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

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

Resources & Links

• Mowie AI — AI marketing platform for SMBs
• Simon Sinek's Golden Circle — The framework Mowie used for early validation

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