This edition is brought to you by our friends at beehiiv.
Finding sponsors that actually fit your audience is one of the hardest parts of running a newsletter. Historically, we’ve sold most Superpath sponsors by hand.
It takes hours every month and is only possible because of years and years of brand-building work by Jimmy and Eric.
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There are other ways to monetize, too. Boosts pays you to recommend newsletters you already read, and beehiiv’s digital products make it easier to sell guides, templates, coaching sessions, and more. You don't need a big list to start earning.
Plus, most importantly, beehiiv doesn’t take any cut of your earnings. If you’re trying to monetize an audience, it couldn’t be easier. - Alex
Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.
Sorry. I’m comin’ in hot with AI again this week:
I believe it would be a mistake for you to categorically reject AI in your work life.
By all means, please continue to boo big-tech CEOs at graduation speeches, bully your Facebook friends who make weird ChatGPT slop meme images, and yell “Human! HumaaaaAaaaAAaaAAaaaaaaan!” into your phone every time you get an AI customer support bot—but please, please reconsider outright rejecting AI at work.
I get that the lines between work and home have blurred in many ways. And I get that it’s frustrating that “everything is AI” now. So if you want to reject AI, it’s perfectly healthy to do so in your personal life. I also don’t use Slack in my spare time. Or Figma on the weekends. Or Zoom anyone since 2022. It’s okay for a tool to stay a work tool.
And heck, I even support rejecting AI for writing. I have also grown allergic to “It’s not x, it’s y”, triplet sentences, and “that matters.”
(Side note: I recently watched a baseball game where the announcers said, “It’s not just x, it’s y” about 30 times. And even though they were just two human beings speaking naturally to each other, it drove me absolutely bonkers. What have you done to my brain, LLMs!?)
Anyway, why am I interrupting your peaceful Wednesday to defend AI? Because I would like you to have a long and productive career.
Something that’s really easy to forget about content marketing is how much stuff you actually do. Only part of the job is actually writing. And the more time you have for writing, the better that part will be.
A lot of the job is just clicking buttons.
My boss/CEO at Dock, Alex Kracov, who used to be VP of Marketing at Lattice, has said he will only ever hire “button clickers”. Here are a few excerpts from a First Round Review interview he did:
“One of the biggest mistakes people make with early marketing hires is they have someone who can talk the talk, but when it comes to actually doing things, they have to go hire people to click the buttons.”
…
“I developed a lot of these little weird skills, like learning Figma or Sketch. Or how to actually build a website or set up a campaign. It wasn’t just that I could talk about marketing, but I figured out how to click buttons and actually do things, or if I didn’t know how to do something, I’d watch a YouTube video and figure it out,”
…
Now he looks for similarly entrepreneurial “do-ers” when he hires for marketing roles — whether they’re content writers or product marketers. “You don’t want someone who will come in and say, ‘I need to go hire a bunch of contractors or other full-time employees or an agency to help with this function.’ Instead, look for people who can actually do things on their laptop that produce marketing.” Yes, the button-clicker test doesn’t just stop with the first marketer — it should crop up every time you open up a new role.
In some ways, this is just a more exotic flavor of the do-more-with-less argument, but basically, what he’s saying is that the best marketers find a way to get sh*t done.
That’s why I’ve always been a big proponent of being great with spreadsheets, or automation, or project management tools, or anything that helps you scale yourself up. Even if you’re a great writer, you’re always going to have to click a crap-ton of buttons.
To prove a point, I asked Claude to summarize all the non-writing tasks I did with Claude only yesterday. Here’s what it said:
Competitive and market research
Researched the current category landscape, including a major merger and other consolidation, then reframed platform recommendations for a 50-rep team.
Investigated whether tools in our category price by asset count vs. seats/storage — surfaced one vendor's free-tier asset cap as a rare exception and flagged it as battle-card material.
Ran a deep pricing restructure analysis against a competitor database, validating tier changes across several competitors
Strategy and planning
Mapped the kinds of long-tail, "answer-shaped" questions that our ICP might ask LLMs, framed explicitly around AEO and what our existing blogs skip.
Designed the full FAQ hub architecture: auto-created an Airtable database as source-of-truth synced to Webflow CMS via a Claude Code script, with the three-bucket question structure and refresh cadence logic.
Data retrieval and reporting
Built a workflow that pulls podcast episode descriptions from Airtable into Claude
Pulled a report of 50 Dock workspaces created in the prior two weeks, organized by creator and engagement.Retrieved Dock's messaging framework and product portfolio from the Drive doc for quick reference.
Enumerated the Dock agents and the full 19-tool MCP surface available to you.
QA and auditing
Audited your llms.txt against the live help center via Dock MCP, identifying missing product areas (Reporting, Order Forms, Security, expanded Integrations) — and later did a structural edit to remove the project management integrations.
Structured data and technical setup
Generated JSON-LD schema (Organization, SoftwareApplication, WebSite) for the homepage and inner pages, and created the Wikidata entry (Q140011545) live, statement by statement.
I assume that was mostly jargon to you, but my point is that I was able to do a whole bunch of non-writing tasks that I never would have been able to do in one day pre-AI.
And that makes me a great asset to my company. If you can master this kind of day-to-day button-clicking AI usage, I think your career will only blossom.
To be clear, I think there’s a healthy breed of AI usage and a very unhealthy breed. (We get into that in the podcast episode this week.) There’s a lot to be learned from clicking the buttons yourself for a while. You shouldn’t turn your brain off and hand every task over to AI. But at some point, you’ll have learned enough from clicking the buttons, when it’s still your job to click them—and that’s where AI can help you scale yourself up.
So even if you’re allergic to AI writing, I’d urge you to at least get AI to click the buttons for you.
Cheers,
- Eric
📝 New on the Blog: Slack AMA round-up with Kaleigh Moore
Kaleigh Moore was kind enough to do a Slack AMA for the Superpath community a few weeks ago, so we’ve summarized it all on the Superpath Blog.
Kaleigh writes the Content Window newsletter, runs an AEO content agency, and created the Source Signal Stack, a diagnostic framework that helps B2B SaaS companies understand why traditional search rankings don’t automatically translate to AI search citation (and how to fix it).
Her 12+ years in SaaS content plus reporting for outlets like Forbes, Vogue Business, and ADWEEK taught her that both people and engines cite people with a named point of view and a track record of credibility. As an AirOps-certified content engineer and a current Harvard graduate student studying AI ethics and LLM information retrieval, she can speak to what's working in AI search.
TL;DR: Kaleigh answered questions from the Superpath Pro community that covered three topics:
AEO, AI search & how LLMs surface content: Kaleigh’s core thesis is that AI search rewards named, credible humans with independent third-party recognition. Reverse-engineering what works through experimentation is the only real playbook right now.
Tools, workflow, & staying current: Kaleigh’s workflow leans heavily on Claude as her core engineer, AirOps for content mapping and ideation, and heavy human editing. Treat AI as a strategic research and gap-analysis layer, not a writing replacement.
B2B Creator strategy & personal brand building: B2B creator work is a massive, largely untapped opportunity, and consistent LinkedIn thought leadership around a named framework is the most reliable method for building a personal brand and a client pipeline.
Oh, and and and: don’t miss our next Slack AMA! More on that below.
📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events
Superpath Social (Jun 4): Join us for breakout discussions with your content peers on hot content topics.
Change My Mind (Jun 16): As a group, we’ll debate your hottest content takes. These have been really fun.
Slack AMA (Jun 18): Melissa Rosenthal, co-founder of Outlever, and previously the VP Creative at BuzzFeed, CCO of ClickUp, CMO of Insight Timer, and CRO of Cheddar, will answer your questions about building an editorial or newsroom-driven content strategy.
AI Show & Tell (Jun 25): Our monthly show and tell, where three people show off what they’ve been building with AI. All the past recordings are available to Pro members.
To get the invitations to our virtual events, join Superpath Pro. You get 30 days free, so you can attend all these events!
🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Be the one who actually cares about content
I caught Chloe in a particularly riled-up state for this week’s podcast episode. She goes on a pretty epic rant about why it’s a content marketer’s job to be the enemy of slop and be the arbiter of quality in your organization. That someone has to care, and it that it should be us.
Chloe and I debated the meaning of “quality” in a one-click-and-you’re-done content world, and when it should be a priority.
We also got into:
Asking whether content should exist before asking how to make it
When is it worth the time to take something from good to great?
How to make the case for quality, time, and effort to leadership
This one was an emotional journey.
💬 Great Slack Threads This Week
Here were some of my favorite questions asked of Kaleigh Moore in our Slack AMA next week (blog coming soon with a summary, but isn’t this a spicy way to create intrigue?):
I'm starting to think about hiring a content marketer at [redacted]. I haven't had to hire in "the AI era" yet. For those who have hired before/after AI, what's changed in how you interview candidates?
Hey everyone! What would you say is the "industry rate" (in USD) for LinkedIn ghostwriting? And how would you price: per hour worked, per post produced, or a mix of both?
Does anyone have tips for automating infographic creation for LinkedIn? I've experimented with different approaches: used OpenAI keys and Anthropic's to generate HTML before converting to PNG with HCTI, but the image quality hasn't been up to standard. I can create standalone images manually with ChatGPT most of the time, but I haven't been able to build a template I can trust across different types of LinkedIn content. What I'm really after is a workflow where I drop in a piece of content and get an image out on an automated schedule. Has anyone figured out how to do this reliably, ideally through Claude Code? Any tips would be appreciated.
📙 The Reading List
Here are some articles that got the Superpath Slack community talking this week:
Is LinkedIn Entering Its Post-Cringe Era? | New York Times (this one generated a lot of discussion)
On Grindslop | Will Manidis
Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise | The Pudding (they do amazing data viz stuff)
🆓 Get a free 30-day trial of Superpath Pro
Superpath Pro is our paid community membership. On your free trial, you'll get access to:
A private Slack community with 400+ in-house and freelance content marketers
Monthly 1:1 peer networking calls
Monthly group events with breakout sessions
Monthly AI Show & Tell workshops
Graduate-level content courses
Niche channels and events for freelancers, content leaders, and more
"Most professional groups boast about their member numbers. Superpath intrigued me for the opposite reason: they deliberately shifted from a massive free community to a much smaller, paid one - so they could focus on it, nurture it, and make it genuinely excellent. And they absolutely deliver."
— Farah Cormack, Senior Marketing Leader