Content Studio · AI Business Mate
Daily social content in a business's own voice — a producer/consumer system with a Google Sheet as the contract.
Problem
Accountants, brokers and advisers know they should post — and stop, because it's 9pm and the page is blank again. The work isn't unimportant; it's unreasonable. Content Studio makes the daily decision disappear: open the portal, three researched topics are waiting, drafted for every platform in your own voice.
Context
AI Business Mate is my small Melbourne studio for exactly this kind of client — professionals whose voice matters and whose time is billable. Content Studio is its flagship service: daily posts, branded images, and on the Plus tier monthly newsletters and campaigns.
Design
The architecture is two programs that share nothing but a Google Sheet. A local content engine — the producer — decides what gets published: it generates the copy, renders branded images, uploads them to Drive, and rewrites a ContentPacks tab. The client portal — the consumer — is a read-only display layer that honestly renders whatever the Sheet contains.
That Sheet is the entire API contract. The engine runs from a laptop and never touches the deployed site; the portal picks changes up on the next page load. No queue, no database, no coupling.
Implementation
The portal is a Next.js App Router app on Amplify (server-side auth, marketing pages as plain static HTML). The engine is a separate local Node project: content generation, SVG-to-PNG brand image rendering, and googleapis to write the Sheet and Drive.
Lessons learned
A spreadsheet the client can open beats an admin panel you have to build. The humble Sheet-as-contract gave me producer/consumer separation, an audit trail, and a client-readable source of truth for free.
Voice profiles matter more than volume. The setup call that maps how a client actually talks to their customers is the product; the automation just keeps the promise daily.