AI-Powered Editing for a Newsletter Publication

The Come Up is an interview series where I sit down with business owners for an hour, talk through the ins and outs of their business, and publish it as a written article. I was paying an editor $500+ a month to turn transcripts into finished pieces. But even with a dedicated contractor, I'd wait weeks — sometimes months — to get something back. The delay was embarrassing. I'd have a great conversation, build real rapport, and then go silent for weeks. By the time I sent them the finished article, the momentum was gone. It undid the relationship-building the interview was supposed to create. And for a passion project generating no revenue, $500/month plus constant project management was hard to justify.

I replaced the contractor with an AI editing pipeline. Not AI writing — editing. The system takes a raw transcript, identifies the key themes, cleans up the rambles and repetition, and formats it into a polished article. Then it quality-checks its own work against style guidelines. The whole process is automated. A guest books, we record, the transcript gets processed, and a finished draft lands in my inbox ready for review. My only job now is the part I actually enjoy: having the conversation, reviewing the draft, and hitting send.