Karen Spinner
Build Your First AI Tool | Content Strategist Turned Founder
Studied at Princeton University
Works at CarouselBot
Available tomorrow at 8:30 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
Karen's Coaching Offerings
Custom hourly · $100/hr
Get help with AI Product Design, Scoping & Requirements, and .
Karen’s free events
Live interactive sessions you can join for free.
5 Questions to Answer Before You Build Your First AI Tool
May 6 at 4:00 PM UTC
Karen’s AI for Product Development Qualifications
Experience level: Executive
10+ people coached for AI for Product Development
I help founders, marketers, and content teams build AI-powered tools and automations without hiring a full dev team or outsourcing to an agency that doesn't understand their workflow. I've launched multiple AI products as both a founder and independent developer, so I can walk you through the full process: refining your idea, building a working prototype, finding your first beta testers, and getting your tool live in the cloud. I use Claude Code as my primary coding assistant and recommend it for most use cases. I also run a content automation agency that works with ghostwriters and marketing teams on scaling their output without sacrificing quality. If you've heard "just use AI" and wondered what that actually looks like in practice, that's where I can help. My Substack newsletter, Wondering About AI, is where I document my early-stage experiments (including the failures) and share tool recommendations, tips, and the occasional freebie.
Karen can help with:
AI Product Design
Scoping & Requirements
AI Roadmap Development
AI Agents
AI Automation
Prototyping with AI
Feature Prioritization
About Karen
Before I started developing AI-powered products, I spent more than a decade as a content strategist, working with enterprise brands like Adobe, Confluent, and IBM to help them communicate complex ideas to technical audiences. When ChatGPT was released, I was immediately intrigued. I had been thinking about the potential for AI to support content creation for a while, but the challenge was always how to do it in a way that preserved quality. That question prompted me to build something rather than just write about it. In early 2023, I started Good Bloggy, an AI writing platform aimed at helping people produce better content with AI assistance. I had some coding foundation from Free Code Camp and self-directed JavaScript study, and AI coding assistance was just becoming capable enough to help me build a working product even as I continued to learn. I ultimately shut it down after onboarding my first cohort of users and discovering that the people most interested in paying for the tool were students looking to cheat on essays. That was not the problem I wanted to solve. StackDigest came next. It was a newsletter aggregation and semantic search platform, and this time I started by talking to potential users instead of writing code. I grew it to 165 users before I had to shut it down over concerns about storing newsletter content at scale. Another hard lesson, this time about legal risk and product structure. I wrote extensively about this experience in my Substack newsletter Wondering About AI. What I carried out of those two experiences was a real understanding of the product development process, including which strategies do not work. Today I run CarouselBot, an AI-powered carousel and document generator for LinkedIn creators and content agencies, and Future Scan, an ML research platform that surfaces emerging trends from academic literature. I also run Good Content, a software development agency that builds AI-powered tools and automations for content teams and marketing agencies. I use Claude Code as my primary coding assistant, and it has genuinely changed what is possible for a solo builder. If you are a non-technical founder with a specific idea and are not sure where to start, that is exactly the situation I understand best. I have been there, and I can help you get from idea to working product without the detours that cost me time.
Why do I coach?
TLDR; I coach because the gap between having an idea and having a working product is smaller than most people think, and I want to help more people close it. When I started building in early 2023, there was not a playbook. AI-assisted development was new enough that most of the advice online did not quite apply, and the learning curve was steep in ways that were hard to anticipate. I made a lot of decisions I had to undo. I spent time on things that did not matter and not enough time on things that did. I wished, more than once, that I could talk to someone who had already been through it. That is the gap I want to fill for the people I work with. Most of my clients are domain experts, including researchers, marketers, consultants, and founders, who have a specific and well-formed idea for a tool that could make their work better. Some of them want me to build it for them, and I take on those projects through my agency Good Content. But others want help navigating the journey themselves. They want to understand how to determine whether there is a market for their idea, build a working prototype, find their first beta users, and keep developing the product over time. What they need is someone who can help them make good decisions early, recognize problems before they become expensive, and build real confidence in their own ability to ship. I also work with business leaders who know Claude Code is changing what is possible but are not sure where to start. Getting hands-on with AI-assisted development for the first time can feel disorienting, and having someone walk through that process with you makes a real difference.
Work Experience
Founder
CarouselBot
January 2026 - Present
CarouselBot is a React app that turns any article or blog post into a polished LinkedIn carousel in seconds, no design skills or cut-and-pasting necessary. You paste a URL or drop in text, pick a style, and get a ready-to-post carousel that pulls out the key points and formats them into slides. It's built for content marketers, agency teams, and LinkedIn creators who need to produce carousel content at scale without burning hours in Canva. Currently onboarding agency users and growing from 140+ beta testers. If you manage LinkedIn content for clients or your own brand and want early access to new features for free, DM me.
Founder
Future Scan
November 2025 - Present
I was searching for the latest research on jailbreaking LLMs to support a newsletter article and found myself frustrated with Google, which didn't surface what I needed, and public research libraries, which can dump hundreds or thousands of papers on you for any given topic. It occurred to me that semantic search and machine learning, if combined with the right data, could give me better information about research trends without drowning me in data. Using cosine similarity clustering and other techniques I learned from creating StackDigest, my previous project, I built a prototype “AI research trend finder.” I'm tentatively calling it Future Scan. The tool analyzes thousands of abstracts from arXiv—a free, open-access repository where researchers share preprints across physics, mathematics, computer science, and AI/ML—clustering them into themes and surfacing patterns that would take weeks to find manually.
Editor
Wondering About AI
July 2025 - Present
This Substack newsletter is where I write about my experiments with AI and highlight interesting developments from the world of AI research. Whether I'm building and growing an AI-powered tool or combing through 50 arXiv papers on AI and mental health, I share whatever I learn, whether it's good, bad, or straight up weird. I'm also very open to guest posts and collaborations. DM me if you have an idea.
Creator and Managing Partner
Good Content
April 2025 - Present
Good Content is where I take on two kinds of projects: custom software builds and B2B content strategy. On the build side, I create Chrome extensions, research automations, and ML-powered reporting tools for agencies and content teams that can include anything from a bespoke browser extension that solves a specific workflow problem to automated research pipelines that surface trends from thousands of sources. On the content side, I offer the same services I've delivered for 15 years: product messaging, thought leadership, data-driven brand journalism, and multi-asset campaign strategy for B2B tech companies. Companies I have worked with include Adobe, ChargePoint, Confluent, HP, and IBM. I work solo or recruit and manage contractors for larger projects. If you've got a content workflow you wish were automated, a Chrome extension idea you want built, or a thought leadership project that needs custom research, I'd love to hear from you.
Director of Content Strategy and Operations
The Argonaut
January 2017 - April 2025
Before founding Good Content, I was Director of Content Strategy at The Argonaut, where I led account strategy and content production for a portfolio of B2B tech clients including Adobe, ChargePoint, Confluent, Drift, and others. Over time, I grew annual content-driven revenue from $200K to $2M, building a scalable process for producing high-quality assets that supported every stage of the buyer journey. I personally led the development of 200+ unique content pieces—everything from blogs, eBooks, and messaging docs to videos, podcasts, and landing pages. To support that volume, I built and managed a nimble team: one full-time copywriter/strategist and a bench of three freelance writers, all focused on delivering strategic content that moved the needle. Collaborating with cross-functional teams across Studio and Operations, I oversaw complex, multi-asset campaigns requiring both high-touch client service and standout visual design. I worked closely with clients to develop detailed content plans tailored to their goals and performance metrics, ensuring we didn’t just make content, we made impact.
Content Strategist
The Argonaut
May 2014 - December 2016
Education
Princeton University
Bachelor's degree