The AI brain for marketing: Runneth

Originally written as an article on X

The most AI-pilled marketers are building agents that run 24/7 on a Mac Mini. They connect a dozen APIs, maintain a massive filesystem of markdown files, and they use Claude Code or Hermes to get a ridiculous amount of work done.

They are building an AI Brain that is way more powerful than cramming files into a Claude Project.

It looks something like this:

# example AI brain for marketing

brain/
├── brand/
│   ├── positioning.md
│   ├── voice.md              # how the brand talks
│   └── claims.md
├── customers/
│   ├── personas.md
│   └── voice-of-customer.md  # real customer language
├── creative/
│   ├── winning-hooks.md      # what's worked, why
│   ├── swipe-file.md
│   └── strategy-engine.md
# ...and 200+ more files

LLMs are trained on mountains of code, so navigating a repository of markdown files is like second nature to them. Agents are also excellent at using the command line so when you hand them a full computer, they go ham. That's why the Mac Mini trend took off. It's the best way for an individual marketer to push AI to its limits.

Where the Mac Mini breaks

The magic of the Mac Mini falls apart when you go from individual use to team (or client) collaboration. The technical setup is too daunting for most people and there is no clean way for everyone to work inside the same brain without tripping over each other.

So you end up with a brain that's locked away on one person's machine.

The sandbox gold rush

Giving AI a virtual computer is one of the biggest problems in the industry right now.

Anthropic launched Managed Agents earlier this year. Notion built Custom Agents. And a whole new category is booming around Sandboxes to give AI access to a computer to do real work on a team.

No one was building the Mac Mini in the cloud

We were dead set on giving our agent a computer, so we went sandbox shopping. We looked at the whole map of vendors. But we didn't find what we were looking for. The vendors were mostly renting out computers by the task. Spin one up, run a job, then wind it down for another agent to use. They weren't offering what makes the Mac Mini special: giving the agent a real, full computer to live on.

They had pieces of it... persistence here, sharing there, but we wanted a full machine, a dedicated one for each of our customers.

So we said screw it and built it ourselves. It's called Runneth.

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Use the Runneth CLI if you're intense, or just talk to it from Slack. Either way, it's one real virtual machine for your team to compound together.

Building this deep into infrastructure was a radical move for us. It's kind of hilarious that we now find ourselves in the virtual machine business. But AI has changed the dynamics of what's possible. I actually think the right approach with AI is to be 100x more ambitious than you otherwise would be.

Rise of the 100x marketer

We keep seeing AI launch videos that say the marketer is cooked. We could not disagree more.

AI is an amplifier. If you are an elite marketer, you will get unbelievable leverage. But if you outsource your judgment to AI, you'll build a token-guzzling slop cannon.

The best marketers know when to be rigorous with data and when to ignore it. They know creative is everything, but that the goal is revenue not art.

They jump altitudes in a heartbeat. One moment they are writing direct-response hooks, the next moment they are jamming on brand narrative with the board. The best of the best know those are the same thing.

The best marketers run on a system. It's often swirling around in their mind or at best locked away in a Mac Mini. We didn't build Runneth to replace them. We built it to make them a force of nature, and to lift everyone around them.

AI can be chaotic. Runneth exists to keep the best marketers calm and in control while they work at a scale that feels impossible.

AI-native agencies: we have clients to send you

If you're an AI-pilled marketer running an agency (or about to start one), this part is for you.

Our customers are some of the best brands in the world. But most of them are still early in their AI adoption. They want an AI marketing brain but need help building it.

Runneth is already live in production for 2,200+ customers and we launch publicly on June 24th. The demand for help is way more than we can handle  ourselves.

So we'd love to partner. We'll give you unlimited Runneth credits while you build and once you're in the program we'll send you a constant stream of new clients.

If you're interested in the partner program or you just want to take Runneth for a spin, drop a comment on the original article on X.

-Reza