Issue #23: I build a copilot of my own brain
Welcome back to The Customer Continuum, Issue #23. You’re part of a small group of people who care about doing customer marketing well, and the fact that you open these is what makes building them worth the time. Thank you for being here.
Six days ago, at the bottom of last week’s issue, I made a promise. I said I was going to start building in the open, and I gave it a name, Build With Me. I’ll be honest with you about something. When I typed that line, I didn’t actually know what I was going to build first. I just knew I’d said it to a few hundred people, and saying a thing out loud to a few hundred people has a way of turning it into a deadline.
So I sat down this week and built a copilot. A version of my own brain that you can run on your own Claude account, for free. The download is further down, and the whole thing came out of a realization I want to walk you through, because it’s really the point of this issue.
Last week I wrote that the hard part of AI was never personal productivity. The hard part is taking it multiplayer, bringing your team and your customers along instead of just getting a little faster by yourself. I believed that when I wrote it. What I didn’t notice until this week is that I’d been quietly breaking my own rule.
For about a year I’ve had a rough version of this copilot built just for me. I trained it on the way I think about customer marketing, and I used it to draft, to pressure-test ideas, to think out loud. It was genuinely useful. It was also completely single-player. The best tool I’d built was locked inside my own account, helping exactly one person.
That’s the thing about the multiplayer move. It’s easy to preach and uncomfortable to actually make, because making it means giving away the edge you’ve been keeping for yourself. So this week I rebuilt it to give away.
What it does
It runs in three modes, and you pick the one that fits what you’re trying to do.
The first is a career coach. If you’re a customer marketer trying to prove your value or make the case for a promotion, it walks you through the things that actually move those conversations. It diagnoses why you might be stuck, it maps the stakeholders who decide your next title, and it gives you the language to answer the question every one of us eventually gets, which is “show me the revenue impact.”
The second is a strategist. If you’re building or fixing a program, it works through the seven pillars I’ve used for fifteen years, which are community, lifecycle and adoption, voice of customer, advocacy, communications, education, and executive engagement. It connects whatever you’re working on back to retention and expansion, and it hands you a structured plan instead of a pile of ideas.
The third is a content partner. If you want to write about your work the way I write about mine, it pulls the real story out of you first, holds you to a few hard rules, and helps you turn what you’ve lived into something worth reading. It writes in your voice, not mine, which was the one rule I refused to bend on.
What building it taught me
Here’s the part I didn’t expect, and it’s the reason I think you should build something like this even if you never give it away.
Teaching a machine to think like me forced me to write down things I’d carried in my head for fifteen years and never once said out loud. How I actually diagnose a struggling team. The real difference between a director who stays a director and one who becomes a VP. Why I open every post with a scene instead of a statistic. All of it had lived as instinct, and instinct is invisible until you try to hand it to someone else.
You don’t know what you know until you try to teach it. That alone was worth the week.
How to get it
It’s free, and it’s yours. Download using the link below:
Once you have it, you can load it into Claude in a couple of ways, and the file walks you through both. The simplest version takes about two minutes, and then you can ask it the kinds of questions you’d otherwise ask me.
If you’ve never added a file like this to Claude before, don’t worry, it takes about two minutes and you don’t need to be technical. Here’s the simplest way, and it works on any Claude plan, including the free one.
Download the file from the link above and unzip it. You’ll see a small folder with a few files inside.
Go to claude.ai and start a new chat.
Click the plus or paperclip icon in the message box, attach the files, and send a message that says, “Use these as your instructions and introduce yourself.”
That’s it. Now ask it anything you’d ask a customer marketing advisor.
If you’re on a paid Claude plan and you want it available in every chat without attaching it each time, you can add it permanently instead. Go to Settings, then Features, find the Skills section, and upload the zip file there. Claude will pull it in on its own whenever you ask a customer marketing question. That path needs a paid plan with code execution turned on, so if that sentence means nothing to you, just use the four steps above and you’re all set.
Try it with something real. Ask it to help you build the case for headcount, or to audit a program you’re not happy with, or to turn a hard week at work into a post. See what it gives back. And then tell me where it falls short, because that’s the part I actually want. This is week one of building in the open, which means the next versions get shaped by what you tell me isn’t working yet.
What’s next
Over the coming weeks I’m going to keep adding to it in public. The next pieces are the deeper reference files, the lifecycle engine with the metrics that matter at each stage, the advocacy program structure, the measurement model. Each one becomes its own issue, and each one drops into the same copilot so it gets sharper over time. That’s the whole idea of Build With Me. You watch it get built, and you get every piece as it ships.
— Kevin
P.S. If this gave you something useful, forward it to one person who’s trying to make customer marketing matter inside their company. That’s how this grows, one real reader at a time.
This is so incredibly generous Kevin! The hardest parts of doing this role as a one person band are competing priorities and shiny object syndrome. This would go a long way to reining that in.