The calendar invite said thirty minutes.
I hadn’t been in touch with Dan in nearly a decade aside from a few LinkedIn conversations.
I first met Dan Willoughby fourteen years earlier. At the time, I was running marketing for MBA programming focused on entrepreneurship, venture capital, private equity, corporate innovation, real estate, and complex systems — what would later become the most disruptive thing to business since the Digital Revolution: Artificial Intelligence.
And it was AI that sparked the catch-up call with Dan.
By the time we reconnected, I was living in Kansas City, running my marketing firm, Storyworthy. Dan had also left Chicago, running CPG businesses from his hometown of Detroit.
I had recently taken a deep dive into AI. Many of my clients were requesting consultative support in thinking through how to implement AI into their marketing workflows.
Should they adopt it?
Should they leverage the AI features rolled out in their existing tools?
Should they migrate to newer, shinier tools?
Should they hire someone to develop customized harnesses for their preferred models?
Every marketer I knew was taking a firm stand: either for, or against. My gut instinct was to stand against it, but as a tech enthusiast who had once been in a position to manage marketing at Kellogg for “Complex Systems” and “Man x Machine” — what was then an emerging tech concept — I knew enough to stay curious. I decided that in order to make a decision, I needed to explore it to the best of my ability.
That’s when I noticed Dan was posting on LinkedIn about using AI to support his content and social strategy and production work. He was also writing about experiments and active builds, as the solo brand operator behind CPG brands, and as the Founder & CEO of Jinn.
He was looking for feedback from marketers who were experimenting with AI in their work. And I was looking for someone I could trust with a strong AI engineering background, to tell me what was real, and what was fiction — or in the world of AI, hallucination.
The First Call
Our initial call was meant to be short and to the point. Dan was looking for feedback from marketers who had in-house, in-agency, or consulting experience. I fit all three.
I was hoping to get clarity on how I could leverage AI for my firm from someone I trusted.
We ended up talking for over three hours. About Jinn, the intelligent engine and operating system for brands he was building. And about all of the new business models, organizational structures, products and workflow possibilities that were enabled as a result of the frontier AI models that were shipping at an increasingly fast pace.
Then, Dan offered to help me get properly set up in Claude Code over the weekend. He walked me through how to configure and begin building a harness for Claude in Cursor via a terminal — a working environment I had resisted throughout my career. I am, at heart, a visual wordsmith who prefers color and formatting. But now, with Claude Code, working in a terminal seemed exciting and full of possibility.
Who I Was On Call One, Is Not Who I Am Today
It matters who I was that first afternoon, because the reaction I’m about to describe depends on it. I’ve spent more than twenty years in marketing in all different types of organizations and industries. My degrees are in Creative Writing and Film. I am a creative-turned-strategist who highly values creativity in others.
And yet, I was already using AI to supplement some of my agency work. Half of my clients were enthusiastically asking me to implement AI into the martech stack and workflows. I was finding ways to deliver increasingly more creative work for the enthusiastic clients using Claude, ChatGPT, as well as AI features embedded within tools like HubSpot, Marketo, Instantly, Apollo, Webflow, WordPress, SproutSocial, Figma, Miro, Adobe, Canva, etc.
So I came in with curiosity, openness, and two decades of pattern recognition — which is a polite way of saying I expected to be lightly impressed, but beyond that, I didn’t anticipate signing up to use Jinn at such an early stage.
Three Hours, Three Reactions
Dan walked me through Jinn.works, and as a result, unintentionally led me through a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.
The first reaction was surprise.
The thing I’ve written into a hundred briefs and watched a hundred tools ignore — that a brand is a specific, knowable set of facts and choices, not simply a vibe — is largely lost when implementing a new tool. Even those that are designed for marketers and designers. That fact is the base premise for Jinn.
Every Jinn product reads from the same source, the brand record, or the Brand DNA. The line on the Jinn homepage is a more succinct way of saying what I felt on that call: Jinn learns the brand once; then applies it everywhere. I had not seen that before, but I had seen a lot of products that claimed to do so.
The second reaction was one I want to be honest about, because it’s the one every working marketer or creative has had in the last two years — and most of us have been quiet about it: it was dread.
I sat there watching a machine produce a competent first draft in a brand’s voice, from the brand’s own facts, in the time it takes me to open a document. I did the arithmetic on my own career: more than twenty years of craft. A tool that does the first forty percent of the work before I’d finished my morning matcha. The phrase that went through my head was the one you’d expect: AI is going to take over marketing, and as a result, my business, and my career.
I sat in that for a while. Dan, to his credit, let me. But he didn’t let me stew for very long. Instead, he redirected my anxiety toward excitement, by giving me a slice of his vision and mission.
In fact, he did something next that would change my entire take on what he was building. He showed me my own personal, customized Ghost voice profile.
Prior to our call, Dan had fed Jinn content I myself had written, in my own voice, with my vocabulary. It clearly captured my unique timbre, cadence, percussion, and my proclivity to use both humor and an often excessive amount of em-dashes. All of it was there on the screen. It was a wild experience, to see an AI tool describe my own voice and tone and style and diction back to me, in such clarity and with such specificity. More so than all of the Creative Writing and Poetry workshops I’d spent years participating in during college.
This was something I hadn’t experienced before. And I immediately realized that this was a very unique product. I also realized what this meant for my clients. I could, quite easily, yet strategically, increase content production, and therefore deliver more value. And it didn’t mean my experience or skills were erased. If anything, it meant that I could compete at a much higher level, leveraging these tools to increase output, without losing quality.
The third reaction was excitement.
Ghost gave me a spark of inspiration, but what flipped me toward a more positive outlook wasn’t a single feature. It was a question about who Jinn was designed for, and what contribution, and what opportunities, humans can make and take, as a result of AI tools like Jinn.
The marketers with the least to fear from a tool like this are the ones with the biggest teams. They already have a writer, a designer, a strategist, and a video crew. A brand-aware AI is a nice efficiency for them. It doesn’t change what they can do.
The people Jinn changes everything for are the ones who don’t have a large bench. The fractional marketer running five client engagements off of her laptop (me, at one point). The small and mid-sized agency that turns down work because it can’t staff it (often me, today). The CPG owner-operator who is the marketing department, on the evenings after the operation work is done (Dan). The serial entrepreneur looking to scale faster, leaner (Aaron, our co-founder). The startup with one marketer, and the small business with none. I’ve been most of those people. I’ve worked for, or with, the others.
For these customers, a suite that learns a brand once and then writes, designs, and eventually films in that brand’s voice is the team they never got to hire, not a threat to their craft. It levels the playing field against the incumbents who could always afford to be everywhere at once.
That was the third reaction, and it arrived somewhere in hour two: not relief, exactly, but excitement, the specific kind you feel when you’ve spent a long time being the person who does everything, and someone hands you a way to do more of it, and to do it better.
Another group of prospective customers were top-of-mind for me: the people who have big, bold ideas, but didn’t before have the budget or capacity to pursue them. And the people who would be displaced by AI inside of large corporations, who could use a product suite like Jinn to hang their own shingle, design their own product, start their own business.
With Jinn, I could see a new wave of business owners competing against much larger incumbents. And for me — someone who always roots for the underdog — that was very exciting.
For these customers, a suite that learns a brand once and then writes, designs, and eventually films in that brand’s voice is the team they never got to hire, not a threat to their craft.
Customer Zero to Product Design Partner to Co-founder, in Quick Succession
I started giving Dan feedback the way you’d give it if you were the customer, because I was the embodiment of multiple of their ideal customer personas. Where the onboarding assumed knowledge a small-business owner wouldn’t have. Where the voice profile development work needed a marketer’s ear, and not just an AI model’s. What a fractional strategist would actually pay for, and what she’d want for free.
At some point pretty early on, the feedback started being the job. Dan built the products. Aaron built the infrastructure. And I tested them, with twenty years of feedback stacking up, and then co-designed the story to launch them. Now, I’m a co-founder at Jinn, along with Dan and Aaron, leading marketing and growth. And I still run Storyworthy, because the studio agency is where the customer’s problems live, and Jinn is where the tools get built to solve them.
In sitting at both desks, I can see the macro and the micro at the same time — the large opportunities, and the small hurdles — and I can help navigate more smoothly, and speak directly to our customers, as a result.
I’ll say the obvious thing plainly: I am biased about Jinn. But after twenty years, I’ve earned the bias, and I’m writing this article to show you the receipts.
If you’re a marketer, and you’re interested in testing out Jinn, or one of the products across our suite, you can reach me directly at sarah@jinn.works. Happy to share more, give you a demo, or get your feedback.
We’re just getting started, but we’ve got big plans ahead.
Let’s Keep in Touch
Jinn was built to help entrepreneurs, small business owners and marketers work more efficiently. We take that mission seriously. We will regularly publish ideas, expert advice, frameworks and playbooks that are actually worth your time. If you’re interested in hearing from us, sign up for Jinn’s emails, or follow us below on one of our platforms.
Sign up for Jinn’s emailsWhat is Jinn?
Jinn is the intelligent engine and operating system for brands. Every Jinn product reads from the same source, the brand record, or the Brand DNA. Jinn learns the brand once; then applies it everywhere.
Who is Jinn built for?
The people who don’t have a large bench: the fractional marketer running client engagements off of her laptop, the small and mid-sized agency that turns down work because it can’t staff it, the CPG owner-operator who is the marketing department, the startup with one marketer, and the small business with none.
Does a brand-aware AI erase a marketer’s experience?
It didn’t erase mine. It meant I could compete at a much higher level, leveraging these tools to increase output, without losing quality. For teams without a big bench, it is the team they never got to hire, not a threat to their craft.
How can I try Jinn?
If you’re a marketer interested in testing out Jinn, or one of the products across our suite, email me directly at sarah@jinn.works. Happy to share more, give you a demo, or get your feedback.