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Building Mowie: How a Concierge Service Became an AI Marketing Platform

Building Mowie: How a Concierge Service Became an AI Marketing Platform

Listen to this episode on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts

What if your small business could have a full marketing team—automated content calendars, customer segmentation, and channel-specific posts—without the headcount?

In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Chris O'Connor (CEO) and Jessica Valenzuela (Co-Founder) of Mowie, an AI marketing platform built for small and medium-sized businesses in restaurants, retail, and e-commerce. Chris and Jessica share how their hands-on experience managing marketing for overwhelmed business owners at a previous company led them to build Mowie—first as a concierge service, then as a fully automated AI product.

They walk through their document hierarchy approach: how Mowie crawls the web to build a "dossier" about each business, infers customer segments and marketing pillars, and generates quarterly content calendars with channel-specific posts. You'll hear about the technical challenges of structuring unstructured data, the evolution from rigid schemas to loosely structured markdown, and how they use customer feedback—from calendar approvals to regeneration requests—as their primary evaluation signal.

Whether you're building AI products that synthesize messy real-world data or figuring out how to keep humans in the loop without overwhelming them, this conversation offers practical lessons from two founders who built their product by doing the work first.

Show Notes

Guests

  • Chris O'Connor – CEO, Mowie
  • Jessica Valenzuela – Co-Founder, Mowie

What we cover in this episode

  • How Mowie evolved from a concierge marketing service to an AI-powered platform
  • The "document hierarchy" architecture: how Mowie builds and maintains context about each business
  • Why they moved from structured schemas to loosely structured markdown for intermediate processing
  • Using Simon Sinek's Golden Circle framework to validate early product-market fit
  • How Mowie generates quarterly content calendars and weekly posts across email and social media
  • The three mini-calendars: public events, business-specific events, and recommended campaigns
  • Building traceability so customers can see which context documents influenced their content
  • Using customer approvals, edits, and regeneration requests as lightweight evals
  • Connecting marketing performance back to point-of-sale data for attribution
  • What's next: deeper attribution, omnichannel expansion, and digital out-of-home displays

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Mowie AI
00:06 Meet the Founders: Chris and Jessica
00:45 Understanding the Target Customers
01:35 Challenges Faced by SMBs in Marketing
04:20 The Evolution of Mowie AI
05:40 How Mowie AI Works for Businesses
08:16 Onboarding and Data Collection
14:56 Content Strategy and Calendar Creation
22:29 Technical Challenges and Solutions
29:41 Iterative Development and Feedback
37:23 Automated Content Calendar Approval
39:19 Content Calendar Creation Process
40:14 Marketing Pillars and Campaigns
42:11 Transparency and Traceability in Recommendations
45:23 Generating Weekly and Quarterly Calendars
48:24 Customizing Campaigns for Specific Events
54:15 Evaluating Campaign Performance
58:48 Customer Feedback and Document Hierarchy

Full Transcript

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