What if you could produce near-daily, branded social media content across every platform for a fraction of what you're paying now? That's not a hypothetical. We built it. It's running right now for Refresh Miami, South Florida's leading tech and startup community.
The result: an 80% reduction in content costs, near-daily output, and a human editor who reviews everything before it goes live. Here's exactly how we did it.
The Problem: Great Community, Content Bottleneck
Refresh Miami has been the heartbeat of South Florida's tech ecosystem since 2006. They connect thousands of founders, operators, and investors through events, news coverage, and community building. But like many mission-driven organizations, they faced a familiar challenge: producing consistent, high-quality content across multiple social platforms is expensive and time-consuming.
The traditional approach meant hiring content creators, designers, and social media managers. The costs added up fast. And even with a dedicated team, maintaining a daily publishing cadence across Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and other platforms was a grind.
The Solution: An AI Content Engine with a Human at the Wheel
We built a production AI Content Engine that handles the heavy lifting of content creation, from ideation to branded graphics, while keeping a human editor in full control of what gets published. This isn't a prototype or a demo. It's a live system producing real content every day.
The architecture combines three core components:
- n8n automation workflows that orchestrate the entire pipeline, from sourcing trending topics and community events to generating platform-specific copy
- AI content generation that writes copy in Refresh Miami's voice, tailored for each platform's format and audience expectations
- Placid for branded graphics that automatically generates on-brand visual assets using dynamic templates, so every post looks like it was touched by a designer
The Human in the Loop: Why It Matters
Here's what separates this from the "set it and forget it" AI content tools flooding the market: nothing gets published without human review.
Colette, the content editor, reviews every piece of content the engine produces before it goes live. She ensures the tone is right, the facts are accurate, and the content genuinely serves the community. Her role costs a fraction of a full content team, but it's the critical layer that maintains trust and quality.
This human-in-the-loop model is not optional. It's the whole point. AI handles scale. Humans handle judgment. Together, you get content that's both prolific and trustworthy.
The Results: 80% Cost Reduction, Daily Output
The numbers tell the story:
- 80% reduction in content costs compared to the previous approach
- Near-daily content output across all major social platforms
- Branded graphics on every post generated automatically via Placid templates
- 100% human-reviewed before anything goes live
This isn't about replacing people. It's about giving a small team superpowers. Refresh Miami now has the content presence of an organization with a full marketing department, at a fraction of the cost.
How the Content Engine Works (Under the Hood)
The engine runs on n8n, an open-source workflow automation platform. Here's the simplified flow:
- Source and curate. The engine pulls from community events, tech news, partner announcements, and trending topics relevant to the Miami tech scene.
- Generate content. AI writes platform-specific copy: concise for X, narrative for LinkedIn, visual-first for Instagram. Each piece matches Refresh Miami's established voice and style guidelines.
- Create visuals. Placid generates branded graphics from templates, pulling in dynamic content like event names, dates, speaker photos, and logos. Every image is on-brand without a designer touching it.
- Human review. Content lands in a review queue. Colette approves, edits, or rejects each piece. Nothing bypasses this step.
- Publish. Approved content gets scheduled and published across platforms automatically.
Why This Approach Beats "Just Use ChatGPT"
Anyone can paste a prompt into ChatGPT and get a social media post. That's not what this is. The Content Engine is a production system with:
- Brand consistency baked into templates and prompts, not left to chance
- Automated visual design that looks professional on every platform
- End-to-end automation from sourcing to publishing, not just text generation
- Quality control through human review, not blind trust in AI output
The difference is infrastructure. A Content Engine is a system, not a tool. It runs whether you're thinking about it or not, and it maintains quality because a human is always the final checkpoint.
Build Your Own Content Engine
The Content Engine we built for Refresh Miami isn't a one-off. It's a repeatable model that works for any organization producing regular content. We've packaged this as a service at Purple Horizons because we've seen how transformative it is for teams that need to do more with less.
If you're curious about the technology behind our AI agent workflows, check out our recap from OpenClaw Miami: Build Your Own AI Agent. And if you want to see the full scope of what a Content Engine includes, visit our Content Engine service page.
Ready to build your own content engine?
Book a free strategy call and let's talk about what an AI Content Engine could look like for your organization.
