What I’m Doing Right Now - New Signature Offer, AI Semester, and Studio Coaching App

My usual tendency is to talk about what I’ve already done in my business after the fact rather than share what I’m building while the sawdust is still on it. This is my attempt to do the latter.

Keep reading if you want to steal my ideas or conclude that yours are better. You can’t lose.

1. I finished my new offer, the Growth Partnership.

Check out the deck here, and reply to this email if you think you may need this.

This Growth Partnership is exciting to me for two reasons:

1. It represents the culmination and compression of what I’ve been doing since early 2016 when I first started selling strategy. The Growth Partnership isn’t really a new offer so much as me putting on my big boy strategy pants.
2. I tripled my price. I called the previous version of this offer a “1-Day Growth Sprint” and charged $7,425. I always overdelivered. I know a guy who wrote a book called Free Money and decided to take his advice by charging a price commensurate to the value I create.

What is kinda new about this offer is the messaging and certain pieces of the scope—for example, writing the strategy doc in plain English and walking alongside founders for 90 days.

I’ve written before how most founders aren’t shopping for strategy, even if they need it. I’ve also written about what strategy is and why writing it out in one- and two-syllable words makes it more effective.

And I’ve known that most founders need someone to walk alongside them as they begin implementing a new strategy. I’ve done a little of that with consulting clients. Marrying an initial strategy diagnostic and sprint with coaching during the implementation phase is something I should have done years ago.

In case you’re wondering, here’s how AI came into play:

• I used Viktor (AI coworker that lives in Slack) to sharpen my thinking. My prompt was 1) explaining that I want to sell larger $30K and $50K strategy projects, 2) dropping in links to the work I’d already done on my offer, positioning, and deck, and 3) asking for an actionable plan for getting from where I am to where I want to be (i.e., another $30K strategy project closed).
• The messaging and copy that Viktor and later Claude gave me was hopelessly derivative, terse, and gimmicky. It also whiffed faintly of bro. Like, who told Claude that good copy consists of 90% sentence fragments? And just please stop with questions like this: “Got your attention yet?”. I edited all of the copy myself multiple times.
• I had to edit the scope and fulfillment processes because, surprise, Viktor and Claude have never actually delivered a consulting engagement. Things that sound good in theory don’t work when you need to convince a warm-blooded human to give you their sweat-soaked money.
• Claude did save me time when I created the deck itself. I created fantastically juvenile slides with my copy in Canva, dropped in the identity guidelines for the Austin L. Church brand into Claude, and got a 90% not terrible result in the first pass. ChatGPT’s version was worse this time. That’s a first.

This is perhaps the most important insight I can share: AI can help you increase clarity, but it can’t supply conviction.

The main reason I’m excited about this new-ish offer is because I believe strongly that what I can do is exactly what founders who are eyeballs deep in complexity need. I can’t wait to do this engagement five, ten, twenty times and see more transformations.

That conviction and excitement enables me to share the deck with a straight face and state my fee without wetting my pants.

So if you haven’t pushed your new offer out yet, ask yourself, “How strongly do I believe in the transformation?” Or, the inverse: “Why aren’t I more excited about this?”

With or without help from AI, you’ll struggle to sell something you don’t believe in—sales is a transfer of belief, after all—and you’ll move very quickly once you reached the right level of conviction.

Just watch how quickly I can move toward smoked brisket or Funfetti cake, and you’ll see what I mean. Conviction.

Creating a signature offer you believe in is harder without a step-by-step process.

If you don’t already have one, then reply to this email. I’ll share the playbook I give to my $10K coaching clients.

2. I designed an “AI semester.”

I was feeling behind with AI, and I was also thinking about a coaching client and a friend:

• My client used Claude Cowork to remove dozens of hours from his workflow and give his clients better results. He quadrupled his monthly recurring revenue in less than six months.
• My friend started by telling me all of the wild things AI was doing and automating for him, but when I asked about his revenue, he told me it was down.

AI is like fire. Put it in an open field and it does more harm than good. Put it into a combustion engine, and it provides propulsion.

Knowing that I can’t afford to be unfocused and play with fire right now, I designed an AI semester with a syllabus, curricula, projects, and assignments.

Clarity on what I want to accomplish has helped me separate signal from noise as I saved certain posts, videos, and other resources and purposefully ignored others.

One of my self-assigned projects was creating a comprehensive content archive or vault, and though getting to the finish line took effort, it was still laughably easy compared to what would have been required in the pre-AI era.

Here were my steps:

1. I watched this video from Nate Herk based on Andrej Karpathy’s idea.
2. I copied and pasted Karpathy’s idea into Claude Code and said in effect: “I want to do this.”
3. I downloaded Obsidian for free and followed Claude’s instructions to get it connected.
4. I started exporting and downloading archives going back to early 2009: WordPress posts, Webflow posts, Medium posts, Kit newsletters, LinkedIn posts, Ulysses .md files (a writing app I used), my book, several guides, podcast episode transcripts, video transcripts, really anything I could think of that I might want in a searchable archive.
5. Claude automatically converted all of those files so that every new markdown file (.md) has parallel structure, and more importantly, all of them have the right meta data—everything from the date the piece was created to the original title to themes and keywords.
6. When I ran into issues, such as LinkedIn not exporting the full archive, Claude helped me troubleshoot.
7. When Claude ran into issues, such as not having the right Python script for unzipping and converting and archiving, it did its own troubleshooting.

The end result was 2,985 unique pieces of content spread across eleven platforms.

Again, creating this vault took effort, but it wasn’t hard in the way that figuring it all out on my own would have been hard. And it would be hard to overstate how valuable this is to me.

I recall several occasions when I was 80% finished with writing about a topic, and when I returned to it later and used keywords to search for the draft in GDocs, I found something else I’d already written on the same topic.

Sometimes, the older piece was shorter, sharper, and better. I had clearly put a lot of effort into it way back when. Realizing that I had spent hours creating a net-new and worse piece on the same topic left me feeling sick to my stomach.

I would peg my lack of strategic content repurposing as the single biggest bottleneck in my marketing, especially for the Freelance Cake Community, and therefore the single biggest obstacle to the growth of the business.

I was finally able to build the vault that will serve as the foundation for future content repurposing.

On that foundation I have stacked other building blocks:

• A rich, vivid ICP based on specific details, patterns, and problems from a couple hundred Freelance Cake Community and one-on-one coaching applications
• A content strategy based on those recurring problems
• A library of post types based on what is working right now on LinkedIn
• A content roadmap that marries the content strategy and post type library

So I now have a way to know what I should write next and why (strategy) and when (roadmap) and how (post types) and whether I already have a strong piece of content on the topic that I can repurpose (Obsidian vault).

I’m finally leveraging some of the efficiencies of AI without running the risk of publishing AI slop, which would be counterproductive in every respect.

Excuse me, what took me so long? What have I been doing with my life?

This content vault was only the first project in my AI semester. I’m both excited and focused. Imagine that.

3. I’m building a marketing habit app with Studio.

Through lies, bribes, and blackmail, I got the opportunity to build a Coaching App with Studio.com. Just kidding. I was invited through a community I’m a part of, Creator Science Lab.

Some of you are familiar with my course, Morning Marketing Habit which is pretty good at what it’s designed to do.

But this new Coaching App doesn’t teach you about marketing in the abstract. Instead, the experience is built around one daily practice, a focused 20- to 30-minute lead-generation effort that I call the “Daily Apple.”

The Daily Apple is personalized each day based on your niche, chosen strategies, relevant channels, strengths, and current stage. You do specific, targeted actions every day, log what happened, and receive coaching feedback grounded in my methodology.

In the first 30 days, you choose up to two lead-generation strategies in addition to the core strategy, the 3 R’s. You also generate your first warm leads.

Over the following 60 days, you continue to implement your chosen strategies, develop a Morning Marketing Habit, and fill your pipeline with warm leads.

So you go on a structured, 90-day journey to build your pipeline in real time, and the app makes your progress visible.

Eventually, the Morning Marketing Habit becomes automatic.

The app launches next month, and one thing that has dramatically cut down on the time required to create it is… drumroll… my content vault in Obsidian.

I dropped my App Blueprint, a 27-page document, into Claude Code, and then I asked it to create a list of everything in the vault that was relevant. Then, it bundled up all of those .md files into an archive I can drop into Studio’s app builder.

I mean, c’mon! That would have taken me hours and hours.

The reason I chose to build this Coaching App is because it enables me to do at scale something that used to be impossible: personalized, one-on-one coaching focused on building a consistent lead generation system suited to your strengths so that you become less dependent on referrals and get off the feast-or-famine rollercoaster.

At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I’ll admit that I may use the app myself.

That’s it for now, and I suppose that’s quite a lot.

If you’re so inclined, email me at helloataustinlchurchdotcom and tell me what you’re working on and what you need help with.