Shipping Case Study Content 5x Faster with AI

Speaker 0: Hey. What's up, everyone? My name is Matt. I am a, marketer by trade. A few weeks ago, I posted on LinkedIn if anybody would be interested in me kinda showing off the process behind how I build case studies now with AI as opposed to how I used to write them, the old brute force classic way of actually writing them.

You know, luckily, we don't have to do that anymore, and I'm able to create case studies at a much higher clip rate, much more rapidly as a team of one. So, what I figured I would do in this video is show you, kind of the four pillars, quote, unquote, of how, I approach case studies now. One, I'm gonna give you a just glimpse at the stack that I use for this. That includes all the AI tooling, some of the other tools like Notion, as well as, you know, my company is Directus, so shameless plug. I use us for our own CMS for our website.

And being able to use the MCP has dramatically helped, the time to getting these case studies actually staged and published on our website. So I'll run through that. That should be really quick. Then I'll talk through some of the prework that gets done. So, there is a big part of this that is still a human component, which is, you know, AI can't run the case study for you, and I don't know if I would trust it to ever do that.

So I've got a list of questions that I typically ask, and I've got a transcript I've already done. So, by the way, this will be me live building out a real case study that, has been on my list for a lot longer than it should have been with other stuff, but we're getting it done now. I'll also run you through some of the prompts that I use. You really have to prime the AI, to get it exactly how you want it to be. So we'll do that as well.

Then we'll run through the actual content creation. It is extremely fast. There is a lot of editing and things that has to go into effect to make it actually, like, good and not super, like I'm trying to think of the phrase that AI typically uses, like, ever evolving, ever changing world of case studies. You gotta remove all that sort of stuff. So and then at the end, I'm gonna show you how I publish it.

And this is actually the coolest part, which it takes no time at all with our new MCP. I still can't wrap my head around the potential with it, and I think you'll like it too. So make sure you stick around for that part as well. Just as caveat, like, anytime I watch these videos, like, I always find myself with a thousand screenshots on my desktop, so don't worry about screenshots. I'm gonna share a link to the notion that has, you know, this I don't know if it's a slide, but this picture, all of the prompts, all of the, like, even the case study questions I ask, and anything else that is relevant here, it'll all be there and available for download.

So, I might gate it just because I gotta gate it, but, you know, we won't chase you with the SDRs. It's just nice to have couple emails so I can take it to the team and be like, look what I generated from this. Life of a marketer. Right? Anyways, okay.

Let's jump into the stack. So, this is my stack. This is what I use. So for Notion, that's really replaced Google Docs for me. And I just like the layout, like the editing, the way that you can write in it.

Just it just comes more naturally at this point. You can also type notion.new like you can in docs.new and get a whole new Notion doc. So convenient. For the call recording, which I've already done, don't worry. I'm not gonna record a call on this call.

I use Evoma. Evoma is awesome. It gives you the transcript, which is really what you need from that conversation to prime, Claude so you can actually, you know, use it. That you can use any call recorder as long as it gives you a transcript, but, you need to have that part. That's kind of the whole reason of doing this exercise.

Then I use perplexity for just kind of the organization, like, researching them. I like to do priming with, like, from an external tool, external AI, like, perplexity before I create the content because it just I don't know. I I just feel like it goes better, plus I just love spending $20 on every AI tool for some reason. And then for the bulk of the content, I use Claude, and I'll run you through actually how I prompt it and how I talk to it and yell at it and compliment it and all those good things on this on this video. And then at the end, shameless plug again, Directus.

That's what we use. We eat our own dog food, as they say, for our content management. So all of the case studies and all the blogs and everything we have on our website, that all goes through Directus. And I really wanna show you the MCP, just because I it still blows my mind. Cool.

So to start, case study questions. Right? Like, you this is the only part that will always be manual. There's no AI involved here. These are the questions that I ask.

I take into every case study call. Obviously, it's not like a q and a session. The way that I treat these case study calls is more of just like a podcast, like conversation. These are really just like boilerplate, kinda give a road map of the actual conversation. But, what I find is they typically go, you know, off tangent in places, and that's when the best stuff comes out.

So this case study that I'm actually working on is with one of our, you know, really good, really big clients, FEG. They're a, Fortuna. They're like a gaming, iGaming slash casino, like, online gambling sort of company. So, that's what this video will be about. Like, super meta is me building that case study for Directus as a marketing tactic for Directus, I guess, is what this is.

But, really, I think this will be valuable for you. So, the you probably have case study questions. If you don't, like, I will link these in the actual notion that will be part of that. This getting so meta already. But you'll have access to these.

You can just replace, like, how are you using Directus today with your own company, and, you know, customize it as needed. So with that in mind, let's hop over to the first bit of prompting in the prework, which is, finding out information about the company. So, this is, like, the easiest part, which is, I just say, like, give me a comprehensive summary about FEG or whatever company you have interviewed. And why I like perplexity is I feel like it has the most comprehensive, like, online search, and it really gives, like, a really good overview. And, you can dial in a little bit more if you want to get more specific about things.

These are none of the FEG. FEG. Let's see. FEG. Right.

Like this. So there was a bunch of FEGs out there. So I'll just say Fortuna, specifically. And it is not Fortuna mining. Yeah.

Just waiting for this to go. We'll edit this bit out. We'll start over. Alright. So let's hop over to Perplexity for our first step in our prework slash prompting.

I use Perplexity, because I feel like it is the most comprehensive search for a company. I don't really need, like, the deep research, like, a 100 pages of research. Like, I just wanna get really a good brief overview of the company, you know, what they do, just to give context to the content as well. So, what I'll ask is I typically just ask, like, give me a comprehensive summary about blank. And then, actually, what you can do is come in here.

Fortuna. None of those. Fortuna f e g. Here we go. Fortuna Entertainment Group.

Really awesome website, which I think is actually powered by Directus. Wink wink. But, yeah, I'll just do that, feg.eu, and I'll let it, just give me the overview. It gives really good, like, core activities. I like how it does, you know, the milestones here as well.

This is all really, really good prompting, primer, I guess. Prime priming for the prompt. I've gotta figure out how to say that the right way. But, and a nice little summary here. So easy peasy.

I think this is perfect based on what I know of them, in that conversation. This is exactly, like, what I would need. So I just copy and paste that over in this other Notion doc I've got on this other page. And then next, I am gonna hop over to the actual Claude instance I've got. So I have hopped over here to, Claude by Anthropic.

I use this for pretty much all of my content writing. I don't know. I just feel like it is it just writes better to me. I've yet to use Grok. Some things I use ChatGPT for.

I feel like that's gotten a lot better recently as well. I don't know. These things it feels like they change quality wise, like, every week or so, and it really depends on when you're doing it. They could be at, like, high bandwidth and just the output if you use them as much as I do, you will start to realize, like, this for this and this for that and that sort of thing. But, for long form content, I really do like Claude.

Okay. So where to start? Right? For the initial prompt, what I like to do is give it before I give it anything about the actual case study or or who I wanna write about, I like to do this prompt, which is kinda priming it on the background of what I want from it. So the way that I've structured this is, like, you know, you're world class class copywriting expert.

It really loves those, like, role play type of things, and that specializes that interning interviews and case studies. So, I'm gonna take the transcript after this and upload it, but first, I'm gonna prime it with five case studies that I already have. I think you can do three. I just do five just to cover all the bases. And this is really important here, which is, like, don't start doing anything until I confirm with you, that it's time to do that.

So, really, all of these prompts are just gonna end with, like, the assistant coming back with, like, I I confirm. I understand. We'll see. Yep. Understand exactly.

And to be honest, what I think I'm gonna do is actually try to turn this into the style I want as concise because I wanna use fewer tokens here. It can get, like, really verbal and really wordy, and I think that's why, like, the new Grok is really good is that it's just very concise with its answers, and you use less tokens when it has to refer back to things. So quick little pro tip. Cool. So it's asking me to share those examples.

I picked these just because I really like kind of the way that they're framed. So I've got this one, which is mighty HQ. I've got a COPPA case study, which I think turned out really well. Actually, you know what I'm gonna do is you could upload these as text, but what I will actually test and see if this is just as good is pulling the actual URLs here because I do believe that Web search is connected. Yeah.

So, I've attached two. I will share links for the others. So Prusa is our most recent one. That's the one I really like the formatting style of, and I would probably use that. Ripley is another good one.

And, let's see. Yeah. Copa, that one. And I'll use Lucid as the last one because I really like this one as well. Cool.

And if you're starting from scratch, like, you don't need to do these at all, but, these, I think, give it a really good sense of, you know, how we've done this before. They understand the narrative and, like, how we tell the story and that sort of thing. So, depends on, like, how you like to do your case studies here. If you don't have any, then just you can prompt it with, like, this is what I want the output to be. Yeah.

I I I prefer to tell kind of the the stories and and that sort of thing. So, excellent. So it's read them. It understands, from those what everything should be. Let me pull up my next prompt here.

And, actually, before I upload the transcript, I wanna drop this one in here, which is, you know, what are the common characteristics? Like, what do you think makes them great? And the tone of voice. It touched on it a little bit, but I really wanna, extract that from those so it understands, like, this is exactly the common thread of all of these case studies we've done, like, the the voice, the structure, and all of that. So it's it's fetching all that now.

We'll see. Yeah. Classic narrative, pain point, search, the implementation, and the transformation. We do have kind of a conversational tone. You know, I I don't like to be super dry, but totally up to to you how it it really depends on who you sell to.

Right? Like, we primarily work with developers, and they don't really like all the jargon and talk and all that stuff. So, this is another thing also is, like, I am a former journalist, so I love to pull out quotes, and I prefer the interviewee to tell the story as opposed to us telling the story on their behalf. So, classic journalism is like, you know, it's full of quotes, and you just kinda connect the dots in between, like, little like, a little puzzle. Right?

And just make sure everything kinda makes sense and flows well. So, great. So now is when I feel good about that. What I'm gonna do is upload that information that we pulled from Perplexity here so it understands who we're writing about. It's a lot of copy and pasting.

And one day, we'll have agents that replace this whole process, but, and I'm sure there's some purists out there that aren't too, like, fond of this, which I totally understand. Right? If I had time in between, you know, all the other work stuff to, like, sit down and build, like, really good human written case studies and all the research and all that, like, I would love to do it. But I just feel like I don't really have the time anymore, and I think this is a great way to do to supplement kind of the the work that you're doing. So, excellent.

So it understands, the style, you know, who we're writing about, which is, FEG. And now I will share the transcript, which I do not have offhand, but I am going to, go grab that really quick. And this is another one of those, like, I want you to read it, get a feel for how we've worked together, you know, their initial intentions and needs, and anything else you think is relevant to create kind of a unique narrative arc that we wanna tell. And, again, I like to end it with, like, just make sure that you've analyzed it. Like, don't start doing anything yet.

So we'll see how long this takes. Confirmed. Loved it. Yeah. So there.

You pull out already the challenge it has and really all of the metrics, that we wanna tell and really highlight here, which is, you know, five to six hour deployment times, you know, six months in advanced promotional content. It had to be planned. Our contact, Darko, when he found us at the conference and what he really liked about it and the things that stuck out to him, the transformation, which is, like, the big, like, whatever. I forgot. I used I took a theater arts class back in the day, but the best stories have that, that moment of transformation that, you know, Luke Skywalker and the swamp.

Yeah. I don't know. I'm terrible at analogies, but you understand, I think. Anyways okay. So now it's read it.

It understands it. It's tell me what it's learned. So I'm actually gonna skip the part where I say, like, tell me what you've learned because I think it's done a great job of that already. Now before we dive into the content, I wanna start with an outline. So using the previous case studies I've shared, like, as a reference, give me an outline for how we can structure this, which I think it sort of had it in the previous one.

But the way that it creates, like, an artifact here is just much easier to to work with, and, like, just start working in the artifacts themselves. Yeah. I mean, couldn't have said it better myself, I guess. Perfect. Challenge, the implementation, the results, you know, future plans, kind of a a wrap up of, you know, why they chose Directus and then a conclusion of what all this means.

So amazing. My next prompt. And the next few prompts are really just gonna be me giving it a little bit more information of what I want as the output. So this is a really big one. I will just copy this over, but I'll talk through this a little bit because there's a lot of stuff in here.

Alright. So nice little compliment, which everybody loves. I don't have to add spaces here. But, yeah. So the way that I write the case studies is that I don't have it spit out everything at once.

I like to do it section by section, based on kind of the previous ones we've done. I like to do the journal journalistic style, which is, you know, line breaks for every quote. I don't like to have quotes on the same thing as, you know, paragraphs, that we write on our side. I wanna keep paragraph short, easily scannable, and readable, so three to four sentences max. This is the big one.

And if you wanna just take this out of this whole video, you're more than welcome to do it. But I love to avoid the AI terminology that seems to seep into all of these, which is, like, words like, delve and ever evolving and revolutionize and streamline. I I just I cannot stand those words or when companies use those words. They just feel like filler to me. They're not really, like, powerful.

So, like, where you could use the term use and you use the term utilize instead, like, why? Why don't you just say use? Right? Like, talk like a normal person having a conversation like I'm talking here. So, and then I have just these that I've built over time, which is, like, start with the broader industry context, you know, use the short things, incorporate a lot of quotes in there, specific challenges, briefly explain if you do mention technical features, avoid again, I like to double down.

Like, avoid the buzzwords and the hyperbole. And don't this is a big one. Like, don't make claims without the supporting evidence or examples. We're trying to cut down on the hallucination. It still works its way into this, but trying to nip it in the butt here.

But that's what the editing is for at the end anyways. So, yeah. No. I think I'll add this at the end just to see if there's anything else that it recommends in addition to these. Yeah.

Love that. Practical business benefit along with those, like, technical specifics, and really emphasizing the pain points. Perfect. Now this is where we actually write it. So let's start with the introduction.

Now that we've done all this, right, that that's most of the work is getting the priming and the prompting right. I can already tell, like, I'll probably have to edit the intro here. Seamless worked its way in there. It is what it is. But, yeah, the, the tone here isn't ideal for me, which is okay.

Right? Like, I think the benefit of this is I'm not staring at a blank page and having to write it from there. And we'll come to that at the end when I do the editing and stuff. But, Yeah. Here, I would say, great.

Next section. And then we'll just do this, like, ad nauseum till the end. Right? Because it already has the outline. It knows what we're gonna write.

I love how it's adding in, you know, the actual quotes from the case study we ran. Yeah. Great. Next section. So we did the challenge.

The next section, if I believe yeah. That's when they came across Directus, kind of the story about that. I I don't know why, but I just love more of the stories than I do just like the here's the x y z benefit. Here's what happened. That sort of thing.

I don't know. I'm just kind of a story nerd, I guess. Great. Next section. And, like, I wanna reiterate, like, I'm not gonna copy and paste this into the wet or our CMS and just hit publish.

Right? Like, there is a lot of editing that's gonna have to go into this still. But it's just like having, like, an outsourced content writer that I'd find through, like, Fiverr or something that gives me kind of the baseline. And then it's a lot less work for me to go in and and edit and move things around and change things, add quotes, take out quotes, that sort of thing. And the other reason I like doing it section by section is, when you do it altogether and try to get it to spit out this, like, really big piece of content at once, like, it tends to override itself and, like, mention things it's it already has mentioned.

When you're doing it section by section, it's taking each previous section into context instead of, like, trying to write it all at once. And I found that this, like, this is gonna be a call out quote, I think, for this, like, in the, like, the marketing and and, you know, things that that we'll post out on social, which is, like, you know, one of the or even the best rollouts in Fortuna history. No outages, really smooth, straightforward. I mean, come on. That's that was dark, though.

That was an incredible quote, and it really depends on the input you get or the output you get from a customer to put into here, the quality of this that comes out. So, again, reiterating that initial customer conversation and making sure you have that good podcast like conversation with them really pulls out this this stuff. So, cool results. And I wanna say we got two more sections for this, if I remember correctly. Nice.

I know this isn't the most thrilling thing to see, But now we're kinda talking about the future, which most of our well, all of our case studies kinda end with, like, you know, this is the problem that's been solved. You know, looking ahead, how can you maybe deploy Directus in in future chats or something? Just kinda keeping the conversation going. And then we've got the final section. And then just a nice little compliment so far.

Because why not? Right? If they do end up taking over the world, I think they'll remember when I said great job and gave them a smiley face. So now that we have this, I feel good about it. Right?

Like, I I think this is so far just, like, kinda breezing through it. It looks good. Like I said, there's gonna be some heavy edits. You know? Maybe the intro is gonna need some changes.

One thing that you definitely need to do is verify the quotes, and the hallucination typically happens on the quotes themselves. In one of my prompts earlier, I think I was like, you know, double check. Like, don't I forgot what I had said, but, you know, don't make things up. Like, make sure you have, context and everything you have for said case study. But I like it.

Now just to knock out some of the other additional stuff before I go to the edit is I wanna get sort of the metadata and the title done. For this one, like, I really like how it did for our Ripley's one where we caught out the metrics, short description using the jobs to be done framework. And then I will top it off with, like, let's get a good title for this five killer titles, like, make sure we add a metric in there, make sure it's a scroll stopper. And, I mean, legacy CMS held to 70% speed games is pretty badass, but I don't know if we can actually post that on our website. Maybe we can.

No. These are all good. Like, I I would probably lean towards one because it calls it out, who it is, you know, what the actual thing was, that they achieved, like the big metric showstopper banner callout, and then also across five European gaming markets is pretty big. But these other ones could be useful in other situations. Maybe, you know, if we do some redistribution of this content.

But, yeah, I'll say let's go with one. Excellent. So I have got my case study now. Next, I'm gonna hop back over to Notion, and then I'll copy this here. I'll move this kind of older title.

Yeah. Too big. Turn that back to text. Yeah. You like, this is just thick paragraphs that I wanna avoid, but, bam.

Killer title. I've got my subheader here, learn how Fortuna Entertainment Group used direct us to achieve. I won't call out the metric here. I'll just say faster content deployment, unify web and mobile management, and deliver one of the best rollouts in company history. That is solid, and I'm just gonna italicize that.

Cool. Alright. So this is the human component. Right now, we have a case study that is workable with all of this information in it. And I'm actually gonna stop recording, while I go through and edit this.

This will probably take me thirty to forty five minutes to do it. I also wanna double check to make sure that the quotes are right. And if they aren't, then I will use that same cloud prompt we have where it has the context of the conversation, and I'm gonna go back and tell it, hey. Like, double check. Like, I think some of these quotes are wrong.

The previous time I did this, there was probably three or four direct quotes that weren't right, or just it had kinda mixed up some of the different quotes together. But, yeah, it's it's helpful if you, like, reprompted. So I'm gonna stop sharing. I'm gonna pause this video, and I'll be right back with the final version. Alright.

So I've done quite a bit of editing. That was actually quicker than I thought. Took about ten minutes. I'm actually blown away by the output here. I just wanna give you kind of a a scope of, you know, what does it look like when I edit it and, like, after I've done edited and, you know, when I go to, the next step, which is getting it ready for publication.

How I like to operate is what I'll do is go through and just loosely format it a little bit, like, how I like it to look. It's just easier for me. So we have that great, title that it spit out, and then I've got kind of the subtext. This will be included, like, on the, you know, the the OG image and stuff, like, when you share it out. I ended up liking I know I said that I wanted to take this out, but it's kind of a cool intro.

Right? Like, I think it reminds me a lot of, like, kings and, like, cards and that sort of thing. So, decided to leave that in there. I a lot of the work was breaking up a lot of the, paragraphs, so they weren't just, like, big blocks. We've got I try to do, like, rhythmic when I do writing.

So there's, like, some lines with one line and then, you know, some shorter sentences and that sort of thing, which was actually surprising as opposed to last time, what really stood out to me is that these quotes are actually, like, literally from the transcript. So, like, it it even has, like, some of the like like, Darko, you know, is not like you know, he he speaks very good English, but, you know, there's some sort of broken English in some of these. And there's a lot of, like, you know and, like, that sort of thing. So it literally pulled out the exact quotes, which is awesome. And now, you know, I like, this first one.

Right? I like to just go in and kinda clean them up. I'll, add, like, specific context to, like, the journalistic style of doing it that way, just to clean them up a little bit, make them easier to read and, like, just better in the context of where they're at in the story. But and the the really the only changes I made were just, editing some of the things. You know, I took out a few sentences here and there.

I will reexplore these, like, chapter headers, because I think they can be better. I took out specific references to, like, other tooling or, like, you know, the tools that were getting replaced. I just don't want it's, like, petty to have that stuff in there. So, replace it just with, like, legacy, the platform providers and that sort of thing. But, overall, like, I I think this is great.

And so next steps for me from from now that I've got this edited and I've got all of the quotes pulled out here, I highlighted all the things in red that I do wanna go back and change and tweak and clean up a little bit. But other than that, like, I mean, this is solid. So what I'll probably do is take another ten minutes and just kinda formulate some ideas for these headers, clean up some of these quotes, and, yeah, then we'll start the exciting part, which is actually getting this published. And that actually might be the quickest part of this whole video. So, be right back after I do this final cleanup here.

Alright. I'm back. I'm really, really happy with how this case study turned out. You know, all in all, I started about an hour ago, which previously, this would probably take me, like, you know, four to five hours to do. But, I was getting couple Slack pings I jumped over on.

But, overall, like, this, I would say, is actually our one of our strongest ones when it comes to case studies. Yeah. So just quick touch on some of the things that I edited. So, went through, really smoothed out those quotes so they make sense in the context of of the narrative slash story. I added a little bit more of, like, a narrative driven header here instead of, like, the classic, like, the challenge, the thing.

Something that's more like, I don't know, click baity maybe. But, yeah, I I feel good about this the story that's told here and kind of what the resolution is. But yeah. So now that we have this done, I'm super happy with it. So next step is just getting this loaded into the actual CMS.

There is a interesting part here. So previously, working with any I've I've worked with, I've worked with WordPress. I've worked with HubSpot. I've worked with, a couple others that I don't know if I can name, but you probably know them, before I started working here at Directus, and Directus kinda became the defacto tool that we use for our website and all that stuff. But, before even just using Directus, right, there has always been a pain for me when it comes to, like I just spent, you know, an hour previously before I had AI.

It would take a lot longer to do this. But, I mean, this is an hour worth of work, like, going through doing all the editing and all that stuff. I I'm in a really happy place with it. And this would be the part of the story where I was just like I feel like, oh god. I hate this, which is actually getting this into a, CMS to get it published.

And that's because, like, I just hated doing more copy and pasting over to the actual document. You know, just it was it was pain in the butt. Always has been. A few months ago, I wanna say May, my coworker, Bryant, you know, was he'd been reading about MCPs, which if you don't know, it's model context protocol, which is I I think that's what it is. But, essentially, what it is is, kind of an API that connects to your AI or your cloud instance that can be, like, connected with any any tool you use is if that tool has, like, an open API or connector.

Right? So what he did is he built a MCP for Directus that connects directly to cloud. Originally, the intention, I think, that I that I'd expected out of it was, you know, just something that could generate content because that's what, you know, AI does for marketers. It's like it generates content, and then you go edit it. What I did not expect was it to actually build out the pages for me if I handed it over the content.

And I wanna show you live in this call because it just blows my mind every time I use it. So, now that I've got this really solid, case study, super happy with it. I am actually going to I'm gonna stop sharing for a second to make sure I can get all of my cloud instance and get my login and all that stuff for Directus, which I'm just gonna hop into now. So if you've never seen Directus, I will show you in one moment. But yeah.

So let me show you how we have it set up at least so you can get kind of an idea of what this looks like. So, here in Directus, we've got all of our, resources. So, like, each one of these tabs is, like, just something different that we've either experimented with or we've been building and and testing. There's a lot of, like, just really cool stuff we can do here. But to give you an idea of how it's laid out for our, resources, like case studies things, is, all of our blogs and case studies come from this single collection, which is resources, and this is how we've structured this.

So for our recent SOC two announcement, which hooray, very official, the when I inputted and made the blog slash, you know, PR announcement, this is how I I built it out, basically. You know? Just like title slug. If if you use WordPress or anything like that, you probably know what this is, from that understanding. But, yeah, and then we have a block editor.

Right? So, like, we have these prebuilt blocks that we go in, and we can add, like, header, you know, call to actions. We can have, like, pop outs, which we call block paper internally, separators, dividers, all that stuff. So what it actually comes down to and I'll I'll go to the last case study we did, which was Prusa. What I really like doing is creating and I'll hop over to direct us here so you can see from the front end what this actually looks like.

I need to go to our case studies. And I like this format because, like I said earlier, like, I I really like to involve quotes and have, like, the customers actually tell the story as opposed to us. So I added a lot of these blocks in in between. How I add it's nice to have images and things in here too just to kind of break up the monotony of the text. Just makes it I I I just think it looks better.

It's just easier to read. So we had the actual customer case study quotes in here, which felt good. Right? Like, I I think this is solid. It's it's a good narrative.

The pain in the butt was actually creating the different, quote slash testimonial blocks here because, from the back end, what it looks like is, like, I had each of those quotes as a different block, and then I had, the rich text kinda in between. So this was pre MCP life. This took me, like, longer than it should've, to build it out, but that's okay. Right? Now with the MCP, like alright.

I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna make sure I've got all my ducks in it right here and make sure I pull up the right thing. Okay. So I have a project here, which is Direct to SMTP. Like, this is so if you've ever used projects in cloud, it's like you can basically, like, have a set, like, like, knowledge that you give it.

So for this one, I put in this prompt of, like, you you know, you're a world class marketing content, technical professional, because I use this a lot for, you know, just getting the content. I can create landing pages really fast, that sort of thing. The this gives it the context that it's working within Directus. And then what I would do is it's connected. So, I will take like, I'll say I want to create a new case study with the same format slash layout as our last one, which was Prusa three d.

It is in the resources folder or resources collection. Can you please review that and let me know when you have understood the context and layout. I'll just reiterate that. So this should be connected, I think, hopefully. Yeah.

Alright. So now it's prompting the system. Right? It's going in, and it's it's getting what I had told it. It's examining the three d that's actually within Directus.

So it's understanding the format. It's going through and reading all of the blocks that exist there, and gonna get, like, an idea for, you know, how to actually structure this new case study now that I've got all of these, you know, quotes in here. And we'll Looks like it's still looking to find it. Ah, found it. Perfect.

Okay. Which is just awesome, by the way, that it goes through and it actually thinks and keeps you updated, like, as it's trying to find it. This is a read option thing. It's looking at the specific blocks, which is how it was built. Now it understands case study structure like I showed you.

Right? It alternates between that block quote and that block rich text. So exactly how I wanna lay this out. Yeah. Now it's ready to create a new case study.

So what I'm gonna do is come over to where I've got my case study written out. I'm going to hop back over here. Perfect. Here's the case study information. So I'm gonna have title is that awesome one we had figured out.

I'm gonna have subtitle, which was this, And then I'm just gonna drop in the actual I'm copy and pasting this whole thing. Here's the case study content and then copied it. Alright. We're doing this on the fly. Like, f it.

We're doing it live. Let's see what happens. So far so good. I mean, it understands what the context is, and it's exactly what I showed you. Now remember, like, when I showed you in the resources, there there is no existing thing for this.

Like, I didn't even create a new case study, like, placeholder or anything. This is gonna do all of that for me. So I can literally just sit back and, I don't know, watch Netflix for five minutes. If anybody from my company is watching, I don't actually watch Netflix. But, if you if that was your prerogative.

You know? If it's late in on the weekend, you're getting some weekend work done, you can go do whatever. I'm just chugging Red Bulls right now and getting hyped for Friday evening, which is, like, I yeah. I don't know. I, like, I don't know what to do with my hands now at this point, like Ricky Bobby, while it's going through and creating these blocks.

Right? So it created the new resource using a create item thing. What will probably have to I I haven't uploaded any, like, media. Right? So I need to find Darko's headshot.

I need to put that in there. We have an FEG logo in there, which I'm really curious to see if it's gonna be able to find it. I believe it's labeled right in the files, but, I'll also need to create, like, a primary banner image, which is, like, our typical, like, Directus logo plus the logo of the person, or the logo of the company that is the main feature, as you'll find is, like, our typical format for it. But yeah. Awesome.

So it's alternating between the blocks. Right? So, it created the initial resource. It's creating all the remaining blocks, rich text. There's the content that I had written.

I love that it's doing, like, the formatting already. So all of the h twos that I had pulled in, the different paragraphs, still creating the blocks. I mean, I I could do this all day. Like, I almost feel guilty guilty, like, it's doing this, but, if I wasn't on camera here and talking, like, I would probably be back in Slack or I would be in another tab doing something else while this happened. But I just have to talk to fill up the space, which is so weird, like, doing that.

I don't know how my coworker, Bryant, does it for all his videos, which is a nice little plug. Like, go to directis.0.i0/tv, watch 100 apps hundred hours. He does this, but he builds actual applications out, which is just unreal to me. But, yeah, I am, I'm interested to see how this pans out. Looks like it's still going.

It was a lot of content. Let's see. Couldn't connect. Lost network connection. Well, that's interesting.

Okay. Well, I know that it did create some stuff in here. So what I'm actually gonna do is go back in to the Directus instance and see what we've got. So this was our previous one. If I refresh let's see.

It should have created the resource. Interesting. You know how things go when you just create new stuff. Right? It's never perfect.

Alright. Well, didn't overwrite any of that, which is solid. We have it set to so it doesn't delete or overwrite anything, but okay. Well, not as perfect as we thought. Of course, it's not gonna go perfect on the first go around.

You know how that goes. Right? Okay. All good. Let's try again, see what happens.

I'll share something else. I'll come back here, and we'll try again. You know what might have happened? And I noticed that there was maybe somebody else in there. Maybe something to look for, which is interesting.

But in any case, you know, it's finding a placeholder. Reusing the case study image. Resources created. You know, it'll build the alternating block structure. I'm having deja vu.

You know? Some things just don't go perfectly the first go around, and that's okay. Still, I am about two hours saved at this point of just doing the formatting and that sort of thing. So, yeah, we'll see if it works this way. Continue building the blocks, creating several blocks at once, and then linking them to the resource.

Let's see. Well, I'm gonna let this run. If it messes up again, I will come back. But when it's done, instead of me talking to fill dead air, I will, just skip forward to the good part. And I'm back.

And it just took a second time. Right? Like, I don't know if anybody here remembers the old Nintendo games or Sega games where you had to just, like, got dusty. He had to blow it out, just blow on the cartridge and put it back in. That is basically what happened with my Claude instance.

So, yeah. So the second go around, I haven't actually checked the actual thing yet, but based on what I'm seeing here, says it's created it. I went through and just double checked, and it looks like the the block quotes were correct. The structure that it added all in there, there was 15 alternating blocks based on the rich text and the quotes. All the quotes were from Darko.

Again, I'll probably have to upload, his assets and the other thing. But cool. So I'm gonna go back to our marketing instance for. Share something else. This has been totally live, by the way.

I have not, other than a little bit of prep here and there, this has been yeah. So what I'll do is add date published. I'm gonna sort by descending. It's not actually published yet, so I need to double check where that would be, which is probably why it's not in here because it's not actually published. And open that.

Open the link. Let's try this. Fingers crossed. Nice. Okay.

Well, it's here. It's in resources. It looks like date published was back January 18, so it pulled the same publish date. So I'm gonna set this to now just to have it updated to, be at the top of the list. 70% faster gaming, content deployment.

Actually, I think this title is wrong, which the title was supposed to be how Fortuna Entertainment achieved. See, can't trust AI for everything. You know? That's actually a really long I'll say FEG. Shorten that title a little bit.

You know? Changing it on the fly. Let's just make sure our, yeah, summary, change that. It's case study. It's part of the category.

The slug is how we do it. It's just what the company's name is part of the slug, and use this placeholder for the image, which I'll update. And then as we go down here, looks good. Right? So I think there's a few little missteps here where there's a couple quotes down here that will probably just have to get added to the right spot.

But, you know, if I go in and, I'm gonna save this as it stands just to get an idea for what it looks like. I'm actually gonna use our live preview here to see what this looks like. Alright. It's up. So we've got how for twenty entertainment group achieved 70% faster.

We have just a placeholder image here. Yeah. It exists. Subdued sort to. I'm gonna have to make a few changes to this just because for some reason they're not showing up here.

But in any case, doing stuff on the fly. So the MCP did not go off as exciting as I hoped it would. But just from the perspective of, like, hey. This is this content's in here already. Like, I didn't have to create these new blocks.

I didn't have to copy and paste this stuff in here. Now it's just going in and ensuring that this is, like, built the right way. I'm just gonna refresh real quick. Looks like the same here. And if I actually pop this image out yeah.

Image can't be null, so I'll have to pull one of our images from the library. We'll use this placeholder, see if that changes things for a live preview. Alright. Well, I'll have to go investigate this, obviously. But like I said, typically, this works out a lot easier than it does here, a lot cleaner.

Every time I've done it, but when I'm not recording, it happened, it happens to go off really well. So, it's just because I'm recording, because you're watching, and I was trying to hype it up. But like I said, any case, it's just really cool, I think, that we have been able to capture all of this case study content in here. It has reduced the the need to go through and actually, like, copy and paste that content over. And, yeah, now there's just a little bit of cleanup left and gotta create the assets, and I gotta, like, double check and make sure that it's not a quote that's, like, kinda throwing stuff off.

And I think we're we're good to go. I solved the problem. Alright. So I figured out what it was. So what had happened was, the initial run of the MCP when it was creating that that first batch of content, it actually created, like, two thirds of the entire thing.

So when it stopped, that was still associated with a instance, and it still had the same slug. So there was a small bug slash error on my part where I didn't recognize that there had been two versions of the same instance built up. So, all is well that ends well. You know, after realizing the issue, what I did was, delete the initial one that was created, and that's all I needed to do. So I came back in, and here's the content.

It's all here. Amazing. It's got our quotes. I'm gonna have to obviously clean up because I had quotes in the original one, and our quote template has this here. But, yeah, the case study is here.

Amazing. So I'll just have to readjust some of the blocks. I noticed that some of them, you know, are are out of order, but that's totally fine as long as I don't have to create them from scratch. One of the cool things I think I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna add the FEG logo here, as part of this. So I'm gonna come back here, and I'm gonna say, amazing.

For the quote testimonial blocks, can you find the FEG most recent G logo we uploaded and add that to all of the blocks, please. Now we're getting tricky with it. So instead of me going through and manually adding each one, and I if this works, hopefully, it does, and we get it correctly added. So found two. We'll use the first one, and update all the quote blocks with that company logo efficiently, just so you know.

It's doing this concisely and efficiently. Great. So while that is cooking, I'm just gonna keep an eye here. I'm gonna go over. I'm gonna adjust these images, but I'll have, this done at, you know, 04:45, 05:00 on a Friday.

Nice little end cap to the week is a really cool case study. Really good story. And, yeah, so that's it. I didn't have to turn this into a whole big series. I mean, we got this done in under an hour, despite the hiccups with the MCP part, but, that would have been an an additional whole other hour to actually put that content in there.

So I'm glad that that got figured out. So that's it. That is the process for k creating a case study from scratch to finish product within an hour. You know, obviously, the process that I have and kind of the way that I approach case studies is gonna be wildly different from how you would or how anybody else would, but, I think there's the process here is applicable to anything. So, you know, other use cases for for case studies could be, you know, taking, like, small testimonials or walls of love and creating, like, quick little one hitter, you know, many case studies on your site.

You can obviously do the same process for that. Yeah. It's it's really up to you. The world is your oyster when it comes to AI plus something like Directus and an MCP, to put it all on your site. So, like I said, I will make sure to put together a really nice little Notion doc, that everyone can have access to, which will include, those initial case study questions that I talked about.

I will include, the prompts, so all of the prompts that I copy and paste it in there. I'll try to include, like, a little bit of the process of actually using those prompts, like, what to look for, the steps afterwards, and the things they'll look for. So during that editing phase, making sure that the quotes are right. And then I'm actually gonna link, guides to direct us on how to use the MCP because, you know, it's worth even just, like, trying it. Right?

I I think your mind would be blown if you start using it and see what the possibilities are. I've just barely, like, scratched the surface on it. So here, it says it update updated all the FEG logos. So fingers crossed. Let's see if it actually worked.

But go in here and refresh. There we are. Bam. There you go. FEG logo on each one.

And then I just need to add, you know, Darko's headshot. I'm gonna do the same process for all of those. But, yeah, I'm I'm super excited for how this turned out, all in all. And, again, I did it completely on the fly. So I I don't know what I expected coming into this, but, hopefully, this was helpful.

I know there was a lot of rambling and stuff, but, yeah. Be sure to download the guide. I'll make sure that gets posted here as well. If there's any other like, I I'd like doing this sort of thing and building out content. Content is, like, you know, my my favorite thing to do and using AI, especially in the process of creating content.

If there's any other specific things you'd like to see, like, just hit me up on LinkedIn or, you know, anywhere you can find me. I love to nerd out about this stuff. But, yeah, I appreciate you following along and, you know, watching, probably skipping through. But, Yeah. I I hope this was helpful for you.

So, till the next one, I guess. Till then, take it easy, and keep marketing. Keep contenting. I don't know. I need a catchphrase.

We'll get there. Alright. Bye.