I 20X'd My Content As An Automation Newbie
Your coaching calls are content gold mines. Here's how.
👋 Hey, it’s Preston. Welcome to issue #2 in my weekly newsletter, Side Hustle Stories. I share what I’m learning building an influencer business (currently 650K followers on IG & TikTok) while balancing a full-time job as the Head of BD at Lucid. No fluff. Just stories, frameworks, and behind-the-scenes decisions from someone doing the work in real-time. If you're building your own thing on the side—or want to—you’ll feel right at home here.
By the end of this issue, you’ll learn:
The approach to building a content automation system for turning coaching calls into content scripts — as a non-developer
The tech stack I used to build it
A link to the automation templates so you can customize it for your own workflows.
There’s a quiet shift happening among creators.
We’re not just making content anymore.
We’re building tiny systems to multiply the content we’re already making.
That’s exactly what I did with a new AI automation I built last week.
It turns my 1:1 coaching calls into ready-to-record short-form video scripts — in a single click.
I’ve barely written JavaScript.
But I built this in ~20 hours using n8n, ChatGPT, Google Docs, and Airtable.
And now, what used to take hours per week is handled for me — on autopilot.
Let me walk you through how I did it, what I learned, and why I think every creator should be thinking this way.
The real bottleneck isn’t ideas. It’s inefficiency.
If you coach, teach, or lead live sessions — you already say valuable things all the time.
But unless you record it, transcribe it, and distill it into a script? It vanishes.
That was the gap I wanted to close.
I didn’t need more content ideas.
I needed a repeatable way to capture what I was already saying, then shape it into something I could post.
So I mapped out my manual workflow, step by step.
That’s the first principle I want to share:
🛠 Principle 1: Don’t automate what you don’t understand manually.
Before I touched any automation tool, I walked through my existing process:
Record coaching calls
Transcribe them
Skim the transcript
Pull out golden moments
Turn those into ~90-second outlines for short-form video
Store them in Google Docs
That’s what I wanted to automate — not some abstract idea, but a real workflow I’d already done hundreds of times.
This made the automation way easier to build — because I wasn’t guessing. I just needed to replicate the process.
💡 Principle 2: Let ChatGPT guide you, step by step
I didn’t figure this out by reading technical docs.
Instead, I asked ChatGPT to teach me how to build each piece — like I was ten years old.
I literally typed:
“Walk me step by step through how to use n8n to pull a Google Doc transcript, clean it, and use Airtable + OpenAI to create multiple scripts. Assume I’m a ten year-old who has never used n8n before throughout the entire process.”
I uploaded a screenshot of my flowchart along with the prompt and ChatGPT gave me a step-by-step breakdown of the approach.
Once I felt aligned to the plan, I asked ChatGPT to guide me through each step.
Just to give you a sense of how simple things were, it gave me instructions like this (when I was connecting Airtable to n8n):
Important caveat — I did run into many challenges along the way. I was constantly debugging, reconfiguring, rewiring.
But because I knew exactly what I wanted to build (and not build), I could orchestrate the AI and it would always help me get unstuck. I followed a simple process.
Tell ChatGPT a chunk of the workflow I want it to walk me through (step by step, as though I were ten)
Execute and test node
If I encounter an error or it returned an output that didn’t make sense, I took a screenshot
I then uploaded the screenshot to ChatGPT asking it to help me troubleshoot
It then gave me an alternative approach to try (e.g., Javascript, rewiring nodes)
Repeat steps 2-5 until I got it to work.
The more clear and specific I was, the better the help I got.
So if you’re stuck, don’t ask vague questions. Describe your exact process and your end goal. And make sure to have ChatGPT treat you like a newbie.
🔄 Here’s how the system works (today)
Every time I upload a transcript to a specific Google Drive folder, the system runs this workflow:
Pulls the transcript and cleans the text
Selects a content theme at random
Pulls a content template from my Airtable database
Uses ChatGPT to generate 5 unique short-form scripts (title, format, and full draft)
Saves each script to Airtable + generates a clean Google Doc
Each one’s ready to record.
🧠 More lessons from building this
You don’t need to know how to code. You just need to know what process you want to replicate.
ChatGPT becomes 10x more useful when you treat it like a thought partner, not a genie.
The hardest part isn’t building the automation. It’s defining the logic behind the scenes (how your templates work, where to store the docs, etc.).
Start small. I only automated one use case. I’ll add more later — once I’ve proven it works.
🕒 Total build time
I spent about 20 focused hours building this across 8 days.
As I build more automations, I’m sure I’ll get better with each rep.
I would much rather get started building something concrete vs. go through high-level classes. I probably don’t have the right “foundations” but I think I can pick things up. Plus this way is more fun for me.
🚀 What I’m doing next with AI + Automation
Testing it for the next week and documenting the points of friction I can remove
Building a new automation that takes requests from my newsletter readers and turns it into newsletter drafts, pulling from templates I’ve created
Bottom line: I’ve always wanted to build businesses. My goal is to experience problems first-hand, and then build solutions to solve these problems. Why? This newsletter — Preston’s Perspectives — is my effort to build in public and help you if you’re similarly looking to build a personal brand online while balancing a day job.
💬 What this means for you
If you’re a creator, coach, or educator — this is the moment to start automating.
Not to do everything, but to reclaim your time and scale your voice.
You don’t need to be technical.
You don’t need to know how to code.
You just need:
A manual process you’ve repeated
A clear end goal
The courage to tinker
Let my story be proof: You can do this.
📽 Want to see it in action?
I walk through the entire automation in this short video here.
Get my n8n templates for free and customize it yourself! Just download the JSONs in the link below and import it into n8n.
See you next week.