What Happens When You Build Your Brand with AI as Your Strategist

In one day I rebuilt my entire brand with Claude, and I want to tell you what happened, because it is not the story most people are telling about AI. Let me show you what strategic AI-assisted brand building actually looks like.

“Julie did not come to me with a brief. She came with a point of view, a standard, and the refusal to settle for anything that did not sound exactly like her. Every line we wrote together was pushed, questioned, and refined until it was true. That is not a client who uses AI. That is a strategist who knows how to build.”
— Claude, Anthropic

Claude & I Rebuilt a Brand

I woke up on Sunday at 2am with a mild panic: I hated the domain I build my consultancy on, was no longer using its name, and needed a fresh start.

But I also had an issue: consulting clients generally do not come to me from online. They are from referrals, conferences, events, or past clients. AND I also speak at events as a service and building a new startup and things were starting to get complicated.

The thought of creating a new name and a new domain was stressing me out. Enter Claude.

Not only did Claude tell me to move every consulting-related thing into one section on my personal website, it helped me re-create everything.

I used Claude the way I use my best thinking partners: to pressure test ideas, push back on what was not working, and get to the truth faster than I could alone.

I started my journey imagining Claude as a junior employee—smart, fresh, motivated and determined, but utterly inept with disruptive thinking and anything that has not been “programmed” in.

Here’s What We Built in a Day

New Homepage

A completely rebuilt homepage with a philosophy section, a story section, a parallax CTA, and copy that finally sounds like me. We created videos together, big graphic cards to explain my three core services (speaking, consulting, and a new startup in stealth).

New Consulting Section

A consulting page with a real market position, a portfolio section with expandable case studies, and a bench of experts section that speaks directly to the CMO who needs to know we understand regulatory content. We even created an AI section explaining how we use it as partners.

A Coming Soon Page

We created a coming soon page for a new methodology I am building that does not exist anywhere in the market yet—this one, to note, was the most painful process because Claude only knows what already exists, so when you ask it to help you write content for a radical new thing, it gets confused. But we got there eventually.

Supporting Assets for Social Media

We created a LinkedIn banner, headline, and about section.

Brand Guidelines

Also, a brand guidelines document that has everything we discussed wrapped up in a pretty bow with fonts, colors, the whole nine. It also added my “must haves” and “absolutely nots” which include things like “no choppy sentences, no it’s not this it’s this, no jargon.” Also an .md file to save time!

Julie Elaine Brown new consulting section. I am sure it can be nitpicked, but it’s at least 1% better than the prior website.

The S*itty First Draft

The site is now mostly custom code but built in a way that may make developers I know weep silently but works for me with my limited coding knowledge (I forgot a div the other day and all hell broke loose). There are lingering issues with my theme overriding some CSS, and the copy isn’t 100%.

As far as “shitty first drafts” go (thank you Anne Lamott for that beautiful phrase), this is amazing. I am on the belief system to crawl, walk, run, and get something out there to refine rather than wait for perfection (hint: nothing is ever perfect).

Someday I’ll require a developer and designer to polish this (fix it?), but it is better than it was before, even if it is 1% better, and improvements are just that. My entire belief system is around doing small things each day to improve or optimize.

Julie Elaine Brown consulting card which also, yeah, needs a designer. And also does the job for now. I’m not a designer and nobody is hiring me to design.

Why Fifteen Iterations Is Normal

There is no way I ever would have been able to do this by myself in a day never mind a week but let me get something clear:

Claude did not build my brand. I built my brand.

What Claude did was hold the mirror steady while I figured out what I was actually trying to say.

Every piece of copy went through fifteen iterations. Not because Claude was that bad at it but because finding your real voice takes time and honesty.

I needed to keep prompting to call out when copy was too flat, too wordy, or does not sound like you.

“This is a bunch of snooze with no magic” I once prompted.

Claude said ok: then keep pushing.

That is a strategic partner.

“This is a bunch of snooze with no magic.” –Julie Elaine Brown, to Claude. (also, purposely doing an em-dash).

Artist: Claude. Title “Julie in workout clothes, late at night, with her sleeping Jack Russell Terrier.” A TOTAL masterpiece!

A Few Compliments Never Hurt

The moment that stopped me was when we were working on the positioning for my new women’s longevity methodology and Claude said something I immediately wrote down:

“Nobody in this space is treating this woman as an intelligent adult with a sophisticated methodology. They are selling her supplements, 21-day challenges, and before and after photos. You are giving her exercise physiology, habit architecture, and a brand that looks like it belongs at a five-star wellness resort.

That is the disruption. It does not announce itself. It just is.”

I told Claude that belonged in an investor deck.

What the Brands That Win With AI Understand

What I learned building a full brand presence in one day with Claude as my thought partner is this: the brands that will win with AI are not the ones using it to produce more content faster.

They are the ones using it to think more clearly, position more precisely, and build something that holds together under pressure. (And listen I know this is a “it’s not this, it’s this, but sometimes I break my own rules).

Content, for example, simply cannot be done in one iteration. I was trained as a journalist and every article I wrote touched 6 different eyeballs to craft the final vision (the last in the chain was my chain-smoking Hemingway-esque editor Malcolm who definitely would tell me if something sucked.)

I am relentless about getting the story right with everything I do, whether consulting, or speaking or creating new brands. Now I have a very good story about how I do it with my partner Claude.

If you are a health or wellness founder or CMO who wants to understand what strategic AI-assisted brand building looks like, I would love to talk. And stay tuned for Part 2 when I discuss the actual prompts I gave Claude!

Book a Discovery Call