I Built My Own Voice Profile Before I Built It for Anyone Else
I’d been writing UX Adjacent for a while before I started using AI to help with it. When I did start, the speed was impressive — I’d put together a bullet list of ideas and Claude would draft something coherent from it faster than I could have outlined it myself. That part felt genuinely useful.
The editing pass did not. I was spending as much time fixing the output as I would have spent writing from scratch. Not fixing structure or logic — fixing voice. Pulling out phrases I’d never use, rewriting openings that were technically fine but not how I’d start anything, softening claims that were more confident than I’d actually be. The time savings weren’t real.
So I went looking for a better approach and found a prompt designed to walk you through building a voice profile — a structured interview that asks you the kinds of questions you’d need to answer to teach Claude how you write. I set aside a couple of hours and went through it.
I did not expect to enjoy it.
What I learned about my own writing
I studied business communication, not English. I can write — I’ve been doing it professionally for years across multiple publications — but I can’t name writing rules. I don’t know what to call the things I do. I just do them, and I know when they’re wrong in someone else’s writing, but I couldn’t tell you the term.
What the interview did was surface patterns I could execute but couldn’t articulate. Two of them stuck with me.
The first was my sentence rhythm. The way Claude described it back to me: a longer explanatory sentence followed by a short, punchy honest one. I read that and thought — yes, that’s exactly it. I do that constantly. I’d never named it. It’s not a rule I learned; it’s just how my writing settles when I’m not overthinking it. Seeing it named made it something I could be intentional about instead of just something that happened when things were going well.
The second was something about audience calibration. The phrase Claude used was that I write for someone one step behind me, not five steps behind. Which is accurate — I’m not writing for beginners and I’m not writing for experts, I’m writing for the person who’s been doing this work for a while and is trying to get better at it. I’d always felt that instinct but hadn’t named it, which meant I couldn’t check myself against it deliberately. Now I can.
Two hours in, I had a document that described how I write more precisely than I could have done myself. Which is a strange thing to say about an AI output, but it’s true.
What happened after I installed it
The next Substack draft was different. Not perfect — I still edited it — but the editing pass was shorter and it was a different kind of editing. I was adjusting content, not correcting voice. The baseline had shifted.
That’s when I started thinking about it as a product. Not because the result was magical, but because the gap between before and after was real and it came from a process that was repeatable. The interview I’d gone through could work for anyone who creates content and uses Claude. The two hours I’d spent could be compressed into fifteen minutes with the right structure.
So I built it. The same interview process, structured as a tool, with the skill file generated automatically at the end.
The thing I didn’t expect
I expected building my own profile to be useful for my content. I didn’t expect it to teach me something about my writing that I hadn’t known after doing it for years.
That part isn’t in the product description, but it’s probably the most interesting thing about the process — that articulating your voice to an AI requires you to actually understand it first, and that understanding turns out to be worth something on its own, separate from whatever the AI does with it afterward.
If you want to try it, the Aligned Voice Profile is fifteen minutes and $37. The skill file generates automatically and you install it in Claude once.
If you’re thinking about something bigger — a full content system built around how you work, not just a voice profile — book a discovery call and we can figure out whether that makes sense.
Related reading:
Why AI Content Never Quite Sounds Like You (And What to Do About It)
What “Write in My Voice” Actually Means to Claude
How to Get the Most Out of Your Aligned Voice Profile