Case study
Ten years to write the book. Thirty days to give it a voice.
Steve Chua. An audiobook he had wanted for a decade, finished in a month, in his own voice, with the next book drafted and a publishing deal secured alongside it.
The ten years
The book was written. The audiobook had not happened.
Steve and his wife Barbara worked on their book for ten years. Free To Be Me: Unlocking All You Were Created To Be came out in May 2023, with both their names on it. For those same ten years Steve had wanted an audiobook of it, and it had never happened. He did not have the time. Recording an audiobook the conventional way means days in a booth reading every line aloud, then editing all of it, and a working coach with a practice to run does not have those days lying around.
How the voice was built
A cloned voice reads. A directed one performs.
Anyone can clone a voice. The work here was teaching a model how Steve speaks, so it could direct the performance rather than read the text.
Three hours of interviews
Recorded with Steve, specifically to capture the components of his voice: how he builds a sentence, where he pauses, how he lands a point.
A voice corpus, built with the Trivium system
Our own methodology, in three layers: a grammar layer for how he constructs language, a logic layer for how he reasons, and a rhetoric layer for how he persuades. Fine-tuned for Steve inside the thirty days.
An ElevenLabs voice clone
Taught to him and built with him. This is the part most people stop at, and on its own it produces a voice that reads a manuscript.
His Claude as the producer
His Claude controlled every ElevenLabs parameter, directing the read for emotional conveyance, human-like pauses and cadence. It could do that because it had the corpus: it knew how Steve speaks, so it could tell the voice where to breathe and where to press. That is the difference between a clone and a performance, and it is why the result is usable.
Within thirty days
Four things that did not exist a month earlier.
The audiobook, finished
Complete, in his voice, and preparing for launch.
The next draft of his next book
Done inside the same thirty days, with the same corpus behind it.
A publishing deal
Secured with Legacy Publishing, for the next book.
A working prototype, and the decision it unlocked
For his new startup, Steve vibe-coded a functional prototype himself. He had needed something to show his business partners before they would approve a full build, and had needed the build before there was anything to show. The prototype broke that: he went from describing the idea to demonstrating it, and his partners approved the full build-out on the strength of it. The full build is approved, and it is not finished.
The same training, a different result
Four clients, one course, four things that share nothing.
The thirty days of Claude training is the same product each time. Buddy Buck built an app for his town. All Climate’s staff automated their own work. Jesse Rhodes Jr read fifteen thousand messages and answered the ones that mattered. Steve built a voice, finished an audiobook, drafted a book and put a working prototype in front of his partners. None of it existed before, and none of it looks like the others.
Two of those are software, and they did different jobs. Buddy’s progressive web app is in production, used by his clients and his subcontractors. Steve’s prototype was built to be shown once, to the people who could approve the real thing, and it got the approval. If you have an idea and no budget until somebody sees it working, that second one is yours.
Go and look
stevechua.net, as it is today.
His site, with the book on the menu. The audiobook is finished and preparing for launch, and it is not pictured until it is public.
In his words
“Brett Moore has changed my world!”
“Brett Moore has changed my world! He has taken me into a new realm of possibilities and his coaching and assistance have been invaluable to see my production increase exponentially. Without his help I wouldn't find myself from the precipice of so many breakthroughs.”
If this sounds like you