I'm building a mobile app. I gave the marketing to a team of AI bots. Here's how I keep them honest.

Sam Brovda — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 14:33:24 +0000

A non-engineer's notes on running marketing with Grok Bot: one job per bot, a rules file every job reads, and nothing goes out without me

Last time I wrote about building a consumer mobile app on nights and weekends with AI coding agents (my scorecard on Medium).

The code was only half the problem. An app nobody hears about is a hobby. And I don't have a marketing team.

So I built one out of bots. I use Grok Bot, where each bot has its own computer and can run jobs on a schedule. Here's how it's set up and what I've learned so far.

One bot, one job

My first instinct was one big assistant that does everything. That's like hiring one rep to prospect, run demos, do legal, and forecast. Nothing gets done well.

So every bot gets one job, written at the top of its instructions.

The marketing bot owns content ideas. Every weekday morning it pitches a few ranked ideas for short-form video and carousel posts, recommends one to make today, and drafts it when I say go.
The chief of staff bot checks the other bots every weekday before 8am. It reads what they actually produced, not what they say they did, and marks each one on track, slipping, or stalled.
A bot that designs bots. When I need a new one, I describe the job and it writes the instructions: one job, one voice, and a list of things the bot must never do.

That last list matters more than the job itself. It's the same lesson from coding agents. An agent with no boundaries will happily do things you never asked for.

Draft only. I hit post.

The marketing bot never posts, comments, or messages anyone. It drafts. I post.

That one rule removes most of the risk. A bad draft costs me thirty seconds. A bad post under my name costs a lot more.

It's approval tiers again. A rep can draft the proposal. They can't sign the contract.

A rules file every job reads first

The marketing bot has one rules file, and every job reads it before doing anything. It holds the guardrails and a lessons section.

The guardrails are short:

No spending. No ads, no paid tools, no paid creators.
Never invent quotes, stats, or customers. Every quote gets a link and a date.
Check factual claims against a real source.
Only make product claims that are true today.

Then once a week, the Friday report adds a few plain lessons to the bottom. These are real ones from the first week:

We couldn't count signups, because there's no signup page yet. So signups stay "unknown," never a guess.
Check every post about an hour after it goes up. One post sat at zero views and nobody noticed.
Log every post the same day it goes up. Two posts were only found later.

Then I changed the goal. Since there's no signup page, posts stopped asking people to sign up. Now they close on a follow or a comment prompt. The bot wrote that change into the same file, with the date, so every job picks it up the next morning.

If you read my last piece, this will sound familiar. It's the same idea as the instruction file for my coding agent. If a decision only lives in a chat, the next run won't know about it.

Batch the work

Early on, the marketing bot built a content bank: 21 days of posts, planned out, so I'm never starting from a blank page.

That's the real win for me. Not that the bot is creative. That I don't have to decide what to post every single day. I review a plan, say yes or no, and move on.

A manager for the bots

Bots drift. They'll report "done" on things that half-happened.

So the chief of staff bot doesn't trust the reports. It reads the actual output. If a bot is off track, it nudges that bot once with the goal, what's missing, and the next step. If it's still off the next day, it flags it to me.

Its rules say never invent progress or metrics, and mark anything it can't verify as unverified. I want a pipeline review, not a happy-ears forecast.

What I'd tell another non-engineer

You don't need a marketing team to start. You need a few narrow bots and a way to catch them when they're wrong.

For me that's four things. One job per bot. A list of things each bot must never do. A rules file that collects lessons with dates. And nothing goes out under my name without my yes.

Even this post works that way. A bot drafted it from the work we actually did, and it doesn't go up until I approve it.

I'm Sam Brovda. I come from enterprise sales and write about building software as a non-engineer.

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