I have a terrible habit of having my best thoughts in the worst places.

Driving to pick up the kids. Mid-workout. Halfway through making coffee. The thought is vivid and clear, and then — almost immediately — it starts to fade at the edges. I’ve lost more genuinely interesting ideas to the friction of “I’ll write that up later” than I care to admit.

So when I realized I could literally speak a blog post into existence — record a few minutes of rambling audio, hand it to Storytell, and use Storytell’s new Persona Skills feature to get back a fully structured Substack post that sounds exactly like me, I became a little obsessed.

This post is the companion guide to the video above I made to walk you through this process. If you watched want a step-by-step written reference to follow along, you’re in the right place. Let’s go.

Why This Works

The core idea is simple: your thoughts are more fluid when you speak than when you type. So instead of staring at a blank page, you talk — to others in meetings, to yourself, to nobody in particular. Then you let Storytell do two things:

* Learn your voice — your patterns, frameworks, tone, the way you build an argument

* Turn your video, audio., transcripts or notes into written output — structured, in your style, ready to edit and publish

The Skills feature is the mechanism that ties this together. Think of it as a pre-loaded, reusable set of instructions that knows exactly how you work, or speak, and can apply that understanding to your raw unstructured material.

Pro-tip: Having Storytell write in your voice is just one small example of teaching Storytell a skill that it can then re-use at scale. You might also have Storytell learn how to speak like your CEO, your sales engineer, your data analyst. Skills aren’t limited to speaking “in the voice of,” either. You might give Storytell specialized knowledge about how your company likes to respond to customers and invoke that skill when doing churn analysis or customer success work.

Phase 1: Build Your “Voice Foundation”

This is the one-time setup. Do this right, and everything you have Storytell write in your voice becomes tuned to the way you write.

Using the “Skill Creator”

The Skill Creator is an easy way to have Storytell build a new skill, like “writing in my voice.” Invoke it by typing the @ symbol and then start typing “Skill Creator” — you’ll see it in a pop up menu.

Then type a prompt like the one below to create a “Voice of” persona-based skill that will output a detailed brand voice and messaging guideline — things like your communication style, your values, how you frame problems, your recurring themes.

Storytell will craft a “Voice of” Skill based on your instructions, which you can then save for future use. You’ll get back output that feels almost uncomfortably accurate. Mine had things like “vulnerable over polished” and “problem-focused over solution-obsessed.” That’s the goal — a document that captures you, not a generic professional persona.

Save the Skill to Your Project and Put It To Work

Once Storytell generates your “Voice of” persona skill, you can start to use it like I did in the video above to create this Substack post. Here’s a screenshot of the output from Storytell that formed the basis of that post:

Storytell offers many pre-built skills, and you can add as many of your own as you’d like.

But Wait, There’s More

Storytell also just launched a Prompt Library that lets you save and re-use your favorite prompts. If you switch to “advanced user mode,” you can even put field variables into your saved prompts. This lets you create a saved prompt that uses one of your skills, like this:

The next time you want to run that prompt, you just select it from the Prompt Library and it’s ready to go:

The Real Math Here

Before I built this workflow, the barrier between “having a thought” and “publishing a post” was high enough that most thoughts never made it. The friction — the blank page, the organizing, the writing, the editing — added up to hours I often didn’t have.

Now it looks like this:

* 5 minutes of audio → captured thought

* 1 click → structured draft in my voice

* Edit to taste → polished post, ready to publish

I’ve built the project once. The “Voice of” skill is ready. The labels are set. Every time I want to publish now, I start with a system that knows my voice. The whole system compounds.

That’s the part I couldn’t have predicted when I started experimenting with this: how much easier the tenth post becomes compared to the first. The project just keeps getting richer, more context-aware, more me. I hope you can experience the same result!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drodio.substack.com