I use AI somewhere in almost every part of running my newsletter.
It helps me research ideas, polish the drafts I write, create thumbnails and infographics, optimize articles for SEO, repurpose them, tell me where a new article should be linked inside my archive, pull my metrics, and even download the invoices my accountant needs.
Some of this work is completely handled by AI. Some of it happens with AI beside me. And some parts are just mine.
Out of all the social platforms I’m present on at the moment, Substack is where I stay the most involved. I decide what is worth publishing. I write the drafts. I spend time inside the community, talk with you, test the products I recommend, and make the final call on everything that goes out under my name.
The setup around that work came together one step at a time as the newsletter grew. I kept adding new skills, workflows, automations, and agents. As we developed Amplifiers, I could build many of the workflows I’m about to show you.
And even though I’ve shared some of these systems with you separately as I built them, now I want to put all the newsletter pieces in one place and walk you through everything I do around it:
By the end, you’ll have an A-to-Z map of almost everything I do to run AI Blew My Mind. Whether you’re just starting a newsletter or content operation or already have one, you’ll get a shortcut to taking yours to the next level, using systems that took me more than a year to build (and many of which I’d call my secret sauce).
I’ll guide you through it as we go and share the tools I use, along with new prompts, skills, workflows, and resources I haven’t shared before. So buckle up, because there’s a lot inside!
How I find and research newsletter ideas with AI
When I started AI Blew My Mind, I didn’t know who my audience was. I didn’t have a content strategy or a specific goal for the newsletter either. It was an experiment and a place to share what I was discovering and doing with AI.
The people came first. And as more of you joined (there are now more than 13,000 of us here, yay!), I learned more about who you are. That helps me make better decisions about what I publish.
But I still don’t follow a rigid content plan. My ideas usually come from a few places:
A new AI feature or release that I think is worth exploring
A topic I covered before that now needs to be updated or taken further
A question someone asks me in the community, in a comment, or during a conversation
A workflow, system, or Amplifier I built for myself that I think could be useful to you too
A random idea that appears while I am reading, testing something, or doing something completely unrelated
What I care about most is choosing something worth your time. For that, I stay informed, follow trends, research every topic, and keep a few other habits in place.
This is everything I do:
I give AI context about my audience and business
Once I learned more about my audience, I created one skill with everything I knew about them and another with the context about my business.
I use both whenever I build a research system, or any kind of system, really. Because whatever kind of content work you’re doing, your AI needs to understand who you are and who you’re creating it for.
So I give both skills to Claude together with the instructions for whatever I want to create, and I don’t need to explain my audience or business again from scratch. They’re part of what I call my foundational skills stack.
I shared the complete process so you can build your own audience and business profile skills here. If you already have Amplifiers set up, you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to use the “Audience Profile Skill Builder” and “Business Profile Extraction” Amplifiers, and they will guide you through the process.
Start with what you know now and update both as your audience and business grow, just like I do.
I keep up with the news that matters to me
I have a simple system built with Amplifiers that pulls the AI news that matters to me every day and puts it all into one Claude artifact. This way, I can catch up in one place instead of spending hours checking everything myself.
You can follow this guide to build your own automated news system around AI, your industry, your clients, or any topic you need to follow. Or just ask Claude or ChatGPT to use the Newsletter Builder Amplifier to create yours.
I monitor trends every week
I also have a weekly trend monitoring system that searches YouTube, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, GitHub, and the web. It sends me a menu of trending topics, posts, videos, questions, and conversations.
I choose the ones that interest me and use them as starting points for social content, Substack notes, and articles.
I shared the complete setup in How I Automated Trend Research Across 9 Platforms, including the prompts and workflow you can adapt to your own audience. If you want a less exhaustive version, you can use the Find What’s Trending on Any Topic Amplifier.
I research each topic properly before I write about it
Once I choose a topic, I need to know what has already been published across the web and social platforms. I hate looking into a new tool only to find everyone repeating the same announcement, so I avoid doing that at all costs. I want to give you something you can use. Quality is what I care about most.
But I don’t do any of this manually. I use Amplifiers, and in about two minutes I have research that would have taken me hours to do.
I shared the complete process here, or you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to use the Topic Research Workflow for Content Creators Amplifier.
I listen to you and always write my content ideas down
This habit has nothing to do with AI. I pay attention when you email me, message me, or share a problem in the community. I love hearing what you are struggling with, and many of those conversations give me ideas for things I could help more of you solve.
Whether an idea comes from one of you or something I am reading, I open a Substack draft and write down everything on my mind, usually by dictating it.
Sometimes it is still fuzzy, so I leave it there and add more later. Other times, I write most of the article while the idea is clear.
You think you’ll remember an idea when it comes to you, but life happens and you forget. That’s why I write everything down. When I have a busy or difficult week, I can open one of those drafts and continue where I left off.
How I write articles and Substack notes with AI
Once I have the idea and the research, I write. AI has become much more involved here, but it’s not an automated system like the one I use to publish content on my other social platforms. I’ve chosen to keep it that way.
How I write my articles
I don’t think of myself as a writer. Writing is simply the way I share what I build. What matters most to me is giving you something useful in every article.
Most of the time, I start with my own notes or a draft I wrote myself, then use AI to polish it (just like this very article, which has been sitting in my drafts for at least a month now). Other times, especially when I’m showing you a system I built, I ask Claude to look through it, map the article with me, and draft it with me from there. So it really depends on what I’m sharing.
But there are, of course, a few things that help me a lot while I’m writing:
My Voice DNA skill, which gives AI the context it needs to write and edit in my voice, plus a separate skill for writing article introductions, because those are especially important to me
Another skill for structuring articles, use cases, and examples so they’re easy to scan and you can go straight to the parts that matter to you
My Draft to Final skill, which teaches AI how I reason and revise, so my drafts come back almost final
How I write hooks for everything I publish
Articles and Substack Notes need strong hooks, and the format changes what the hook needs to do. An article title, the first line of a Note, a carousel cover or an infographic title, and the opening words of a video all have different jobs.
So I built a Hook Writer inside Amplifiers from 3,905 high-performing hooks across 17 industries and 7 platforms. I give it whatever I’m publishing, tell it where it will appear, and it creates written, visual, and spoken hooks for that exact format. You can use it too.
How I write my Substack Notes
I treat Substack Notes as their own kind of writing and I don’t follow one rigid process for them either.
Sometimes I have an idea that feels worth sharing. Sometimes something I read in a newsletter or a book sparks a thought. Other times, a Note starts with research, an infographic, an article I already wrote, or a variation of one of my past Notes that performed well. I rely on AI more for Notes (even for ideation) than I do for articles because I enjoy writing my articles much more and hold them to a higher standard. They are also my main growth engine.
I usually handle the original notes in batches. I set aside one day per week for short-form content across all platforms, take the ideas I’ve saved, and use AI to help me turn them into notes.
Repurposed Notes are a little different because the thinking is already inside the original article. My AI OS has that context, and my Substack Notes skill helps me turn parts of it into notes that can stand on their own.
You can build your own version with the Substack Notes Skill Builder Amplifier. It analyzes your best and worst-performing notes, extracts what works for you across hooks, structure, tone, topics, and formatting, then packages those patterns into a reusable skill.
The system I use for both
My writing skills and all the context behind them live inside my AI OS.
The same folder works across Claude Code and Cowork, but also ChatGPT and Codex.
It also keeps the article and everything around it together. So when I finish an article and want to turn it into Substack Notes, the system already has the article, my voice, and my Notes skill. I don’t have to pass everything back and forth.
I shared how you can build your own AI OS in under 60 minutes here. I promise you, this simple folder filled with text files is more useful than it sounds. It helps you avoid repeating yourself, move much faster, and produce much better work.
How I create newsletter thumbnails and infographics with AI
Visuals are part of the way I explain things. I use them inside articles, in Substack Notes, and when I turn an article into content for other platforms.
For that, I use several skills: carousel and infographic skills, my brand skill, and my thumbnail skill. They’re all powered by Amplifiers, and they’ve reduced the time I spend creating visuals from hours to just a few minutes.
Below, I’ll share how you can build your own.
I create every thumbnail with my thumbnail skill
As you probably already know, every thumbnail includes my AI character in a different pose or scene that fits the article. But the character always needs to look the same, wear the AI BLEW MY MIND T-shirt, and appear on the exact same gradient background.
So I built a thumbnail skill that handles all of this for me in just two minutes, saving me from the messy back-and-forth I used to go through.