Zero to Launch · Session 06 · Wed Oct 14, 2026
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Automated content, paid marketing, and the CAC ceiling
Ship AIPhoenix, ArizonaPress → to begin
What Ship AI is
Builders showing each other the work.
The best AI education isn't behind a paywall or on a stage — it's in the open, for free.
Your host
Founder & Host
Founder and Lead Product Engineer building agentic AI systems. Founding product hire at ZBD — the money layer for games — $0 to $12M ARR, the EU's first MiCAR approval, and money transmitter licenses in 26 states and D.C. He started Ship AI to give Phoenix builders a room where you show the work, not talk about it.

Two days from now, this all goes public.
Last session before the weekend. Two failure modes to close out, both cheap to fix now and expensive to fix later.
Content that needs you
Paid without a ceiling
Sponsors
Six free sessions and a free weekend, funded by companies rather than tickets. Tiers are published — $1,000 to $10,000 — and cash, credits or hours all count. There's an opportunity at every price point, and a custom arrangement is always on the table.
shipai.club · Free, always
Six Wednesdays, then the weekend. Every session is free and standalone — you don't have to attend all of them to compete in October, and catching up late is explicitly allowed.
Act one
Built on screen. The half most builders never automate.
The content map from Oct 7 is the input — the queries your ICP actually types, ranked by how close they sit to a purchase. Topics come out of a table, not out of whatever occurred to you in the shower.
The agent drafts against a voice file: your vocabulary, your register, the things you never say. That file is a brand asset — it sits next to the design tokens from Oct 7 and it's written out of the positioning brief from Sep 16.
Decide where a human actually stays in the loop. A checkpoint you always rubber-stamp is theatre — remove it or mean it. The honest answer is usually: read the first ten closely, then spot-check.
One piece of work reshaped per channel automatically — the thread, the post, the newsletter section, the short. Different register each time, same claim underneath, no second writing session.
Scheduled ahead at a rate that survives a bad month. Then it comes back around: last week's numbers choose next week's topics, which is what makes this a loop and not a batch you burned a Sunday on.
Built on screen tonight. This is the half most builders never automate, and it's the half that stops the first busy week if they don't.
The ambitious cadence is the one you abandon in week three. Halve it.
One piece of work, repurposed across channels automatically, at a rate that survives a bad month.
Act two
Everything about performance marketing is downstream of one number.
One campaign, a couple of ad sets, clear names. Complexity buys nothing at this budget and costs you the ability to say what worked. If you can't read the account in thirty seconds, you can't act on it daily.
Five ways to say one thing is one test. Five different reasons to care is five tests. The angles are your value props from Sep 16, one per ad — if you never wrote them down, this is where that bill arrives.
Start where you're already confident the buyer is. Going broad first spends your budget teaching the platform something you could have told it. Widen only after something converts.
One look a day, three options, judged against a threshold you set before spending. The discipline isn't watching more closely — it's deciding in advance what would make you stop.
Every ad points at a page. If the page doesn't say what the ad said, you're paying for a click and then losing it in the hero — that's the Oct 7 session doing its job.
LTV
what a customer is worth
÷ payback
how fast you need it back
= ceiling
the most you can pay
Work it out with your real numbers, not a template's.
| Unsustainable | Sustainable | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per customer | $90 | $90 |
| First-year value | $70 | $310 |
| Payback | never | 4 months |
| Verdict | Scaling this loses money faster | Scaling this is the job |
The channel isn't good or bad. The arithmetic underneath it is.
If the ceiling is lower than any channel can hit, that's not a marketing problem.
It's pricing or retention. Fix it before Saturday, not after.
Tonight's runs
/social-automation → /unit-economics → /paid-basics
queue: 7 posts scheduledCAC ceiling: $86wrote 06-growth/README.md
The pipeline, then the arithmetic, then the plan that has to clear it. Add /pricing-model if pricing isn't settled, and /launch-checklist on Friday night.
Act three
Venue, timings, what to bring. Then it's on.
Scoring: shipped 40, receipts 30, growth engine 20, craft 10.
You've had ten weeks and a roadmap. The only thing left is to ship it.
Thank you
Platinum sponsor · Meetup venue
Workuity hosts and sponsors every meetup in this series, tonight included. Last session before the weekend — thank them on your way out.

Sponsors
Ship AI is seeking corporate sponsors for the hackathon and whatever comes after it. Published tiers, $1,000 to $10,000, settled in cash, credits or hours. There's an opportunity at every price point and a custom arrangement is always on the table — talk to Santos tonight.
shipai.club · Free, always
Everything is open source — the deck, the skills, the template repo. Take it all.
Feel the fear and do it anyways.
Next
Doors Friday at 6. Bring the thing that's been sitting at 90%.
shipai.club · Free, always