College teacher turned ghostwriter | Scaling founders, coaches, and consultants to $100K+ /mo | Writing to build wealth and better self | 98,000 on Twitter (X)

Taylin John Simmonds

3 years ago, a friend lent me $40K to pay off my debt. So I could focus on business.

2 years ago, I offered to pay it back. He said no. Reinvest. Pay me later. 1 year ago, first payment. 

Yesterday, I paid him back!

Find the people who bet on you before it makes sense. Then spend your life proving them right.

College teacher turned Substack ghostwriter | Thoughts about craft, ideas, and AI as a creative partner (not a replacement) | 2B impressions | $4M+ revenue generated | All in on Substack

One pattern I’ve noticed in all the people that inspire me: They live a diverse life.

They layer unrelated skills. 
Read widely. 
And have friends you'd rarely see together. 

A rich life isn't only about money. It's about the range of experiences that made you who you are.

Stop calling yourself a content creator. Content creators chase algorithms. You're cultivating a body of work.

You're not in the content game. You're in the depth game.

And depth doesn't scale. It compounds.

I'm noticing a quiet rebellion against balance. 

People who disappear into their craft. 12, 15 hours a day for weeks. Then step back completely. No guilt. No routine. No splitting the difference. Full immersion, then full recovery. 

Seasons, not schedules.

You don't actually want to stop working. You just haven't found work worth your devotion.

The goal isn't to do less. It's to care so deeply about one thing that everything else becomes noise.

Find that thing. Then you'll never need convincing to start.

Everyone's trying to escape work. Fewer hours. Passive income. Early retirement. That's not freedom. That's avoidance.

You don't want to do less. You want something worth pouring everything into. Work that's worthy of your full attention, your full energy, your full devotion.

Find that first.

If AI is speeding up your writing process, you're using it wrong.

AI should slow you down. Stress-test your ideas. Pressure-test your arguments. Find the angle that actually matters before you write a word.

The bottleneck was never your writing speed. It was your thinking clarity.

You don't need 100 clients. You need a handful of the right ones and the devotion to serve them so well they never want to leave.

No empire. No team of 30. No "scaling to seven figures."

Just craft you're proud of and a livelihood that lets you live well.

A book you highlighted but never practiced is a book you never read.

Understanding doesn't live in the notes you took.

It lives in the choices you made differently afterward.

A life-changing habit I picked up recently: Fifteen minutes of breath work before work.

The breath brings me out of my head and into stillness. A stillness that makes creative work feel effortless.

Your best work is hiding behind the ritual you're skipping.

The real value in the AI age isn't what you know. It's who you can inspire.

Give them an aim, a compelling reason, and the next small step when everything feels overwhelming.

If you want to matter in the AI age, don't just share knowledge. 
Lend direction.

You're behind because you've never given 100% of yourself to the thing you care about.

Subtract everything that isn't it. Give it everything you have. Not 40%. Not most days. Everything.

You've never seen what happens when you actually commit. Find out.

Acquiring Inbound Leads for B2B Founders with Personal Content Programs • Explaining Content, one Ugly Drawing at a time

Content steals focus, I know. Writing, formatting, visuals, posting cadence, and keeping up with comments. It becomes a weekly tax, then it gets dropped, then inbound stays unpredictable.I build an Authority Engine for B2B Tech Founders. It turns your existing knowledge into consistent content that makes you look like the category leader, without you writing a word.What you get:1) 100% custom AI voice cloneWe extract your voice from your real materials. Whitepapers, sales calls, internal docs, Slack messages, past posts, and anything else that reflects how you think and speak. No generic templates.2) LinkedIn Autopilot5 high converting posts per week, ghostwritten, formatted, and ready to publish. You do not write, format, post, or search for visuals. You approve drafts with a simple yes or no.3) Search Dominance pack2 SEO optimized long form articles per month, derived from your LinkedIn content, so your authority compounds beyond the feed.First week of content can go live within 48 hours of onboarding. You can see engagement on day 1. Your only job is approvals.I will write 3 posts for you for free using your data, so you can see the voice match before you pay. If the first week does not sound exactly like you, or better, I rewrite it until it does, or you do not pay.Best for founders who have real insight and a real product, but do not want content creation to compete with building, selling, and hiring.If you want to test the voice clone, message me: “3 posts”.

Kuba Czubajewski

IMO, this is the only realistic "future" of content marketers:

Every week, I see here new tools popping up that promise my clients they can let all their content team go because AI can do it all for them.

Not once have I seen it actually work, btw.

Content is a much deeper thing than writing a bunch of paragraphs that sound good or an infographic that looks nice.

For me, it's all about connecting the dots that are usually VERY far apart and turning it into a fresh, impactful message.

This is why I'm in love how Dropbox Dash is approaching AI for creatives.

Instead of proposing yet another "I'll do it for you" tool, they're solving one major pain most of us feel:

Not being able to connect the dots because the dot you're looking for is in a file you forgot the name of.

Sounds trivial, but OH MY GOD, the amount of time I used to spend on scrolling through my G-drive is embarrassing.

And this is where I think the whole AI for content conversation should land.

AI is incredible at recall.

Humans are still the best at judgment what matters, what’s true, what’s new, and what’s worth saying out loud.

You won't win because you can generate 50 posts a day.

But if you can pull the right inputs fast, then make a call on the angle, and ship a message people actually remember, you will win.

PS. this is not sponsored by anyone, I just saw their launch and loved it.

I’ll write 3 LinkedIn posts for free, in your voice. If it sounds like you (or better), we install your AI Authority Engine in 90 days.

Here's a 10-min flow I use with founders to create weeks of content for them:

The goal is to create one small, high-integrity narrative object that can survive multiple contexts without losing its meaning. 

The easiest way to do that is to start with a 10-minute CEO video (use Tella or Loom), because spoken answers preserve something writing tends to bleach out: conviction, nuance, and those small qualifiers that signal real experience. 

I beg you, don’t ask for “thought leadership.” 

Ask one tight prompt that forces specificity, like what buyers are getting wrong about a problem right now, what that misunderstanding costs them, and what they should do instead.

Once you have the Loom, the extraction step matters more than the editing. 

You’re looking for a structure:

Pull out:

- one contrarian claim that creates tension
- one vivid symptom that makes the claim relatable
- one constraint that makes it believable
- one before/after framing that makes the shift obvious
- one proof detail that anchors it in reality

That proof detail can be lightweight. It can be “we heard this on 12 calls this month,” or “this showed up in every deal we lost last quarter.” 

Now you take those five ingredients and you write one “source paragraph” in plain language. Don't think of any platform yet. 

Just articulate the idea clearly as if you were explaining it to a smart friend over coffee. This paragraph becomes the anchor. Every other asset is a translation of it, not a reinvention. That’s how you keep integrity when you repurpose.

From there, I like to create three outputs that each do a different cognitive job:

First, a short text post that opens with the contrarian claim and immediately explains the symptom. 

The mistake people make is opening with the claim and then drifting into abstraction. Don’t. 

Earn the reader’s trust by describing what they already see in the wild, the call snippets, the internal debates, the marketing copy that “sounds right” but doesn’t move anything.

Second, a simple carousel where each slide is a single unit of meaning. Not “tips,” but progression. The before model, the cost of that model, the constraint that keeps people stuck, the after model, and then one practical move they can try this week. 

If you can’t fit the idea on five slides without it turning into fog, the idea isn’t ready yet.

Third, a longer form piece where you unpack the constraint and the proof detail. 

This is where nuance belongs. Why the obvious fix fails. What tradeoff you’re making. What to watch out for. 

This is also where you can safely include a real example, even if it’s anonymized, because you have space to set context.

Two quality checks before you hit publish:

• If the post could apply to any company, it’s too generic. 

• If the reader can’t repeat your point in one sentence, it’s too complicated.

If you want, reply with your niche and I’ll give you 5 tight CEO prompts that reliably produce these “weeks of content” anchors.

I recently changed my banner to this one below and you might think I went insane:

This is not a typical path content people choose for their businesses.

“Free value” beyond a regurgitated ChatGPT lead magnet is a rare thing here.

My thinking is this:

I built an Authority System for copying B2B founders’ voice with AI.

It’s GOOD. Took me about a year to get here. 

And the easiest way to prove it is to show my potential clients how it works.

Yes, building a sample assistant is harder than posting fancy carousels and “vulnerable” fake-ass stories

But I’ve always been more of a show-don’t-tell kinda guy and not planning to stop now.

Curious how it works? Dm me “3 posts”

"comment on other creators' posts" is sh!tty advice:

I used to spend 2 hours per day here commenting on probably all of them big creators.

Most of them don't give a rat's a*s about me or my content.

And that's perfectly fine. Why would they?

Not once have I reached out to them in a DM, they have no reason to see my comment and think:

"I wonder what this guy is about?"

But the folks I exchanged DMs with are consistently showing up under my posts.

Because we established a more meaningful connection than a [put an insightful comment here so they see you're trying hard]

See what I'm getting at?

Connection > tactics.

Build the first one and you'll never need to think about the second one again.

A year ago I thought I had it figured out:

Build a content agency for B2B founders. Use AI to do the heavy lifting. Keep costs low, scale fast. Simple.

What actually happened: 

I spent months building something nobody wanted to pay for.

The first version of the system was basically:

1. take the founder's old posts
2. dump them into a prompt
3. generate something that kind of sounded like them

The output was fine. Technically competent. The kind of content that gets 15 likes and zero leads.

I wasn't impressed with myself tbh. Neither were my clients.

So I overcomplicated everything:

A 12-step onboarding process, 5 different content formats, a pricing page that looked like a software feature comparison matrix...

I was trying to cover every possible use case for every possible client, and the result was that nobody could figure out what I actually did.

The solution was so stupidly simple, I facepalmed when I finally got there:

I started interviewing founders instead of just ingesting their existing content.

Turns out the best content a founder can publish isn't what they've already written.

 It's what they say when someone asks them the right questions:

- the unguarded takes
- the specific stories
- the things they'd never think to write down but say out loud constantly

Once I built the system around that – extract the thinking first, then write – the output stopped sounding like AI trying to be human and started sounding like the founder on their best day.

That took about a year to nail.

The offer got simpler too:

Interview you -> Write it up -> Publish it -> You approve the drafts. 

That's the whole thing.

If you want to see what it looks like, DM me "3 posts" – I'll write them for free before you spend anything.

A thing we rarely discuss in marketing is how customers perceive our narrative through preloaded meanings:

We think we’re publishing a simple story about a benefit. They’re interpreting a signal about power, intent, and control. 

That gap is what Ring ran into with its Super Bowl ad about a lost dog found through a neighborhood camera network. The creative aimed for warmth and community. 

The audience, already saturated with years of privacy discourse and surveillance headlines, watched the same 30 seconds and didn’t primarily evaluate the plot. They evaluated the infrastructure implied by the plot. 

“AI + cameras” isn’t a neutral prop anymore. It’s a symbol, and symbols arrive with cultural baggage attached.

This is the real mechanism behind “losing the narrative.” It’s rarely about execution quality but about the interpretive surface area. 

When a story leaves room for people to fill in the blanks, they will. And they’ll fill them with the strongest available frame in their mind, usually the one that best matches their anxieties. 

In this case, the counter-frame was waiting in the wings, mass surveillance disguised as safety. 

Once that frame establishes itself, everything that follows stops being “new information” and becomes “supporting evidence.” 

That’s why Ring’s sudden move away from a planned partnership with Flock Safety was immediately absorbed into the same storyline. Regardless of internal motives, it read like validation, not coincidence.

The takeaway isn’t “be careful with your messaging.” That’s too shallow. 

The takeaway is that narrative is not a message you transmit. It’s a negotiation between your intent and the audience’s prior beliefs. 

And prior beliefs are not something you overcome with a nicer tone. They’re something you have to design around. If your product or campaign touches an area where trust is already fragile, you should assume your audience will run an adversarial interpretation, even if they like you, even if the ad is well made.

A better move is to treat messaging like you treat product design:

Reduce ambiguity. Anticipate misuse scenarios. Make the boundaries legible. 

Don’t just tell a heartwarming story about what your system can do at its best. Show that you’ve thought seriously about what it could do at its worst, and what you’ve done to prevent that. 

In 2026, “we’re doing this for safety” is not a persuasive claim by itself. People want to know who gets visibility, who gets veto power, and what recourse exists when the system is wrong.

Curious how you think about this. When was the last time you watched a brand’s “feel good” story and immediately felt the darker subtext the audience would attach to it?

Quick tip if you hate when AI says "It's not X, it's Y..."

This rhetorical device is called "contrastive reframing using antithesis structure."

Hard-prompt it into your content assistant to avoid it (example below).

Also, from my tests, Claude 4.6 is much better at this that GPT models.

PS. Let me know any other annoying things AI uses - I'll show you how to remove them from the outputs.

How I helped a B2B consultancy business (very niche) start showing up in AI search:

We focused on turning their LinkedIn content into long-form SEO articles built around real opinions, specific frameworks, and language that maps to actual buyer problems.

AI tools cite sources that are clear and substantive. Since their LinkedIn content had this already, expanding it into articles became much easier.

The results measured over the last 90 days:

Overall: 1,619 AI bot hits → 4,163. That's 3x.
Homepage: 514 → 946. Almost 2x.

Every hit is ChatGPT or Perplexity pulling from their site while a buyer is actively researching. That's pipeline you'd never see in a cold outreach report.

If you want to see what this looks like for your niche, reply ENGINE and tell me what you sell.

200,000 people just watched a creator get stood up by a brand's AI chatbot:

Reformation used AI to manage its influencer outreach. It confirmed a collaboration, set up a store visit, and ran weeks of back-and-forth with a creator.

She drove an hour to the store, shot video in the dressing room... The manager had no idea who she was.

TikTok called it "an AI bot that went rogue." Reformation sent her a sweater as an apology.

Here's my read on what actually happened: 

AI made commitments nobody at the brand had authorized. And no human was watching the inbox it was running.

The bot did exactly what it was built to do - respond, confirm, follow up. 

But nobody told it where to stop. That's a systems failure.

AI doesn't know when it's overstepping. The tool runs until you build a stop - and plenty of AI marketing setups skip that step entirely.

There are places where automation works well: segmentation, sequences, content drafts.

And then there are contexts that require a human in the seat: real commitments, real relationships, anything a creator or partner will hold you to.

I put a lot of emphasis on that while working with my clients on their content assistants.

First draft can (and should) come from the AI. But the human editor before anything goes live is a must. 

Doesn't matter how good your AI tool is. If there's no one monitoring what it's agreeing to, you're one post away from a mess.

The CEO of impact put it well: "Human credibility becomes more valuable, not less."

That's the thing marketing teams running AI tools aren't accounting for right now, imo.

I've been inside a lot of AI content setups lately. 

Usually, it’s a single prompt, no real architecture:

A prompt produces something that sounds okay one day and off-brand the next.

What I built for myself first, now for clients, runs on 8 layers:

1. A voice profile: formality level, POV, energy, humor notes

2. A writing style guide: sentence rhythm, paragraph rules, formatting settings

3. A preferred/banned word list: the exact vocabulary the AI can and can't touch

4. Content pillars: the strategic territory the brand owns (and what it doesn't)

5. A CTA library: specific closing lines and keyword triggers, not improvised

6. An editorial guardrails file: a list of hard limits for the AI

7. A reference database: curated post examples labeled by format, hook type, and why they worked

8. A master prompt: the architecture that connects all 7 layers and tells the AI how to operate

Each layer feeds into the next. Remove one and the output starts drifting.

For example, the voice profile without the banned word list sounds right tonally but uses language the person wouldn't say out loud.

If you want to see what each layer looks like in practice, reply "SYSTEM" and I'll send you the breakdown.

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