This interview is with Ken Marshall, Co-Founder, Meet Sona.
For readers meeting you on Featured, how do you describe your work today and the role verbal identity plays in the results you deliver?
I help founders escape generic AI content by flipping the script.
Think better first, then let AI amplify. Most people start with ChatGPT and train it repeatedly. I start with you. We capture your actual voice and beliefs through a 10-minute conversation, build a verbal identity profile that learns how you think, and then use AI as a sparring partner to turn that into weeks of authentic content.
The moat isn’t the tool; it’s alignment with your truth. I sold an SEO agency on organic growth, and I drink my own champagne daily. I’m posting founder-led content built exactly this way.
Verbal identity is the difference between content that converts and content that just exists.
What key experiences or turning points shaped your approach to verbal branding and guided interviews?
I saw founders struggling with the same problem over and over: they had incredible insights when you talked to them, but their content sounded generic because they were starting with AI prompts instead of their own thinking.
I’d spent years in SEO and content strategy, and I kept watching people waste time training ChatGPT to sound like them when they could just talk through their ideas in 10 minutes. The insight was simple: speaking lets you bypass writer’s block and get to your real thoughts faster.
So, I built Meet Sona around that. Capture your verbal identity through short interviews, then use AI to turn those into posts. It removes the barrier for under-resourced founders who don’t have time to become prompt engineers or hire expensive agencies.
I wanted to give people a way to share their stories authentically without the years of trial and error I went through learning content strategy.
Basically, I built the system I wish existed when I was starting out: think first, talk it through, then let AI handle the formatting and repurposing.
At the start of an engagement, how do you assess whether a brand’s current voice truly aligns with its audience and offer?
It’s simpler than most people make it.
I start by pulling actual customer language—support transcripts, sales calls, form submissions; anything where they’re explaining their problems in their own words. Then I spend an hour scrolling through example personas on LinkedIn to see what they’re posting about: their wins, their frustrations, and what keeps them up at night.
You start seeing patterns immediately. They’ll use specific phrases repeatedly, prioritize certain pain points, and celebrate particular outcomes. Then I compare that against the brand’s current messaging. The gaps become obvious fast.
If your homepage says “enterprise-grade scalability” but every customer transcript mentions “I just need something that works without a developer,” you’re missing the mark. If prospects on LinkedIn are celebrating “closed our first $50K deal” and your case studies focus on “20% efficiency gains,” you’re not speaking their language. The assessment isn’t about subjective taste or creative vision.
It’s pattern matching: does what you’re saying actually reflect how your customers think and talk?
Building on that, walk us through your guided interview playbook for capturing a founder’s voice and turning it into a usable voice system.
The interview process is designed to get people talking about what they actually believe, not what they think they should say.
I start with context-setting questions tied to their recent work, such as: “Tell me about a client conversation from this week that frustrated you” or “What’s a belief you have about your industry that most people get wrong?” The key is making it conversational, not interrogative. People relax, and their real voice comes out when they are explaining something they care about rather than performing for an audience.
Once they start talking, I follow the thread with clarifying questions that dig into specifics. If they say, “Our clients struggle with content,” I’ll ask, “What does that struggle actually look like on a Tuesday morning for them?” You’re mining for concrete examples, the exact phrases they use when explaining their value, and the stories they tell naturally. After three or four of these interviews, patterns emerge. They’ll use the same metaphors, circle back to the same core beliefs, and have consistent energy around certain topics. That repetition becomes the voice profile.
From there, it’s straightforward: take those patterns, the specific phrases, the tone, and codify it so future content references it. The system isn’t magic; it’s just capturing what already exists when someone stops trying to write and starts explaining.
You’ve said you optimize for clarity—how do you operationalize that value into concrete voice guidelines a team can apply consistently?
Clarity becomes operational when you turn it into observable behaviors rather than aspirational principles.
I create voice guidelines with before-and-after examples showing exactly what clarity looks like. Instead of saying “be clear,” the guideline says, “replace ‘leverage synergies’ with ‘work together to get better results.'”
I build a yes/no checklist teams can actually use:
- Does this use industry jargon without defining it?
- Does this take three sentences to say what one sentence could handle?
- Can someone outside our industry understand this?
The key is giving editors concrete decisions to make rather than subjective judgment calls.
I also score content on axes like formality, directness, and complexity on a 0-100 scale based on existing content the founder loves. When a writer drafts something, they can check: does this land around 25 on formality and 85 on directness like the reference examples? Clarity isn’t a vibe; it’s a set of specific choices you can point to and replicate.
Moving to LinkedIn, how do you adapt a brand’s voice so posts feel native to the feed while remaining unmistakably on-brand?
LinkedIn has platform norms you need to respect. Shorter paragraphs work better. Line breaks improve readability. Your opening hook needs to stop the scroll. But adapting to those mechanics doesn’t mean you sound like everyone else.
Here’s the thing. Most founders fall into one of two traps on LinkedIn. First is regurgitation. They just repost company messaging with no emotional resonance. Second is pure promotion. They blast out thoughts without any empathy for who they’re speaking to or what that person needs.
Combined, this makes for a very annoying and bland experience. People just aren’t going to tune in.
The adaptation happens in structure, not substance. Your belief that founder-led content is the only moat left stays exactly the same. But instead of burying it in paragraph three, you lead with it. Instead of a 500-word essay block, you break it into digestible chunks.
Your unique verbal identity stays consistent. If you score 85 on directness in long-form content, you stay 85 on directness in LinkedIn posts. What changes is respecting how people consume content on the platform.
Native doesn’t mean generic. It means understanding people are scrolling fast and your first two lines either hook them or they’re gone. Your actual beliefs and how you say them? Those stay untouched. You’re playing to win, not trying not to lose.
To keep publishing momentum, what process do you use to turn a company narrative into a month of LinkedIn topics that unlock new insight rather than promotion?
It’s simpler than most founders make it. I use what I call the Four Pillar Framework. Start with your core beliefs and company values. Not generic mission statement garbage, but the actual things you stand for. Then map those against your business topics and the problems you solve.
From there, I pull out the unique stories: the wins, the losses, the partner moments, and the difficult client situations. Every founder has dozens of these sitting in their head, unused.
Here’s the key part everyone misses. One 10-minute conversation about any of these topics gives you at least four different angles for LinkedIn. You can talk about:
- the problem you solved,
- the belief that informed your decision,
- the tactical how, and
- the outcome.
Each becomes its own post.
I literally just talk through my thinking on one topic using the rule of three: three beliefs, three examples, and three takeaways. Then I repurpose that one conversation into different formats. A tactical breakdown becomes one post, the contrarian belief becomes another, and the story with the learning becomes a third.
Most founders waste time staring at blank screens trying to write. Just talk through what you already know using your company narrative as the backbone, then systematically break it into pieces people actually want to read.
With answer engines and LLMs in the mix, how do you keep a human verbal identity while making content legible to these systems?
Here’s the thing. Google’s latest updates judge what they call “samesies” content harder than ever. The Helpful Content Update and Core Updates basically state that without being able to contribute something new and relevant, your content might not perform well in Search.
I wrote about this concept called Information Gain in a LinkedIn post. You need actual expertise in the subject, new perspectives to add to the conversation, and an interesting way to say it. These three things matter more than any technical optimization.
Writing solely for the purpose of ranking well is played out. Not because of algorithm updates, but because your prospects hate it, and they can tell.
So, I focus less on SEO and more on HEO: Human Engagement Optimization. It’s a perspective shift. Instead of thinking about driving traffic as though that isn’t humans with needs and jobs to be done, I think about how we can encourage someone at one stage of their buying journey to continue that journey with each piece of content.
The way this works in practice is simple. Your verbal identity stays intact. Your beliefs, your stories, your way of explaining things—these are the substance. Then, you ensure that search engines and LLMs can actually parse it. Use natural language. Keep jargon to a minimum unless you define it. Structure your thoughts so both humans and systems can follow.
The systems are getting smarter at understanding context and quality. They’re trained on what humans actually engage with. So, if you write something that makes a human stop scrolling and actually read, the systems will figure that out.
Describe your one-hour fix for the most common mistake you see when teams codify voice.
The biggest mistake is that teams write aspirational nonsense instead of decision criteria. They say things like “be authentic” or “sound conversational” and then wonder why every writer interprets it differently.
Here’s my one-hour fix.
First 15 minutes: Pull three pieces of content the founder loves and three they hate. Not kind of like or kind of dislike—love and hate. Put them side by side in a document.
Next 15 minutes: Go line by line and identify the actual differences. Not the vibe, but the specifics. Does the good one use short sentences? Does it lead with the conclusion? Does it use industry jargon or explain everything? Does it include personal stories or stick to tactics? Write down every observable difference you can spot.
Next 15 minutes: Turn those observations into yes or no questions. Not “be clear” but “Does this sentence use jargon without defining it?” Not “sound like the founder” but “Does this include a personal example or belief?” Create a checklist of 8 to 10 questions that any editor can answer in 30 seconds.
Last 15 minutes: Test it. Take a draft piece of content and run it through your new checklist. If the checklist says the content passes but you still hate it, your criteria are wrong. Go back and fix them. If the checklist catches the problems, you’re done.
Most teams waste weeks on brand voice workshops. This takes one hour and gives you something you can actually use tomorrow.