Chris Hawes.

“Your course is everything that you say it was. People will come away with a foundational understanding of AI and n8n, but also how they can apply it in their own careers.”

The before.

Chris spent his career as a writer. A few years as a journalist, then a move into content marketing, helping brands tell stories across articles, videos and animations. He had worked with some big names. He had never written a line of code.

AI was the obvious next layer for his work, but he was not interested in using it to manufacture content. He wanted to use it on the process side: find insights, shape stories, and surface the right material for a writer to put their tone on. The problem was the on-ramp.

The writer's leverage problem.

"I've done other courses where you jump in and you're immediately out of your depth because the language people are using doesn't compute." The vocabulary around APIs, payloads and webhooks meant nothing to someone whose tools were Google Docs and a notebook. He needed someone who could explain it from a marketing brain, not a coder's brain.

There was also a quiet professional anxiety. Writers and marketers are always the first ones told they're going to be automated away. He went into the course half-expecting to learn the thing that was going to replace him.

What we built.

A few weeks in, Chris landed on a use case that fit his world perfectly. Most brands he had worked with were sitting on archives of dormant content. Articles, podcasts, videos that delivered their value once and then went quiet. He wanted to wake that content up.

He built RAG agents that ingest a brand's archive and turn it into an interactive audience experience. The user gets to converse with the brand's accumulated thinking. On the back end, Chris layered an insights workflow that pulls themes and questions out of those interactions, so the brand learns what its audience actually cares about. The content becomes both a product and a research surface in the same workflow.

RAG meets storytelling.

He pitched the system to potential clients, got his foot in the door, and started his first build. The pitch wasn't "I built a chatbot." The pitch was "your archive is undermonetised, here's how to turn it into a customer-research engine."

"AI can kind of give your brand more. It can turn unused content, unused data into really valuable workflows and equity." That framing is the bridge between writer and consultant.

The shift.

Chris went from a non-technical writer worried about being replaced to a consultant who can walk a brand leader through what AI can and cannot do for their business. He can take a company's data, see what's underused, and design a workflow that turns it into an asset.

Your course is everything that you say it was. People will come away with a foundational understanding of AI and n8n, but also how they can apply it in their own careers.

The shift he didn't expect was the breadth. He came in to learn n8n. What he got was a moving target of platforms, models and capabilities, with someone sitting on top of the changes and translating them into the workflow. "That's not like, you know, if I was to go on a writing course or a public speaking course, the information you get always remains quite static, whereas with AI, you know, we're kind of on the forefront of what can be done."

From writer to consultant.

The deeper reframe is about his own value. Writers were supposed to be the first against the wall when AI arrived. He looked at it the other way. "By learning the technical side of AI, you realize that those skills actually, if you combine them with AI, you're not going to be automated, but you're one of the ones that's going to kind of lead the change."

It's another pen, it's another way to create more engaging stories, and it's a much more powerful one.

Why this works.

Chris said it directly. The difference between a YouTube playlist and the mentorship was the unblock loop. He could send a workflow template or a video of where he was stuck, get a specific answer back, and stop trying to debug his way through a tutorial that was already six months out of date. For a non-technical writer, that responsiveness was the difference between giving up and shipping.