How one co-founder runs a zero-employee marketing agency with AI tools

By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)

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Running a marketing agency used to mean juggling a small army of freelancers, risking missed deadlines, and spending more time managing people than creating content and building strategies.

That’s how Barbara Jovanovic of Startup Cookie used to operate.

She’s now built a streamlined operation that generates six figures annually with a tech stack that costs less than one grand a year. There’s no team behind her — just Jovanovic, her AI tools, and a process that turns one hour-long conversation into weeks of high-quality content.

Here’s exactly how she did it — and how you can replicate her success, whether you’re an aspiring solopreneur or just want ideas on streamlining your workflows with AI.

Table of Contents

6 Tips for Running a Marketing Agency with AI Tools
How to Maximize Your Resources with AI
8 Top Startup AI Tools for Content Creation

6 Tips for Running a Marketing Agency with AI Tools

1. Never start with a blank page — context is everything.

“We never start with just prompting AI by itself to do anything, even the simplest social media post. We always have something to start with,” says Jovanovic.

In her view, the biggest mistake people make when they use AI for content creation is asking it to write about a topic from scratch.

Jovanovic’s secret weapon? She starts with human interactions.

That might mean feeding the AI transcripts from webinar transcripts or podcast recordings. Her co-founder, Sam Claassen, does hour-long interviews with founders, and those transcripts also get fed to the AI.

In a world where authenticity is paramount in your marketing strategies, giving AI something human to work with can set you up for success.

2. Talk to your AI, don’t type.

I hate talking to AI because I tend to ramble — but Jovanovic says that could actually work to my advantage.

She rarely types prompts into ChatGPT, instead using an AI-powered voice-to-text tool called Super Whisper. Speaking naturally adds context and nuance that short, typed prompts miss. And Jovanovic says that the results are “infinitely better.”

When you’re talking, you naturally provide more background, explain your thinking — or in my case, over explain — and give the AI the rich context it needs to produce high-quality results.

3. Use projects to scale your personal brand voice.

ChatGPT‘s Projects feature isn’t just a neat organization tool — it’s also Jovanovic’s scaling secret. For each client, she creates projects loaded with: