Bending spoon is the large software holding company that buys legacy tech brands and reorganizes them - think Eventbrite, Vimeo, Meetup.com What's the implication for how our workflows will be impacted when Bending Spoons undoubtedly reprices Airtable? Curous what @Stephen G. Pope has to say!

I run a UK digital agency and one of my clients is a builder who sends me raw build project videos via WhatsApp. We turn these into branded shorts and reels for YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Nextdoor. Current setup ($100/month): My VA in Nigeria handles the whole pipeline manually: • Downloads videos from WhatsApp • Runs them through Descript (adds voiceover when client’s ops manager hasn’t recorded one) • Polishes clips in Opus Clip Pro • Adds logo and branding • Writes captions • Schedules to YouTube, Insta, Facebook • Manually posts to Nextdoor via GHL workspace He’s reliable, the quality is OK, and at $100/month it’s hard to beat on cost. The AI-automated alternative I scoped: Make.com + Claude API + Creatomate (branding) + ElevenLabs (voice clone) + Opus Clip Pro API + GHL scheduling. Roughly £60-75/month in tooling, plus probably 20-30 hours of build time on my end. The build would handle: WhatsApp ingestion, Claude analysing each video and writing platform-specific captions, voiceover generation when needed, automated clipping, branding overlay, scheduled posting across all platforms, with one approval gate before publishing. Where I’m stuck: On paper the AI route looks cheaper long-term, but when I actually compare: 1. My VA costs $100/month flat, no build time, no API surprises, deals with edge cases naturally 2. The AI stack is ~£60/month in tools but needs my time to build and maintain, and breaks when APIs change or videos are unusual 3. Nextdoor still needs a human click either way (no API) 4. Voice cloning needs careful setup and consent 5. The VA can also handle other ad-hoc tasks the AI can’t My questions for the group: • Has anyone built something similar and found the maintenance cost was higher than expected? • Is there a hybrid worth considering — AI for the captions and Claude analysis, VA for the video editing and posting? • Am I overcomplicating this when a good VA with the right SOPs is genuinely the more cost-effective answer?

Hi! Welcome to the Content Academy. This community is designed to help you build a profitable content strategy, efficient team & automated content process. Step 1: Introduce yourself in THIS THREAD below! (✄ copy/paste template 👇) Where are you from? What are you working on? What immediate help do you need? Step 2: Read the rules and checkout our free courses and paid programs

Last post was the concept. This one's the build. Took a coaching business (Apex Coaching) and built the entire AI Operating System from scratch, on camera. No head start, no template folder just an empty directory and one company overview file. - Connect the folder to Claude, drop in that one file - It reads it and writes its own CLAUDE.md + a blank .env for credentials - Dump in the raw stuff — signups, DMs, session notes, student roster and it sorts itself into department folders: onboarding, support, progress tracking, content. Each one gets its own CLAUDE.md. Then I turned the actual work into skills, so you're not re-explaining yourself every session: - Onboard New Student — Drafts a personalized welcome per signup, flags what needs a human first (missing email, timezone conflict, duplicate contact) - Triage Support DM — Reads the DMs against the roster and session notes, drafts replies in your actual voice, flags anything that's a judgment call instead of guessing - Generate Progress Report — Clean HTML report on who's on track, who's at risk of churning, and the wins worth bringing to a team meeting That last one's now scheduled to run itself every Monday at 9am. I don't touch it. Same folder, same structure. Works with Claude Code, cowork, or codex — pick whichever CLI agent you're running. Next video: content and repurposing. If you have any question, ask me in the comments section.

Everyone's building "AI agents." I just built mine out of folders. No new platform, no dashboard. Just a root folder, one subfolder per department, and a framework (FFPP: Folders, Files, Processes, Permissions) that any CLI agent like Claude Code or codex can work inside of straight away. - Every folder gets its own instructions file + its own credentials + its own reusable "skills" - Runs entirely on your own device. Nothing to host, nothing extra to pay for Video 1 : Just the concept. Next one, I build the whole thing live from an empty folder. If you have any question, ask me in the comments section.