What Sintra does for a small business marketing budget

Luisa Ramirez is the executive chef at Charcuterie by Bohemian Picnics and, because the business could not afford an agency, also its marketing department. Quoted roughly $800 to $1,000 for two carousels — her own approximation of the figure — she went looking for an alternative and settled on Sintra at $37 a month. Instagram reached 20,000 followers the week of the interview, and she credits the tool and what it taught her.

The quote that started it

Her account of the agency conversation is short. They searched for marketing companies, got a price for two pieces of content, and stopped. "That's the salary of like, you know, someone here." For a business two people built from scratch, a four-figure monthly content spend was not a trade-off; it was out of the question.

This is the part worth holding onto. The alternative to the $37 tool was not a cheaper agency. It was no marketing at all.

What she uses it for

She started with ChatGPT, tried an app from the Apple store that was unhelpful enough she has forgotten its name, and landed on Sintra. It now covers:

• Developing catering menus
• Instagram strategy and post ideas
• Email marketing
• Choosing which images from a batch to run that week, and writing the caption with keywords aimed at the algorithm
• Scheduling posts, with a notification so she can check before anything publishes

She describes the product as organised into what it calls assistants — separate branches for personal assistance, social, email — and says there are "around nine to twelve AI workers" in it, some of which she has not learned to use yet.

How she gets results out of it

Her description of the working method is more useful than the feature list, because it explains why it works for her and not for others. "The way that I see AI is that it helps me organise my own ideas. But if I'm messy with my ideas with AI, then it's going to be all over the place."

So she has a strategy for how she types the ideas in, and then she argues with the output. She has found that a firm tone gets corrections made faster — "I'm like, what are you doing? This is not it" — and she asks the tool directly what it is capable of, which is how she learned that pushing back works at all.

She is also clear-eyed about the common misconception. Asked about the idea that you put something in and perfect output comes out: "It doesn't work that way." The menu translation for her signature mini sandwiches took many rounds of back and forth before it was usable.

Where it fails

Two failures, both specific.

Image and flyer generation. When she asks Sintra to produce a flyer with text on it, the text comes out wrong — missing grammar and spelling, letters that do not match what she typed. She has since learned the app is new and not fully developed, and works around it by transferring everything to Canva, where "it makes it perfect."

Anything financial. She tried to budget a catering order in Sintra early on, when the app had less in it, and it "kinda like messed everything up." She was rushing a menu that day, so she abandoned it and has not tried since — in Sintra or, notably, in ChatGPT, which her co-owner uses for precisely this.

She also hits the same context problem other operators describe: sometimes it asks for the address or the logo it already has. She attributes that to back-end work still in progress.

Her one product request

A Sintra and Canva integration, so the round trip disappears. "I hope that one day they can just combine everything to just make it easier so that you don't have to go from Sintra to Canva. It will just be in one place."

Products named here were named by the operator. Inclusion is reporting, not endorsement.

Where this comes from

S2E2: The secret AI strategy this small NYC business uses to save thousands — the full interview with Sara Rojas and Luisa Ramirez. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.