How to Build a Powerful Marketing Campaign That Turns Your Vibe Coded Project Into Real Revenue Using AI

A marketing campaign is the single most important thing standing between your AI-powered product and the revenue you built it to generate — and most builders never figure that out until the silence after launch becomes impossible to ignore.

You spent days or weeks bringing something incredible to life using vibe coding tools, watching prompts turn into real features, real screens, real functionality that feels genuinely impressive when you demo it to yourself at midnight.

Then you launch it, and nothing happens.

No sign-ups, no customers, no passive income, no messages from strangers telling you how much your product changed their workflow — just a quiet, humbling stillness that tells you something important is missing.

The painful truth, and the truth that Jonathan “Jay Ice Cream” Courtney has been teaching to CEOs and founders for over 14 years, is that what is missing is almost never the product.

Jonathan runs multi-six and seven-figure businesses including facilitator.com and AJ and Smart, and he has spent the majority of his career figuring out how to make money, get users, and turn something that is not selling into something that is — and he does it primarily by mastering the marketing campaign, not the product itself.

Tools like flipitai.io exist to help creators connect their technical work with real commercial opportunity, and the principles behind building a marketing campaign that actually converts are what this article is going to teach you from the ground up.

Why Your Job as a CEO Is Not What the AI Builder Community Is Telling You It Is

There is a dangerous misconception spreading through the vibe coding and AI builder space right now, and it is quietly destroying the revenue potential of thousands of products that could otherwise be thriving with the right marketing campaign behind them.

The misconception is that your job as a CEO, founder, or solo builder is to get really good at the tools — to build complex automations, design intricate systems, spend four or five days constructing cool workflows — and that somehow customers and revenue will follow naturally from the quality of what you build.

Jonathan Courtney addresses this directly with a vivid analogy: building an incredible product without running a marketing campaign is like opening the most automated, perfectly designed restaurant in the city, spending an entire year optimizing every machine, perfecting every recipe, and building the smoothest booking system imaginable — and then never telling a single person the restaurant exists.

That restaurant dies quietly even though the kitchen runs flawlessly, and the same fate waits for your AI product if nobody is actively running a marketing campaign to bring people through the door.

The names you know best in the AI space — the CEO of OpenAI, the CEO of Anthropic, solo entrepreneur and prolific builder Peter Levels — all share one underappreciated habit that almost nobody in the builder community talks about openly.

At least fifty percent of their time is spent promoting their businesses, not just building them — and that split is not a coincidence, it is the job description of anyone who actually wants their work to reach the people it was built for.

Peter Levels does not just build tools; he pins long-form promotional content to his profile, talks about his products constantly, and runs deliberate selling moments that produce visible spikes in revenue every single time they happen.

The CEO of Anthropic appearing at Davos and sitting down with Bloomberg for an interview is not doing that for the good of humanity alone — he is running a marketing campaign to position Claude as the enterprise AI platform of choice for large corporations, and every word he says is part of a strategy designed to fill a very specific pipeline.

So before any AI tool enters the picture, the first thing to accept is that your primary role is not builder, developer, or engineer — it is promoter, and every marketing campaign you run is the oxygen your business needs to survive and grow.

The Promoter Blueprint: A Three-Stage Marketing Campaign Framework That Creates Real Income

Jonathan Courtney puts together a framework he calls the Promoter Blueprint to explain exactly how a marketing campaign should flow from the moment someone first encounters you to the moment they hand over money, and he uses it personally across all of his businesses with consistently strong financial results.

The blueprint has three core stages, and understanding all three is what separates a builder who earns real income from a builder who simply keeps building — so this marketing campaign framework deserves your full attention because it is the foundation of everything that follows.

Stage One: Traffic — Getting New Eyes Into Your World

Every marketing campaign begins with traffic, and the only two categories of traffic that exist are organic and paid — there is no third option, no hidden shortcut, just those two paths and the strategic choice of which one to walk or whether to walk both at the same time.

Organic traffic means going on other people’s podcasts, running events, posting free content on social platforms consistently, writing articles and sharing your perspective, and making yourself visible in the spaces where your target audience already spends their time every day.

Paid traffic means running ads on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, or whichever platform your audience lives on, and putting money behind impressions that move people from scrolling past your name to actually landing somewhere inside your world.

The critical insight here is that traffic — whether organic or paid — should never be pushed directly to your product page or sales page, because cold attention rarely converts and you will burn through curiosity before trust is ever established.

Without trust, a marketing campaign has no real foundation, which is why every drop of traffic you generate should flow instead into what the blueprint calls the Holding Pattern, where the actual relationship between you and your audience gets built over time.

Stage Two: The Holding Pattern — Where Attention Becomes Trust

The Holding Pattern is the second stage of the marketing campaign, and it is the space where your audience lives between the moment they first discover you and the moment they feel ready and willing to buy something from you.

This is your email newsletter, your podcast, your YouTube channel, your consistent social media presence — the places where people keep coming back to receive value from you without feeling like they are being sold to every single time they show up.

The Startup Ideas podcast itself is a textbook example of a Holding Pattern in action — it delivers genuine, practical value consistently, it does not aggressively pitch products at the end of every episode, and it quietly builds thousands of relationships where trust and familiarity compound week after week.

Even Peter Levels posting about how to cook a steak in an air fryer is a Holding Pattern activity — it is not generating cold traffic from scratch, it is deepening connection with people who are already in his orbit, keeping his presence top of mind, and warming an audience that will buy when the marketing campaign shifts into active selling mode.

Most people in the vibe coding and social media space are actually quite good at the first two stages — they know how to post, grow followers, and generate engagement — but they have almost no system for taking that momentum and transforming it into a marketing campaign that produces consistent income.

Platforms like flipitai.io are built specifically for creators who want to bridge that exact gap between building an engaged audience and converting that audience into reliable, scalable revenue — because the tools are powerful but the strategy has to come first.

Stage Three: The Selling Event — The Bridge From Attention to Revenue

The Selling Event is the third stage of the marketing campaign, and it is simultaneously the most underused, most misunderstood, and most profitable stage for virtually every creator and founder who finally learns how to execute it with intention.

A selling event is not a cold pitch dropped into someone’s feed without context — it is a deliberately timed, carefully structured moment that moves people out of your Holding Pattern and into a position where they are genuinely ready to buy something, start a free trial, or book a discovery call.

The most powerful form of selling event is the live webinar or product demo, and Jonathan Courtney runs these consistently for AJ and Smart with extraordinary results — one recent marketing campaign had over 4,000 webinar sign-ups and was projected to generate between $350,000 and $500,000 in a single week.

Companies like Superhuman use this same approach relentlessly — they send targeted email sequences to existing users inviting them to live product demos, and use those structured moments to convert free users into paying subscribers or upgrade existing accounts to higher-value team plans.

A second powerful selling event format is the email campaign — a simple sequence of three to four emails sent to your Holding Pattern that carries readers from curiosity to consideration to decision, each message building gently on the last and moving the reader one deliberate step closer to action.

A third option is retargeting — using the email list you have already built to create lookalike audiences inside Facebook or Instagram, putting your message in front of people who are statistically similar to your best existing customers, and driving them toward a specific offer or sign-up page.

Jonathan also shares a tactic that most people overlook entirely: reviewing your newsletter sign-up list for email addresses from recognizable companies, then reaching out personally to those individuals to explore enterprise partnerships or high-value client relationships that a standard marketing campaign would never surface.

When people do not convert during a selling event — and most will not, because timing is everything — they simply return to the Holding Pattern and stay there until the next cycle of the marketing campaign begins.

How to Use Claude and AI Tools to Power Every Stage of Your Marketing Campaign

Now that the foundation of the marketing campaign framework is clearly established, the AI tools enter the picture not as the strategy itself but as the engine that makes every stage of the strategy faster, cheaper, smarter, and far more scalable than it would ever be without them.

Jonathan walks through his own use of Claude — both the standard chat interface and Claude Code — to prepare content, research audiences, build lead magnets, and create campaign assets at a pace that would have required a full creative team and several days of coordination just eighteen months ago.

Before appearing on a podcast, for example, he starts by recording a fifteen-minute verbal brain dump directly into his phone — every idea he wants to cover, every angle he wants to hit, every example he wants to use — and then drops that audio file straight into a Claude project built specifically for that appearance.

He then instructs Claude to transform that raw, unstructured recording into a clean, scannable, ADHD-friendly reference document that he can glance at during a live conversation without reading from a script, giving him the structure of thorough preparation combined with the energy of natural spontaneity.

The tool Whisperflow, which converts spoken words into typed text in real time, is what makes this entire workflow feel effortless — rather than laboriously typing long prompts to Claude, Jonathan simply talks to it, which means the quality, nuance, and detail of his prompts are far higher than most people achieve through typing alone.

Using flipitai.io gives creators a focused environment to manage these kinds of content-to-campaign workflows, keeping everything connected from the initial idea stage all the way through to the finished marketing campaign asset that actually reaches an audience.

Moving Between Claude Chat and Claude Code: When and Why Each One Matters

One of the most practically useful elements of Jonathan’s AI-powered marketing campaign workflow is the deliberate and intentional transition between Claude’s standard chat interface and Claude Code — each tool has its moment, and knowing when to switch is what makes the overall process feel smooth rather than chaotic.

When brainstorming content angles, doing audience research, writing email copy, or mapping out a webinar structure, Jonathan stays in the standard Claude interface where the layout makes it easy to see multiple elements at once, especially when managing several marketing campaign workstreams simultaneously.

The moment he needs to turn a marketing concept into an actual working piece of software — a lead magnet landing page, an interactive infographic, a custom campaign tool — he exports the full project context into a CLAUDE.md file and moves everything into Claude Code, where he can build and deploy directly to platforms like Vercel.

The entire interactive Promoter Blueprint, complete with toggle switches revealing AI use cases, floating animated stickers, and a custom ice cream cursor, was built exactly this way in under an hour — first shaped conceptually inside Claude chat, then brought to life in Claude Code, then pushed live to Vercel for anyone to use.

That kind of custom, one-off marketing campaign asset would have previously required a designer, a developer, and several days of iteration — now it is a single-person, half-day creative and technical project that feels native and specific to the exact content being promoted.

The 17,000-Line Swipe File and the AI Brain Behind a $450,000 Marketing Campaign

One of the most impressive elements of Jonathan’s marketing campaign setup is what he refers to as his AJ and Smart Marketing Expert Brain — a dedicated Claude project built entirely around marketing and copywriting that has been enriched over months with an extraordinary depth of context, examples, and curated expertise.

At the center of this project sits a 17,766-line document containing hundreds of real marketing emails from successful companies and creators, collected manually over time and fed into Claude to extract, analyze, and distill the core copywriting principles that make those emails perform.

Those distilled lessons are continuously added to the CLAUDE.md instruction file inside the project, creating a marketing campaign engine that gets sharper and more sophisticated with every new source of inspiration that enters the system.

When Jonathan needs to build a new email sequence, design a webinar campaign, or create a lead magnet for a specific piece of content, he opens this project, provides the relevant context, and asks Claude to generate options — and the quality of what comes back reflects months of accumulated learning, not just a single isolated prompt.

After preparing for a podcast episode, for example, he might ask Claude to generate three lead magnet ideas that could accompany the release of that episode — something free, immediately relevant, and compelling enough to pull listeners deeper into the newsletter and further into the Holding Pattern of his marketing campaign.

Ideas that might emerge include a downloadable one-page version of the Promoter Blueprint, a swipe file of fifty AI-powered prompts built specifically for the CEO who wants to market smarter, or a self-assessment tool that reveals whether a builder has fallen into what he calls the cave-dweller trap — spending all their time building and none of it promoting.

That last concept — the cave dweller audit — is exactly the kind of marketing campaign angle that sticks because it is provocative, immediately relevant to the audience, and frames the lead magnet as something that gives the reader urgent and useful insight about their own behavior.

Flipitai.io is built with this kind of creator-first thinking at its core — connecting the content you create with the tools that help you package it, distribute it, and monetize it as part of a cohesive and intentional marketing campaign.

The CEO Trap: Why Building Without a Marketing Campaign Quietly Kills Great Products

One of the most powerful warnings Jonathan shares is also one of the most personally relatable: AI tools can become the most sophisticated procrastination machines you have ever built for yourself if you are not absolutely clear on what your actual job is as a CEO.

A co-founder at AJ and Smart once spent three full days building a custom proposal builder from scratch using AI tools — designing it, refining it, testing it, polishing it — before finally asking Claude whether an off-the-shelf solution already existed that could accomplish the same thing.

Of course one did, and it had been available from day one, fully connected and ready to deploy in a fraction of the time — a reminder that not everything needs to be custom built, and that the best marketing campaign is often the one you ship today rather than the perfect one you are still designing.

This lesson applies directly to the marketing campaign workflow itself: you do not need a custom-built everything, you do not need to spend a week configuring a hundred Claude skills before you write your first email, and you do not need every piece of the system optimized before you begin running it.

Less preparation, more action — this is the mindset shift that separates a builder who procrastinates with AI tools from a promoter who uses those same tools to run faster, more frequent, and more targeted marketing campaigns week after week.

Jonathan himself started using Claude meaningfully just a few months after first encountering it as little more than a glorified search engine, and within that short window every single business process at AJ and Smart had an AI-assisted element running inside it.

Not because everything was painstakingly automated from the very beginning, but because the marketing campaign came first, the business need was identified first, and the AI tool was brought in to serve that need — rather than the need being invented to justify using the tool.

Scale Up Rather Than Optimize: The Abundance Mindset Powering the Best Marketing Campaign Results Right Now

The final and most energizing insight from Jonathan’s framework is what he describes as the abundance play — a fundamental shift in how most people think about what AI tools are actually for in a real business context.

Most builders who discover AI tools immediately start thinking about efficiency: how can they do the same amount of work with fewer people, how can they automate tasks that used to take their team time, how can they make existing processes leaner and faster and cheaper than before?

That is the wrong question to ask right now, in this specific moment of AI development, when the tools are powerful enough to dramatically expand what a small team can produce rather than simply replacing what a larger team used to do.

The right question is this: if everyone on my team uses these tools and we can produce five times the output, what would it look like to run five marketing campaigns a month instead of one, to test twenty different ad variations instead of two, to produce a fresh lead magnet every week instead of every quarter?

That is the abundance mindset, and it is the operating framework of the most aggressive and successful users of AI marketing tools right now — not doing less with less, but doing dramatically more with the same lean, committed team they have always had.

Jonathan’s AJ and Smart operation is currently running Meta ads, publishing podcast episodes, hosting regular webinars, building campaign landing pages in Claude Code, and managing enterprise outreach simultaneously — all at a speed and quality level that was simply not achievable eighteen months ago.

For any creator or builder who wants to operate at this level of output and intentionality, flipitai.io/auth/flipper gives you a direct entry point into a platform designed to support exactly this kind of multi-channel, AI-accelerated marketing campaign workflow.

Practical Steps to Launch Your First Real Marketing Campaign Starting Today

The most important step is also the simplest: accept that your role is promoter first and builder second — and from that acceptance, everything else becomes clearer, including which tools to prioritize, when to use them, and what a successful marketing campaign actually looks like in daily practice.

Start by mapping your current traffic sources honestly — are you generating any organic content, running any paid campaigns, or appearing on other platforms where new audiences can discover you and follow you back into your world?

Then build your Holding Pattern — an email newsletter is the most resilient and valuable choice because you own the audience completely and no algorithm can take it away from you, but a podcast or YouTube channel can work with equal effectiveness if you are consistent.

Once traffic is flowing and a Holding Pattern exists, design your first selling event — a live demo, a webinar, a three-part email sequence, or a personal outreach campaign — and commit to running it on a regular, scheduled basis so that the marketing campaign becomes a rhythm rather than a one-time experiment.

Use Claude to support every stage of this process: dump your ideas verbally using Whisperflow, let Claude shape them into content angles and copy and scripts, move to Claude Code when you need to turn a marketing campaign idea into a live deployable asset, and let the system grow richer over time as your instruction files accumulate context and intelligence.

Every tool available to you — Claude, Claude Code, Vercel, email platforms, ad managers, flipitai.io — exists to serve the marketing campaign strategy, not to replace it, and the moment you internalize that distinction is the moment your vibe coded project stops being a personal side project and starts becoming a real business.

The Revenue Was Always Waiting on the Other Side of the Marketing Campaign

The gap between a brilliant AI-powered product and a profitable business is almost never technical — it is a marketing campaign gap, a promotion gap, a willingness to step outside the comfortable and familiar world of building and into the slightly messier but infinitely more rewarding world of putting your work in front of people.

Jonathan Courtney’s Promoter Blueprint — traffic, holding pattern, selling event — is a simple, repeatable, and deeply practical framework for building a marketing campaign that compounds over time and turns accumulated attention into consistent income, regardless of how technical or non-technical the founder behind it happens to be.

The AI tools amplify every stage of that process: they write better copy faster, they build campaign assets in an afternoon instead of a week, they research your audience and your competitors, they run webinar follow-ups and retargeting strategies, and they make a team of one feel like a team of ten when used with clear intention.

But none of that amplification matters unless the marketing campaign foundation is in place first — because a faster and smarter version of a business that does not promote itself is still a business that makes no money at the end of the month.

Start promoting today, use AI to do it faster and better than you ever could working alone, trust the framework that has already generated millions of dollars for the people who have fully committed to living inside it, and let flipitai.io help you make the whole system work together from the very first campaign you launch.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.