I finally built the thing I kept talking about
Hello again, it’s the girl who writes in once a year 🫣
The last time I wrote to you, I told you that remarkable content doesn’t scale on talent alone.
You need systems.
And I showed you mine.
Over more than a decade of working in content marketing, I’ve developed a very particular way of approaching content: how I research, how I decide what matters, how I interrogate a topic, how I build a brief, and eventually, how I decide what an article should actually say and not say.
I gave that system a name:
LEMA.
Logical. Explicit. Memorable. Actionable.
Well, some of you asked if I could make LEMA a tool; you wanted that thinking, that judgment embedded in something anyone could wield (Too much Merlin?).
So, despite the abundance of content assistants flooding the market, I went and did something slightly ridiculous.
I built LEMA AI.
Or at least, that’s what I’ve been trying to build over the past year (just in case you’ve missed me).
There’s currently no public website, and we’ve only built out the research stage.
It made sense to start this small because:
I want to build something genuinely useful for high-taste content marketers and founders, which means I want to build it with you.
Research is the foundation of everything. And it was probably one of my favourite parts of the job.
Over the years, it was also one of the things people consistently complimented about my work.
My research was thorough.
Sometimes... perhaps a little too thorough. 😂
Because I have a problem, I want to know everything!
Give me a topic I don’t understand, and I will happily disappear down a rabbit hole.
I’ll read the obvious sources.
Then I’ll follow their sources.
Find that their sources aren’t sourcing, whelp… then I’ll find the original study.
Then something in the study will make me wonder about something else.
So I’ll research that.
Then I’ll find two experts who disagree and obviously now I need to understand why they disagree.
Seven hours later, I know an unreasonable amount about something I’d never heard of that morning.
Which is great for the eventual article, less so for my calendar. And I suspect, yours too 😅
But I never wanted to solve that problem by researching less.
Because the depth was the point.
The research was what eventually got me to my favourite moment:
forming the thesis.
That point where you’ve seen enough of the landscape to say:
Okay.
Here’s what’s actually interesting.
Here’s what everyone keeps repeating.
Here’s what’s missing.
And here’s what I think this piece should say.
A FRIGGIN’ OPINION!
I didn’t want to lose everything that came before that moment.
And that’s probably the simplest way I can explain what I’m trying to build with LEMA:
LEMA lets me comb through everything without having to personally comb through everything.
It takes the research process I’ve developed over years of doing this work and tries to execute it at a scale I physically can’t.
Now I need to find out whether I’ve spent the past year wearing peeksy blinders (shivers in hopefully not). Because my content marketing friends won’t tell me otherwise:
And if I were buying LEMA rather than building it?
The bar would be sky high.
That’s the standard I’m holding LEMA to.
And I need some help testing it. I need people to actually throw difficult work at LEMA and tell me where it falls apart.
Send me your rabbit holes
For now, I’m making LEMA research free.
I’m particularly interested in people working on technical content—agency strategists, editors, writers and content teams dealing with complex subjects where good research actually matters.
Give me a real topic you’d work on next week.
Not something you’ve invented to test the AI.
Give me something annoying, technical, something where you’ve looked at the topic and thought:
Okay. I’m going to need to understand some shii before I can write a brief for this one. 😂
I’ll run it through LEMA and send you a content brief.
Then tell me:
Was it thorough enough?
Did it surface things you wouldn’t have easily found yourself?
Did you trust the sources?
Did it save you time?
Did it help you understand the topic?
What did it miss?
And one more thing:
If you had to pay for that exact brief tomorrow, what would it be worth to you?
I genuinely don’t know the answer yet.
And rather than inventing a price from inside my own head, I’d rather let the people actually using LEMA help me figure out what it’s worth.
Please note, LEMA doesn’t generate outlines yet.
Eventually, there’s a lot more I want it to do.
But before I build the next thing, I want to answer one question:
Have I successfully bottled the research process that served me for more than a decade?
Because if I have...
then I think we might have something interesting.
So hit reply.
Send me your rabbit hole.
The worse it is, the better. 😂
Love and light,
Lily