Marketing done well is so much more than cranking out ad copy or polishing sales slides. In all my corporate product roles—Fabasoft, Borland / Micro Focus, smec—I got to work with fantastic marketing teams. They shaped products, challenged ideas, and saw the bigger picture we tech-focused product folks often missed.
With poketto.me, though, it was just me. So I leaned on ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini more often than I liked—sometimes with good results, sometimes… not so much.
Here’s how that went:
1️⃣ The good: “Shorten this text”
For the official launch email on Sept 2, I wrote a long piece introducing features, pricing, and the future vision. But I also needed short versions for Bluesky, X, and LinkedIn. Turns out: ChatGPT is excellent at compressing long-form text without losing the core message. Check out Exhibit A!
2️⃣ The okay: “Variations on a theme”
The personal podcasts feature in poketto.me is pretty generic: Turn any content into speech, listen anytime, anywhere. Specificity sells, so I asked the bots for use cases, branding ideas, and taglines.
– All three suggested “ListenLater.”
– Many pitched “…Cast” names (too obvious).
– A few were original: “Ear Mark” (Gemini) and “Audibly Yours” stood out as clever wordplay.
3️⃣ The mediocre: “Ask me critical questions”
As an optimist, I tend to overlook risks. So I asked the bots for five critical questions about the podcast feature. Result: softball questions. Checking them off would give a false sense of security—the real pitfalls weren’t even mentioned. As I said in my post about “The Bright Side” a few weeks back: Here’s where the combination of a dispositional optimist and a critically minded pessimist would stand out.
The 15 total questions roughly clustered around 🟢 Persona & problem, 🟠 UX & personalization, 🟣 Legal & privacy, Monetization (just one question!). See Exhibit C.
Bottom line: AI can help with speed and brainstorming, but it still can’t replace the strategic thinking of a real marketing team.
