A five-year idea, live in a matter of weeks — by building the newsroom Joanne needed as a system instead of a payroll.
What we built around: Joanne has spent a career inside the UK energy and utilities sector — the people, the politics, the stories that move it. Her superpower is editorial judgement: she knows which story matters, and why. We built a system around that judgement, so the only thing she has to bring is the part no machine can.
Joanne had carried the idea for five years. She owned the domain and she had the vision — a serious news and analysis publication for the energy transition, covering the market intelligence, the technology in practice, the business moves and the expert voices shaping net zero. What she didn’t have was a newsroom. We built her one as a system instead of a payroll: a newsroom that watches the sector for her, an editorial pipeline she controls end to end, and an assistant she can question in plain language. Talking Utilities went from a five-year idea to live in a matter of weeks, launching at the Future of Utilities Summit in June 2026.
Talking Utilities has been a passion project for me for a number of years, but I could not work out how to get it off the ground on my own. Bumping into Jim and Maya at an industry event, and hearing them talk about the power of AI changed all that. Their knowledge and experience built my fully functioning newsroom in weeks — and the process was super smooth. The front-end website was built to my spec really quickly and needed minimal tweaks — which were delivered in hours. Launching www.talkingutilities.com was a really proud moment for me — and I could not have done it without the expertise of Solopreneur Superpowers.
— Joanne Smalley, Founder, Talking Utilities Stories from across the energy transition are gathered and sorted before Joanne sits down — she opens to a shortlist that's already pulled together for her.
The system does the watching and the sorting; Joanne does the deciding, so readers get a publication shaped by her expertise, not an automated feed.
Ask a question in plain English, get an answer drawn from the material she trusts. No searching, no scrolling — just the answer.
Talking Utilities launched at an industry summit and runs on Joanne's own infrastructure — a working newsroom operated by one expert who doesn't write code.
Behind the publication is an AI-powered editorial system we designed and built around the way Joanne works:
AI continuously scans the sector’s sources, ranks what actually matters, and feeds a steady stream of relevant stories into the newsroom.
Candidate stories arrive drafted and sorted into a review queue. Joanne curates — keep, sharpen, or spike — and approved pieces flow straight to the live site.
A conversational layer lets Joanne interrogate her own sources in plain English and get grounded answers back — turning a sprawling archive into something she can simply ask.
The front end is a fast, search-optimised publication that updates without anyone touching code — the intelligent newsroom drives it end to end.
Automated reports land in her inbox on a schedule — readership for the site, subscribers for the newsletter — so she always knows what’s landing without opening a dashboard.
We built Joanne a custom MCP server, so her own AI agents can plug straight into the newsroom’s sources and content — the publication doubles as a tool other agents can query.
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