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You have successfully "vibe coded" a new project. You spent days refining the prompt, the interface looks crisp, and the functionality is seamless. You launch it to the world, expecting immediate traction, but instead, you are met with silence. No customers, no revenue, and certainly no passive income. This is the "builder’s trap"—the misconception that creation equals success.
In a recent discussion with Jonathan Courtney (founder of AJ&Smart), the focus shifted from technical implementation to the often-neglected reality of AI entrepreneurship: revenue generation. While tools like Claude Code can build software in record time, they cannot inherently sell it. Courtney outlines a distinct framework for using AI not just to write code, but to act as a force multiplier for marketing, sales, and the CEO’s primary mandate—promotion.
Key Takeaways
- The CEO’s Primary Role is Promotion: Regardless of technical ability, a founder’s main job is moving traffic into a sales funnel. Building without promoting is a form of procrastination.
- The "Holding Pattern" Strategy: Traffic should rarely go straight to a product page. It must be directed to a "holding pattern" (newsletter, podcast, social sphere) where trust is built over time.
- Dual-Mode AI Usage: Use the standard Claude web interface for high-level strategy, copywriting, and research, while reserving Claude Code (CLI) for executing technical builds and landing pages.
- Abundance Over Efficiency: The goal of AI in marketing is not to save time, but to increase output volume—running five campaigns in the time it used to take to run one.
The Promoter Mindset: Breaking the Builder's Trap
There is a prevalent misconception in the development community that if a product is technically superior, users will naturally find it. Courtney argues that this view is contradictory to the behavior of the most successful tech leaders. Figures like Sam Altman (OpenAI) or Peter Levels (indie maker) are not just builders; they are relentless promoters. At least 50% of their operational time is dedicated to visibility.
For the technical founder, "vibe coding" endless features can become a comfortable distraction from the uncomfortable work of sales. Courtney likens this to opening a restaurant where the kitchen is fully automated and creates perfect dishes, but the owner never unlocks the front door or puts up a sign.
If you are not able to promote those things, no one's going to use them and it becomes completely like a little self-contained procrastination station that you're building for yourself.
To transition from a builder to a CEO, one must accept that promotion provides the oxygen for the business. Without traffic, the most sophisticated AI agent or SaaS platform is simply dead code.
The Four-Step Revenue Blueprint
To operationalize this mindset, Courtney utilizes a specific framework designed to move strangers toward a purchase. This blueprint is platform-agnostic but highly optimized when executed with AI assistance.
1. Traffic Generation
Traffic is binary: it is either organic or paid. Organic traffic involves appearing on podcasts, networking, or creating social content. Paid traffic involves ads on platforms like Meta or YouTube. The critical error most founders make is driving this cold traffic directly to a "Buy Now" button, which results in abysmal conversion rates.
2. The Holding Pattern
Instead of selling immediately, traffic should be directed into a "holding pattern." This is an owned environment where the potential customer sits and consumes value without pressure. Common examples include:
- Weekly email newsletters
- A subscribed podcast audience
- A focused X (Twitter) or LinkedIn following
This stage warms up the lead. It turns a skeptical click into a knowledgeable follower who understands your worldview.
3. The Selling Event
The "selling event" is the bridge between the holding pattern and revenue. This is a deliberate, orchestrated moment where the passive audience is asked to take action. This could be a live webinar, a specific email sequence, or a product demo. Because the audience has been incubating in the holding pattern, they are primed for this conversion event.
4. Revenue and Retargeting
Finally, the selling event leads to the transaction. However, notably, those who do not buy are not lost; they simply cycle back into the holding pattern until the next selling event. This creates a sustainable loop where leads are never wasted, only nurtured further.
Executing the Strategy with Claude and Claude Code
While the strategy is fundamental, the execution is where AI radically alters the speed and scale of operations. Courtney distinguishes between two distinct modes of using Anthropic’s Claude to power this machine.
Strategic Planning with Claude (Web Interface)
For the "soft skills" of marketing—strategy, psychology, and copywriting—the standard web interface remains superior. It allows for a visual overview and contextual "chatting" that mimics a co-founder relationship. A workflow might look like this:
- Context Loading: Upload transcripts of previous podcasts, customer interviews, or successful email campaigns.
- Research: Ask Claude to analyze the upload to find the strongest hooks or angles. For example, "Analyze my last three campaigns and tell me which emotional triggers resulted in the highest click-through rate."
- Asset Planning: Brainstorm lead magnets. If you have just recorded a podcast about "CEO Mindset," Claude can instantly suggest creating a "Promoter Blueprint PDF" to capture listeners' emails.
Execution with Claude Code (CLI)
Once the strategy is defined, Claude Code (the command-line interface) is used for building the actual assets. This separates the "thinking" from the "building."
In a live demonstration, Courtney showed how he took the "Promoter Blueprint" concept and used Claude Code to deploy a fully functional interactive web app to Vercel in under an hour. Previously, this would have required a designer, a developer, and days of back-and-forth communication. Now, the marketing asset is generated directly from the strategic context provided in the web chat.
I definitely think less prep, more action, and an understanding... that your job is to grow your business to make money or to get investors or to get users. And your job is not to be optimizing your admin before you're even making money.
Abundance Over Efficiency
A critical insight for AI-enabled businesses is the shift from "efficiency" to "abundance." Many founders use AI to do the same amount of work in less time, aiming to work fewer hours. However, the true leverage comes from doing more work in the same amount of time.
If a team of three can now produce the output of a team of ten, the goal shouldn't be to fire two people. The goal should be to run five times as many marketing campaigns. By utilizing Claude to generate landing pages, write ad copy, and code lead magnets, a company can test multiple angles simultaneously.
This approach moves away from the "measure twice, cut once" philosophy. With the speed of AI generation, the cost of "cutting" (executing) has dropped to near zero. Therefore, the new winning strategy is to "measure once, cut ten times"—launching multiple variations to see what the market actually wants.
Conclusion
The era of "vibe coding" as a hobby is ending for those who wish to build sustainable businesses. The tools available today, specifically the combination of strategic reasoning via LLMs and rapid deployment via agentic coding tools, remove the friction between having an idea and selling it.
However, the software cannot be the CEO. It cannot replace the human drive to promote, evangelize, and close deals. By adopting the "Promoter Blueprint" and using AI to fill the "Holding Pattern" with high-quality assets, founders can finally bridge the gap between building cool products and seeing those products generate serious revenue.
