---
title: "The 45-Minute Interview That Produces a Month of LinkedIn Content"
description: "One recorded conversation each month gives you eight to twelve posts, and you can run the whole process yourself without hiring anybody to do it for you."
url: "https://steadyrev.ca/drafts/the-45-minute-interview-that-produces-a-month-of-content"
lang: "en"
---

# The 45-Minute Interview That Produces a Month of Content

A walkthrough of the monthly content interview. What gets asked, how the transcript becomes posts, and how to run it yourself if you'd rather not hire anyone.

## Why an interview and not a brief

Most content processes start with a brief. You fill out a form, or you have a kickoff call, and someone extracts your "key messaging pillars." Then they write from that.

The output is always slightly wrong, and it's hard to explain why. The ideas are correct. The words aren't yours.

An interview solves this because you're not summarizing your opinions, you're saying them out loud. The specific phrases you reach for, the analogies you use without thinking, the thing you say when you get slightly annoyed. That's the raw material. It doesn't survive a form.

## What actually gets asked

Ten to fifteen questions, prepared in advance, designed to produce stories rather than positions. A rough shape:

**On the last month of client conversations.** What did someone tell you that surprised you? What did you have to explain more than once? What did a client get wrong before you fixed it?

**On frustration.** What's something in your industry that you're tired of seeing? What advice do you see going around that you think is actively bad?

**On objections.** What did a prospect push back on this month? What's the objection you've stopped trying to overcome because it means they're not a fit?

**On lessons.** What did you get wrong recently? What would you tell yourself two years ago?

**On the market.** What's changing that people haven't caught up to yet? What did you read this month that you disagreed with?

Notice that none of these are "what are your key differentiators." That question produces a marketing sentence. The questions above produce a scene.

## How it's run

Camera on, always. Forty-five to sixty minutes. Recorded and transcribed.

The interviewer's job is mostly to follow up. When you say something interesting and move past it, they should stop you and ask for the specific example. Every time you say "founders always" or "clients usually," the follow-up is "who, and what did they say."

Generalizations are where content goes to die. The interview is where you catch them.

Tangents are allowed. Some of the best material comes from the thing you got sidetracked into for four minutes.

## What comes out the other side

From one session, roughly:

Eight to twelve post topics, each tagged to a content pillar and time-stamped back to the moment in the transcript it came from.

Three to five video clips, assuming the camera was on and you weren't reading from notes.

One or two article concepts, usually from whichever topic you talked about longest.

The tagging matters more than it sounds. When a draft comes back to you for review, it should be traceable to a specific ninety seconds of you talking. If it isn't, it was written from the general vibe of the interview rather than from something you said, and it'll read that way.

## The failure modes

**You prepare.** If you write notes beforehand and deliver polished answers, you've turned an interview into a presentation and the output will sound like one. Show up cold.

**The interviewer doesn't push.** A passive interviewer produces a transcript full of abstractions. The follow-up question is the entire job.

**You skip a month.** The system depends on fresh material. Two months of drafts pulled from one interview means the second month is thin, and you'll feel it.

**You approve drafts you don't love.** The review step exists to catch the 20% that isn't quite you. If you rubber-stamp it because you're busy, you've published something with your name on it that you wouldn't have said. That's worse than posting nothing.

## Running it yourself

Get someone to interview you. A colleague, a friend who's good at asking questions, anyone who will not let you get away with a vague answer.

Record it. Transcribe it with whatever tool you like.

Read the transcript and highlight every moment where you said something specific. A number, a name, a scene, a phrase you'd repeat. Those are your posts. The abstract parts are filler.

Then write from the highlighted bits, not from your general knowledge of the topic. That last instruction is the one everyone ignores, and it's the one that makes the difference.

Try one. Worst case you get a transcript with three usable ideas in it.