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Zero to Launch · Session 06 · Wed Oct 14, 2026

Agentic Growth

Automated content, paid marketing, and the CAC ceiling

Ship AIPhoenix, ArizonaPress → to begin

Ship AIAgentic Growth01/26

What Ship AI is

Builders showing each other the work.

  • Builders & founders
  • Phoenix
  • Free, always

The best AI education isn't behind a paywall or on a stage — it's in the open, for free.

Ship AIAgentic Growth02/26

Your host

Santos Hernandez

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.

Santos Hernandez
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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.

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The two failures

Content that needs you

  • Posting depends on memory
  • Stops the first busy week
  • Restarts with an apology post
  • Never compounds

Paid without a ceiling

  • Spend first, measure later
  • Every customer loses money
  • The launch "worked"
  • The business didn't
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Tonight

  1. 01Automating the content pipeline
  2. 02Distribution without a social media manager
  3. 03Performance marketing basics
  4. 04The CAC ceiling
  5. 05Pricing, quickly
  6. 06Weekend logistics
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Sponsors

Ship AI runs on 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

The menu — shipai.club
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Where we are

  1. Aug 5GTM Engineering
  2. Aug 19Zero to $3,000
  3. Sep 2Outbound Agents
  4. Sep 16Unfair Advantage
  5. Oct 7Ship the Surface
  6. Oct 14Agentic Growth
  7. WeekendHackathon

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.

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Act one

Distribution that runs without you

Built on screen. The half most builders never automate.

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The content pipeline

  1. Map intopics from a table
  2. Draftan agent, holding your voice
  3. Reviewgenuinely, or not at all
  4. Repurposeone piece, every channel
  5. Queuea cadence you'll survive

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.

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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.

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Act two

Paid, and its ceiling

Everything about performance marketing is downstream of one number.

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Performance marketing, in four moves

  1. Structuresimple enough to read
  2. Anglesfive reasons, not five wordings
  3. Narrow firstconfidence before reach
  4. The daily loopraise · hold · cut

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.

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The CAC ceiling

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.

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The same channel, two businesses

UnsustainableSustainable
Cost per customer$90$90
First-year value$70$310
Paybacknever4 months
VerdictScaling this loses money fasterScaling this is the job

The channel isn't good or bad. The arithmetic underneath it is.

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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.

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Pricing, quickly

  • Match how value arrivesPer-seat, usage, flat — the model should track the thing that grows when they succeed.
  • Decide it deliberately tonightRather than anxiously on Saturday afternoon with a judge walking over.
  • Defensible in a sentenceIf you can't explain it in one, customers can't understand it either.
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Tonight's runs

~/your-product

/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.

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Act three

The weekend

Venue, timings, what to bring. Then it's on.

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October 16–18, Workuity Biltmore

  1. Fri 6:00 PMKickoff and Launch Rehearsal. Teams of 1–4.
  2. SaturdayBuild, launch, gather receipts. Mentors in the room.
  3. Sun 12:00 PMSubmissions close.
  4. Sunday PMJudging, then Crowd Favorite voted by the room.

Scoring: shipped 40, receipts 30, growth engine 20, craft 10.

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You've had ten weeks and a roadmap. The only thing left is to ship it.

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Thank you

Workuity Biltmore

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.

Workuity Biltmore
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Sponsors

Sponsor the weekend, before Friday

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

The menu — shipai.club
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Say hi

  • X@5antoshernandezBuild in public — arguments welcome.
  • Discorddiscord.gg/kZSJMNveYMWhere tonight's links, slides, and skills land.
  • Work with medesic.xyzWant systems like these built and run for you? That's my team.

Everything is open source — the deck, the skills, the template repo. Take it all.

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Feel the fear and do it anyways.

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Next

Zero to Launch — Oct 16–18, Workuity Biltmore

Doors Friday at 6. Bring the thing that's been sitting at 90%.

shipai.club · Free, always

The program
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