The AI Newsletter Engine Playbook

For founders who want a weekly newsletter that sounds like them, this playbook shows how to produce a finished draft in under 30 minutes. You download the full build (two phases, three documents, one automation) plus the Tone of Voice, Content Categories, and Newsletter Writing prompt templates.

Created with

Victoria Mariscal

Founder, Front Desk

Free Playbook

Get the full playbook.

What you'll learn

Build a Tone of Voice document from 5-10 of your own content samples so the AI writes in your real voice instead of generic marketing speak
Define your hard rules (no political takes, no emojis, no em dashes) so the AI stays on-script and you stop fixing the same mistakes
Create a Content Categories document with filter criteria and 3-5 Perplexity search queries per bucket that tell the research step exactly what to find
Set up Relay as the automation hub with a trigger that runs two days before send, giving you buffer time to edit, add images, and load your email tool
Wire ChatGPT to scrape your blog for the 3 most recent posts, Perplexity to pull current stories past paywalls, and Claude to write the draft
Use a newsletter structure template (subject line options, personal intro, curated news with your take, In Case You Missed It, closing reflection) that produces a usable draft
Run a monthly feedback loop that compares AI drafts to your edited finals and feeds the differences back so the engine improves with every issue

Summary

The AI Newsletter Engine is a two-phase system. Phase one is the homework that teaches the AI how you talk, what your audience cares about, and what you will never say, captured in a Tone of Voice document and a Content Categories document. Phase two wires Relay, Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT together so they research, write, and deliver an 80% draft to your inbox two days before send. It is drawn from a Catalyst Lightning Lesson with Victoria Mariscal, founder of Front Desk, who runs this exact engine. The documents are the product, the automation is the delivery.