Toward a Claude Code for Marketing

Over the span of my career I’ve done just about every job on the org chart: software engineer, sales engineer, bag-carrying sales guy, product manager, customer support, hell, even some bookkeeping. But I’ve never been a marketer. I’m a marketing idiot. (Just ask any of the marketing pros I’ve worked with—they’ll back me up.)

These days I’m living life as an indie iOS developer. I shipped the most commercially viable of my apps, CD Wally, and then immediately hit the wall every solo dev hits: “Ah crap, now I have to market this thing.” Ugh.

With a little help from my AI friends I can create what I think is a pretty cool app. I know how to write clear requirements. What I don’t know how to do is create a content calendar. I can identify when my AI coding assistant is starting down a rathole, but even thinking about positioning, messaging, ASO, a social strategy, analytics, and content pillars… well, ugh.

What I need is a Claude Code, but for marketing instead of coding. And as it turns out, the right tool for that job might be… Claude Code (CC). I’ve started building the full pipeline: strategy, content generation, media hosting, scheduled publishing, and a weekly workflow that takes about 30 minutes, all using CC. And the whole thing even runs inside of CC. (It’s all very meta.)

Here’s what it looks like and what I’ve learned so far.

The problem with “just post something”

Most indie devs approach marketing like I did: open Twitter or Threads, stare at the compose box, write something that sounds vaguely promotional, hit post, feel weird about it, and then don’t post again for two weeks.

The issue isn’t laziness. It’s that marketing involves a dozen decisions you’re not equipped to make on the fly: What should I say? How often? On which platforms? In what voice? How do I measure if it’s working? Without a framework, each post is a cold start. And most people who code tend not to be the most extroverted or self-promoting, so the whole process is painful.

Step 1: The Playbook

I started by telling Claude (chat, not Claude Code) what I wanted. Here’s the exact prompt I used:

So, Claude Code has solved coding. I mean not really, but close enough, and you know what I mean. Now the limiting factor in what I want to do is marketing and all that entails. I’ve worked just about every job at a modern software shop, but never marketing. To me it’s a black box filled with voodoo. But I imagine that’s not true, and that there are playbooks you can use, conventional wisdom that works, processes, algorithms, repeatable approaches that I’m just unaware of. So where is the Claude Code of marketing? (I strongly suspect it’s Claude Code.) Help me, Obi Wan Claude-nobi. You’re my only hope.

That kicked off a conversation that ultimately led to the creation of a playbook that includes elements of April Dunford’s positioning model from “Obviously Awesome” and the Bullseye Method from Gabriel Weinberg’s “Traction.” Instead of a vague “post 3x a week” plan, it includes actual deliverables:

Claude delivered this playbook as a well-organized Markdown file. From there it was time to get serious, so dropped the playbook into my CD Wally project folder, opened the Terminal app there, and fired up Claude Code.

Step 2: The Interactive Tool

I pointed Claude Code at the playbook and basically said, “Run it.” It used its knowledge of the app (gained from reading the code and examining the deliverables in the project folder, including the App Store listing) and then interviewed me, asking questions about what to emphasize and what I thought would resonate with prospective customers. Some things I was able to answer easily, while other things required a bit of back-and-forth. CC also did some research on its own, finding relevant trends in recent news articles and online discussions. It was very much like an initial exercise with a marketing consultant.

The output of that interview was a design for an ongoing marketing campaign and a template for executing it. “Great,” I said, “now execute it for me.” And so CC got to work on that part.

Step 3: The Automation

The conversation then turned to implementation details: setting up media asset storage (I chose Cloudflare R2, their version of Amazon S3), walking through the gnarly process of configuring Threads and Instagram for API access, a draft-approve-publish workflow for new posts, a reminder system to email me if a publication date is coming up and the assets haven’t been finalized, and a scheduling system using GitHub actions to run the whole thing autonomously. Total infrastructure cost: $0.

Step 4: The Weekly Workflow

Now, every Sunday I have maybe 30 minutes of work to do:

  1. I open Claude Code in the marketing repo
  2. CC reads the voice guide and content pillars, checks what’s been posted recently, and drafts 3-4 posts for the coming week
  3. I review and rewrite the copy in my own words
  4. I create images or videos to go with the posts as appropriate
  5. CC uploads the media to R2
  6. Once I approve the posts, everything gets pushed to GitHub

A GitHub Action runs every weekday and publishes any scheduled and approved post. Boom.

What’s working

The content pillars framework and the automatically drafted posts have given me a way to organize how I think about posting. Instead of, “What should I say today?” it’s, “Here’s one draft Wallet post and one draft Album Love post. If they feel right, let me rewrite them. If not, I can write something along the same lines.” A lot of the decisions are pre-made, leaving me to just fill in the specifics, which I can do with very little effort.

Weekly batch creation removes the daily willpower drain. I don’t need to think about marketing Monday through Saturday. It’s a Sunday task that I can do it at whatever time of day the muse is upon me.

What’s not implemented yet

This system handles the daily social media posting flywheel, which forms a solid foundation. There’s a longer list of channels and tactics that make sense once we get some momentum:

The nice thing is that each of these has a “revisit trigger” defined in the strategy docs. Not “do this in Q2” but “do this when X metric hits Y threshold.” It’s deterministic, which makes my engineering brain happy.

Toward a reusable system

So the skeleton of the system is in place. This week will be its first live run. But none of this is specific to CD Wally. To market a different product all I need to do is re-run the playbook interview, maybe swap out some API tokens, and rewrite the templates. Which is good, because I already have two more apps on the App Store, and probably more coming.

Ultimately what I want to create is a Claude Code slash command where you just type /marketing and it scaffolds the whole thing: strategy docs, a voice guide, content pillars, a publishing pipeline configured for the appropriate platforms, and a regular cadence, all ready to go. It’s not there yet. But the first version of all of the pieces are there, and the workflow is simple enough that any developer could run it. Once I get it more polished, I’ll release it to the world.

The hard part of marketing for indie devs was never the posting. It was knowing what to post, why, and having a system that makes it sustainable. I now have that system, or at least the first version of it.

If you’re an indie dev staring at a compose box wondering what to say, start with the strategy. Claude Code makes the automation the easy part. If you’re a professional marketer, let me know what I’m missing, where my blind spots are, and what I should add, remove, or change. And regardless of who you are, if you have what you think is a daunting task and you’re not even sure how to get started with it, open up Claude and ask. You might be surprised how far that gets you.

Ultimately the proof will be in the pudding. If this system helps me hit the performance targets I’ve defined, excellent. If not, Claude Code and I will iterate.

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