Building Mowie: How a Concierge Service Became an AI Marketing Platform

What if your small business could have a full marketing team—automated content calendars, customer segmentation, and channel-specific posts—without the headcount?

In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Chris O'Connor (CEO) and Jessica Valenzuela (Co-Founder) of Mowie, an AI marketing platform built for small and medium-sized businesses in restaurants, retail, and e-commerce. Chris and Jessica share how their hands-on experience managing marketing for overwhelmed business owners at a previous company led them to build Mowie—first as a concierge service, then as a fully automated AI product.

They walk through their document hierarchy approach: how Mowie crawls the web to build a "dossier" about each business, infers customer segments and marketing pillars, and generates quarterly content calendars with channel-specific posts. You'll hear about the technical challenges of structuring unstructured data, the evolution from rigid schemas to loosely structured markdown, and how they use customer feedback—from calendar approvals to regeneration requests—as their primary evaluation signal.

Whether you're building AI products that synthesize messy real-world data or figuring out how to keep humans in the loop without overwhelming them, this conversation offers practical lessons from two founders who built their product by doing the work first.