advocacy Program: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/launch-an-ai-powered-employee-advocacy-program https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/launch-an-ai-powered-employee-advocacy-program If you’re enjoying these episodes, reply and let me know what you’d love to learn more about: AI workflows, hiring, growth, product strategy—anything. Catch you next week, Lenny P.S. Want every new episode delivered the moment it drops? Hit “Follow” on your favorite podcast app.