Wow, what an incredible last few days! The topic of today’s newsletter dovetails very nicely into the midterm elections and my interpretation of what happened.

In today’s edition:

1. The new B2B go-to-market strategy for the age of AI-slop supersaturation

2. The midterms and AI backlash

3. What I’m reading: Sales Pitch - How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win, by April Dunford

4. My new website functionality

The new B2B go-to-market strategy for the age of supersaturation

I was on a call the other day with a potential client, the founder of a software company getting ready to launch a new product.

I asked him how he was preparing to go to market.

“Well, you know, the usual stuff,” he said. “A target list of ideal customers. A pitch for cold email and cold DMs. A content plan.”

Then he added one more thing:

“We’re planning an in-person event strategy, because, you know…nobody really trusts online content anymore because of AI slop.”

Bingo.

He said it better than I could have, and the timing was perfect: I was formulating my new pitch deck and today’s newsletter.

We’re all facing the same problem. Buyers are drowning in AI-created content and AI comments. We’ve stopped trusting it.

On top of that, B2B tech companies (and I suspect most B2B firms in non-tech spaces as well) pretty much sound the same.

When you combine supersaturation with the sea of sameness, you get marketing that’s stopped working (at least it doesn’t work the way it used to).

Content supply has far exceeded demand, and that supply is not trustworthy.

Tech startups need a new go-to-market strategy for today, something that combines the best of the old with a completely new approach.

I call this the Unopposed Founder Framework.

And it involves five steps: Say, Prove, Connect, Convert, and Amplify.

Let’s go through it.

What is supersaturation?

On January 6, 2014, marketing author Mark Schaefer published a blog post called “Content Shock.”

The amount of content published every day was growing exponentially, and it had passed our ability as humans to consume it.

If only he knew what was coming on November 30, 2022.

That’s the day ChatGPT launched. Content had already been exploding. After large language models showed up, it really exploded.

And then came AI slop.

People can tell when you didn’t write your own content. Even when the ideas are original, the turns of phrase and the rhythm give it away. Readers can spot it immediately.

“Oh, AI wrote that.” Ouch!

I know because I did it. For a while I was repurposing the transcripts of my own videos with AI. Well-meaning stuff, my own ideas. Then one day I realized: uh-oh, this is not the way to go.

I call this supersaturation. It’s when your content, as a founder or a CMO at a tech startup, gets drowned out by the noise, the AI slop, the sheer volume of content, and the lack of trust buyers now have in all of it.

That’s the world we’re marketing in.

We sound like everyone else

Peep Laja, the founder of Wynter, surveyed 100 B2B SaaS leaders in 2025 about their brands.

Only 6% said their brand was very distinctive.

Another 46% said somewhat. And nearly half, 48%, said their brand was only slightly distinctive, or not distinctive at all.

There’s a term for that called the Sea of Sameness: a market where every company follows the same best practices until the buyer can’t tell any of them apart.

You see, startups (and even mature companies) focus so much on performance marketing that whatever unique “positioning” they created has given way to those best practices.

And the performance marketing tactic Du Jour? AI visibility.

But the thing is, AI won’t give you any visibility until you have something to say. Some unique idea - a framework, methodology, POV. Something you’ve named and claimed.

And AI picks whoever said it first.

So by default, you end up copying a competitor and maybe you do it a little better.

Then a buyer asks ChatGPT to recommend a vendor, or how to approach a problem.

The AI is going to cite whoever came up with the idea, the term or the language. The original sayer comes first. The Johnny-come-lately - you, who just decided to copy and slightly improve - is just more noise.

GEO guru Jason Barnard, founder and CEO of Kalicube, told me the same thing when I interviewed him. If you publish the same article as your competitor with a few tweaks, AI doesn’t care. It already has your competitor’s article. You won’t get cited.

Robert Rose made it concrete in an October 27 article for the Content Marketing Institute, “What It Means If Your Brand Is Mentioned But Not Cited in AI Answers.”

His favorite stat of the month?

in July, Ford was the 18th most-mentioned brand in ChatGPT answers to car and vehicle questions in the US. But Ford’s own website was the 1,055th most-cited source. (The visibility rankings come from the Semrush AI Visibility Index).

Rose compares it to walking into a party where everyone talks about your outfit, and nobody listens to a word you say. Brutal.

Meanwhile, PubMed, the database of medical research papers, climbed from 64th to fourth among the most-cited domains, according to Ahrefs data, Rose cites.

The engines are leaning toward primary sources. Original research. Places where somebody actually knows something.

That’s good news for us.

So we all need something unique to say.

What do you need to say instead?

Part of the answer is original research. I’ll get to that in step two.

The bigger part is what I call your One Unforgettable Idea: the single idea a founder owns so completely that they stop being compared and become their own category.

That unique idea you had? The framework, methodology, POV I mentioned above? That’s your OUI after you’ve given it a distinctive and memorable name.

It comes from inside you. Your 20, 30 or 40 years in the market. Your hidden zone of genius.

We’re all snowflakes. No two are alike. And that goes for our ideas that turn into your OUI.

I see it come from five places:

1. Who you are. Your personality, experience, background, and knowledge. Or the culture of your whole company (especially if you’ve grown to a size where it’s no longer a founder-led company).

2. A buried feature. One feature, hidden in a bullet list, that matters a lot to one niche.

3. How you deliver. If you run a services firm, it’s that flourish at the end of the job, or the method nobody else uses.

4. How you sell. After 100 or 200 sales calls as a founder, you figured something out. It’s in your pitch, but it’s nowhere on your website.

5. Your worldview. Think of George Lucas building the Star Wars universe, or Dan Koe and his one-person business. A way of seeing the world that pulls some people in and pushes others away.

Whatever it is, you name it, and it becomes tied to you.

And it can take three shapes. A strong point of view inside an existing category. A subcategory. Or a brand-new category.

It’s also a spectrum. You can start with a strong point of view, grow it into a recognized subcategory, and watch it become a category of its own.

Step 1: Say

In A Star Is Born, Jackson Maine tells Ally that “…everybody in this bar has talent. But having something to say, that’s a whole other bag.”

That’s the Say step. What do you have to say that nobody else is saying?

Once you’ve figured out what your OUI is, take these steps:

• Write a strategy document for your idea.

• Decide who it’s for, and which problem in which niche it solves.

• Lay out your approach: your framework, model, or method.

• Give it a name.

• Then write a book about it.

I’ve identified 21 founders who have done this. Here are just two examples:

Zhamak Dehghani and data mesh.

While Dehghani was at ThoughtWorks working on client projects, she noticed something weird.

In software, each department, from finance to HR to marketing, had come to control its own computing resources.

Control was spread out.

But data was going the other way. It sat in central data warehouses and data lakes, run by data people who didn’t have the domain knowledge of those departments.

Her reaction: that’s backward.

So she coined a term, data mesh. It gives ownership of the data to the departments that know it.

She gave a talk about it at an O’Reilly conference, wrote the book Data Mesh for O’Reilly, and founded Nextdata to deliver it.

Then she kept talking about it on other people’s podcasts and on conference stages.

Gabe Cooper and responsive fundraising.

Gabe Cooper is the founder of Virtuous, a CRM for nonprofits. He worked with various nonprofits before founding Virtuous.

And he noticed something: Amazon, Netflix, and Google personalize everything for every single customer. And that contrasted with his experience with nonprofits, who personalize only for their two or three biggest donors.

But they treat everyone giving $5, $10, or $200, the same. No personalization or special treatment.

That’s backwards, he said.

He believed nonprofits should adopt technology-enabled mass personalization to those retail donors, and he called it responsive fundraising. Personalize for every donor, the way nonprofits already did for their biggest ones.

He founded Virtuou, the software that does it.

He published the book Responsive Fundraising in 2020 and then the follow-up book, The Responsive Nonprofit, in 2025.

Responsive fundraising became a category.

How do you find your own One Unforgettable Idea?

There are three places to look:

The one feature.

In her book Obviously Awesome, positioning expert April Dunford tells the story of a CRM company with pretty much the same features as Salesforce and HubSpot. Except one: It could track many-to-many relationships.

Most CRMs track one company to one prospect. But that one feature was especially useful to investment banks, and the company came to dominate that niche.

Your founding story.

Cooper’s Virtuous CRM story is an example of this method. What vision, insight, or customer problem triggered you to start your company in the first place?

Did you notice something that’s just wrong, and you had to fix it?

Did you see a recurring gap in current products that customers always seem to complain about?

Did you have a vision for the world that nobody else has?

The thing you say on sales calls.

A lot of founders say something on every call that never made it to the website. The website ended up full of corporate jargon that looks like everyone else’s.

And that thing you say that wins you customers? You’re not even aware you say it. It’s instinct.

To dig it out, I use a method from cognitive psychology called applied cognitive task analysis (ACTA for short). It’s designed to accurately uncover your tacit knowledge - that knowledge you’re unconscious of because it’s become instinct, or it’s just “the way things are done.”

Here’s an example that makes it more concrete for you.

Back in the 1980s, Matsushita was building a home bread-making machine. It mixed and kneaded the dough and baked it in the same device. But the bread kept coming out raw in the middle. Nobody could figure out why.

So a software developer on the team apprenticed herself to the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel. She worked next to him and watched.

He kneaded the dough.

And then he twisted it.

She asked him why he’d never mentioned the twist when she first interviewed him. His answer, more or less: I never thought about it. It’s just something I do.

Your One Unforgettable Idea is usually hiding in a twist like that.

You don’t have to apprentice anyone. In a structured interview, someone asks you questions that make you relive real situations, instead of asking you to explain yourself.

Here’s how it might go if we were looking at how a founder sells:

1. “Tell me about your best recent sale. What were the four to six steps you went through?” Maybe you open with your view of the market, then demo, then ask questions, then lay out options.

2. “Which step takes the most judgment?” Maybe it’s the questions you ask prospects during the demo, the questions that uncovers the problems you can sell to.

3. “Take me back to that last call. What did you ask in that moment?” Now you’re reliving it, and the details come out.

4. “What mistake would an amateur make there?” People are much better at explaining how someone else messes up than explaining their own wisdom. Maybe an amateur would never ask the prospect about the time their accounting system broke, and what they did to fill the gap. But you always do.

5. “When did you go against what the data said, and turn out to be right?” That’s where the contrarian move lives.

That’s how you surface tacit knowledge. It works for how you sell, how you deliver a service, even your worldview. I wrote a full walkthrough of the questions in this earlier article.

It’s really magical.

Step 2: Prove

Prove means original research. First-party data. This matters even more now, because AI cites primary sources.

My favorite example is from 2014.

Infochimps was a young company pivoting into an emerging space called big data. My friend Amanda McGuckin Hager became its director of marketing, and she organized a research study with a professional association for database administrators. They surveyed hundreds of database administrators about their big data projects.

One finding stood out: 55% of big data projects fail.

They hired a PR person to promote the report and used the research report as their lead magnet. They started getting articles written about the report. News outlets, blogs, and research firms quoted it by the hundreds. For a couple of years it was the big data stat everyone used.

You can do this on a startup budget. SurveyMonkey has a service that finds respondents for you. A research firm works too, but it gets costly. Or send the survey to your LinkedIn connections, if they’re the people you want to hear from.

I aim for at least 100 respondents. Then interview 10 or 15 people for the stories and anecdotes that give the numbers color.

Step 3: Connect

Connect means getting in the room.

Speak at conferences. Go on podcasts.

Yes, it takes human effort. That’s the point.

People can see you in the flesh. A podcast host asks you something out of left field, you stumble a little, and you answer anyway. People are looking for proof you’re real.

Executive dinners.

Put together a list of 50 to 60 target accounts. Find out where they cluster. The Bay Area, New York, Austin. Then run a mini tour of dinners in those cities.

Don’t make it a pitch fest. Invite peers in the same role, because people want to be in a room with people like them. Turn it into a Q&A over food and drinks.

This is where collective effervescence comes in. That’s the shared emotional energy that arises when human beings gather in a heightened moment with a common purpose. AI can’t create it. And you become the person who gets them into rooms with people like them.

Small workshops.

Senior people, CTOs, CIOs and cloud leaders, often prefer a small room to being one of thousands at a big conference.

Your own conference.

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the founders of HubSpot, came up with inbound marketing. They wrote the book Inbound Marketing, blogged and podcasted about it, and then launched Inbound, their annual conference in Boston. It’s become a pilgrimage for marketers.

I call this a Category Keystone Event: the conference for your point of view, your subcategory or your category. It’s where your whole field gathers, and your product stays in the background. Think Dreamforce for Salesforce, or Craft and Commerce for Kit.

Gabe Cooper did a version of this too. Virtuous built the company on virtual summits. They ran them quarterly, then twice a year, then once a year as the events got bigger. You see people talking live. You can ask questions in the chat. That’s AI-proof.

Step 4: Convert

Convert is account-based marketing done the way it was meant to be done.

ABM took off around 2015 and 2016. Since then, a lot of us have twisted it into this: build a list of 1,000 or 2,000 prospects and blast them all.

I get those messages all the time. I run a one-person consultancy. And people still write to me: “Hey, I’d like to talk to you about your HR process.”

HR process? I don’t have any employees. It’s just me.

That’s just tone deaf.

Here’s what I recommend instead. If you sell a considered purchase, something over $20,000 that a buying committee has to approve, you only need 50 to 60 target accounts, initially. And you write each of them a truly personal message.

Tools like Clay, and SLEG from Pinnacle AI, which I’ll be testing soon, let you get very granular. What situation is the company in? What tech do they use? What have their founders said on podcasts?

Then you map your One Unforgettable Idea to their specific needs. Your cold outbound arrives with a solution already in it.

You’re giving them the solution for free.

That gets attention, and it spreads your idea at the same time.

Remember the bowling alley from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm? To get a strike, you have to hit the first pin at the right angle, and it knocks down the rest.

April Dunford’s CRM company did exactly that. Its first pin was investment banks. Once it became the go-to CRM there, it moved to business banking, and then to fintech.

Step 5: Amplify

AI listens to what you say on your own website, newsletter, and podcast.

But it also wants to see third parties talking about you.

That’s where amplify comes in, and there are three easy ways to get it:

1. Your research gets cited. This is the payoff from step two. Run PR on research that shows, in a neutral way, why the market needs a solution like yours, and the news picks it up.

2. Your speaker pages. When you speak at a conference, ask the organizers to put your One Unforgettable Idea on your speaker profile.

3. Your podcast episode pages. When you’re a guest on somebody else’s podcast, ask the host to include your idea on the episode page.

Then there’s the big one: analysts.

Charity Majors, founder of Honeycomb, borrowed the term observability in 2016 to set Honeycomb apart from other monitoring tools. Gartner went on to name Honeycomb a Leader in the 2022 and 2023 Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability.

Getting named by Gartner or Forrester, or written up in Harvard Business Review, is a huge amplifier.

AI values it a lot.

So what’s actually new here?

You’ll notice a lot of these methods are old. Original research. PR. Getting in rooms.

The new twist is pairing them with an idea that comes from inside you.

We get the best of the old plus the best of the new.

That’s the Unopposed Founder framework.

And you can start tomorrow. Sit down with a colleague, or even an AI, and work through the applied cognitive task analysis questions about your last few sales calls. Find your twist.

Then tell me how it goes. Hit reply. I read every one.

If you’d rather have a second pair of eyes first, I’ll do it for you. My free One Unforgettable Idea Audit reads what you’ve already said in public and tells you where your idea is hiding.

Know a founder sitting on a gold mine he isn’t exploiting? Send him this.

The midterms and the AI backlash

My head is spinning from the blue tsunami we just experienced. I’m ecstatic about it (yes, I’m blue).

And I couldn’t help noticing something: the usual attack ads didn’t work.

I live in Austin, Texas, and I constantly saw pre-rolls and interstitial ads on YouTube attacking Talarico with sensationalist fear-mongering about what he might have said in an interview, or something scary about his beliefs.

It was so obvious that most of these ads used AI.

But the ads didn’t work. Talarico beat Paxton to become the first Democratic senator-elect from Texas in nearly 40 years.

The final numbers weren’t even close. Talarico beat Paxton 55% to 43%. A shocking result in a reliably red state.

But it wasn’t just ads. I witnessed troll accounts inside a Republicans for Talarico Facebook group “warn” everybody that if we voted for Talarico, we’d be voting for this horrible person who was going to transition our kids at school.

On the other hand, I kept seeing videos of Talarico speaking at town halls, shaking hands with people, meeting with people on the street, and responding to attack questions in the Texas House.

The attack ads and troll accounts looked suspicious. Screenshots of negative articles from questionable sources. AI-altered or AI-generated images. Clickbait titles.

But Talarico’s videos showed a real human in real situations.

My hypothesis? We have such a jaded view of online content now, because of AI slop, that those attack ads and troll accounts just looked like more slop.

The Talarico videos, on the other hand, looked authentic. It made us believe that, we too, could go hear him speak at town hall if we wanted to see him in the flesh.

I think this might be the first election where AI slop made the usual political tricks completely ineffectual.

And of course it helped that people were pissed at the current situation of more war, rising prices, and police state paramilitary-style overreach.

This is obviously my opinion. Pollsters would need to verify this.

What do you think: did AI slop make the usual political attack ad playbook ineffectual?

What I’m reading: Sales Pitch - How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win, by April Dunford

Marketers do so many things. It’s like we’re a jack of all trades.

One of those things is positioning: figuring out what our companies are uniquely good at, and what problem this uniqueness solves for our target market.

But for some reason, most marketers drop the ball when teaching salespeople how to communicate that positioning.

In Sales Pitch, positioning expert and best-selling author, April Dunford, closes that gap and teaches us how to arm salespeople with a sales pitch that effectively communicates our unique positioning to prospects.

The end of the “product tour” demo.

What do most salespeople do when they give a product demo to a prospect? They do the standard product walk-through: show all the menus and features, one by one.

That’s not a demo. It’s a lullaby designed to put our prospects to sleep.

Of course, salespeople also ask qualifying questions to see where the pain is, if they have budget, and if they have decision-making power.

But this is a sub-optimal process.

Instead, Dunford says to follow these steps:

1. Step 1: Insight

   Start with an insight about your prospect’s world that helps them understand why your unique value matters. You’re giving them a useful perspective on their problem before you introduce your product.

2. Step 2: Alternatives

   Walk prospects through the different ways they could solve their problem, including sticking with what they use today. Explain the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and use the conversation to understand what matters most to them.

3. Step 3: The Perfect World

   Based on those trade-offs, describe what an ideal solution would deliver. This gives you and your prospect a shared set of buying criteria before your product enters the conversation.

4. Step 4: The Introduction

   Now introduce your company and product, making it clear what you do and which market category you belong to. With the context established, prospects can understand where your solution fits and why it deserves their attention.

5. Step 5: Differentiated Value

   Show prospects the value you deliver that the alternatives can’t match, and demonstrate the capabilities that make it possible. This is where the demo belongs: each feature you show should connect to a result the prospect cares about.

6. Step 6: Proof

   Give prospects evidence that you can deliver on your promises. Customer stories, measurable results, and third-party validation help turn your claims into something they can confidently take to their boss.

7. Step 7: Objections

   Address the common concerns that could stop the deal, such as switching costs, implementation, or adoption. Don’t assume prospects will raise every concern themselves; equip them to answer the questions they’ll face internally.

8. Step 8: The Ask

   Finish by recommending a clear next step in the buying process. Whether that’s a technical evaluation or a meeting with other stakeholders, make it specific so the prospect knows how to move forward.

Go out there and get the book now (this is NOT an affiliate link). It just came out, so you still have time to be the first one in your market to use this method!

My new website functionality

Want to find out your One Unforgettable Idea (OUI), for free?

I just added some AI prompts to my website that allow you to get a quick and easy result using ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity:

https://viralgeniusinstitute.com/oui-audit

Then, underneath this section, I provide five follow-up prompts you can copy and paste so you can continue the analysis.

Try it; it’s fun! Then hit “reply” on this email and tell me what you find.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end, and I’ll see you next Thursday!

- Fernando Labastida, Viral Genius Institute

I always recommend to founders that they should write a book to position themselves and their companies as leaders within a new market space.

But I often get pushback: “I’d love to write a book, but what’s the benefit?”

I get it. Writing a book takes time, valuable time they could pour into growing their company.

And a lot of these founders don’t want the spotlight.

They don’t want to be influencers.

Some of them only keep a LinkedIn profile because they kind of have to.

So I sat down and made a list.

Here are the six reasons I give founders for writing a book:

1. Give your market a new perspective

2. Build your brand around one idea

3. Establish a category or framework tied to your name

4. Clarify your thinking so you can sell

5. Educate and attract the market you want to serve

6. Create opportunities beyond what you sell today

What’s missing from that list?

Book sales.

Marketing author Mark Schaefer, who has written several books, is blunt about it in his article “Is writing a book a marketing tactic or a long-term strategy?“:

“One of the main reasons people write books is to establish a source of passive income. This will not happen.“

Unless you’re Malcolm Gladwell or James Clear, the book won’t pay for itself in royalties.

It pays for itself in everything else.

Let’s go through the six.

1. Give your market a new perspective

Most of us get into business for one of two reasons.

We want to make money.

Or we saw a problem nobody was solving well, and from our perspective, the fix was obvious.

Usually it’s both.

But after a while, something else kicks in.

Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Food and shelter at the bottom, then safety, then all the way up to self-actualization at the top.

That’s where a lot of founders end up. We want to contribute something to the world.

And we start to notice that the problem we solve for our customers is a small version of a much bigger problem.

Say you build software for research labs. A narrow market. But the thing your software fixes shows up everywhere, and you can see it plain as day.

It’s like watching people stuck in traffic for an hour on the drive home, when all they want is to see their family and watch an episode of their favorite show.

If only they knew how to fix it!

That urge is a big reason to write a book.

Look at Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, the company behind the project management software Basecamp.

In 2010, he and his co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson published Rework.

Rework says very little about project management software. It’s about how to run a small company.

In an interview with the Book Overflow podcast, Fried said they “wrote this book to share our point of view on how a business should be and could be run.”

They saw small companies trying to run like big companies.

And they knew a better way, because they were living it.

You can do this even in an industry that hasn’t changed in decades. Accounting is accounting. Selling a house is selling a house. You still have to insure your car.

But if you figured something out that most people in your market haven’t, that’s a new perspective. And a book is how you share it.

2. Build your brand around one idea

In the same article, Schaefer points to his book Known, where the first stage of his four-step process is deciding what you want to be known for.

His line:

“A book can be a bold manifesto to help clarify your thinking and declare “this is me!”“

This is the heart of my upcoming book, Unopposed: Design a Personal Category Only You Can Own.

I call it your One Unforgettable Idea: the single idea a founder owns so completely that they stop being compared and become their own category.

The founder gets known for the idea. Then it cascades down to the company.

Think about Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the co-founders of HubSpot.

They’re known as the people who invented inbound marketing.

When HubSpot announced its $16 million Series C round, Halligan explained what made them different. Their vision was that “traditional, outbound marketing (telemarketing, email spamming, direct mail, etc.) is fundamentally broken.”

Then he wrote:

“Rather than automating and codifying the old rules of marketing, our vision is to transform marketing and then automate the new rules.“

And in the next sentence, he pointed to the book. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs came out the same day.

Look at that title.

“Inbound marketing” is the thing they wanted to be known for.

Before that book, there wasn’t a name for using Google, social media, and blogs to pull leads in.

Attraction instead of interruption.

Now it’s everywhere.

3. Establish a category or framework tied to your name

I have two favorite examples of this.

The first is Chris Ronzio, founder and CEO of Trainual.

You’ve probably heard of The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. Work on your business, not in it. Be the architect, and let your people do the work.

Great in theory.

But most founders never had a practical way to write down how their business runs, so they could step back and hand it off.

Ronzio built that way. He called it the Business Playbook.

He built Trainual, software where every process and standard operating procedure lives in one place, for every role in the company.

And he wrote the book: The Business Playbook.

The way I see it, The Business Playbook finishes the job Gerber started.

My second example is Gabe Cooper, founder and CEO of Virtuous, a CRM for nonprofits.

Think about the NPR or PBS fundraising drive. I love NPR and PBS, but golly, those drives get annoying.

Nonprofits give their biggest donors the VIP treatment. Lunches, visits, a real relationship.

Everyone else gets a mass email.

Cooper asked a different question: what if you treated every donor like you had a relationship with them?

With today’s software, and now AI, you can do that at scale.

He called it responsive fundraising, and he wrote the book, Responsive Fundraising, in 2020. In 2024, he followed it with The Responsive Nonprofit.

He talks about the approach in this Nonprofit Hub podcast episode.

And it just so happens his company sells the software to do it.

That’s the HubSpot play.

Sure, you can do inbound marketing by duct-taping WordPress, an email tool, Salesforce, and a social media tool together with Zapier.

Or you can use one inbound marketing platform: HubSpot.

Virtuous says the same thing about responsive fundraising.

The book names the category. The company owns it.

I wrote about this in The Startup Book in 2024, and I’m building on it in Unopposed.

4. Clarify your thinking so you can sell

I’ve been living this one for the last three weeks, working on Unopposed.

Have you heard the terms “planners” and “pantsers”?

A pantser writes by the seat of their pants. They start typing and figure it out later, which means round after round of edits.

A planner maps the whole book first.

I’m a planner. I build what I call a 3D outline: a book plan spreadsheet with every chapter on it, plus a detailed outline for each chapter.

That planning forces you to answer hard questions.

What’s my concept?

What’s my framework?

What are the pieces, and in what order?

Then when you write, you have to explain each piece. You do research. You interview people.

And the next day, on a sales call, you explain what you do better than you ever have.

All that hard thinking went into the book, and it comes out of your mouth.

5. Educate and attract the market you want to serve

If you’re bringing something new to market, you want buyers to show up already understanding it.

You shouldn’t have to explain everything from scratch on every sales call.

I know of companies that won’t take a meeting until the prospect has watched a certain video, or read a foundational blog post, or read the book.

A book also attracts your people.

Take my sister. She’s a realtor, and nothing like the realtor you’re picturing.

No pantsuits. No perfectly done hair. She’ll dye her hair dark red or purple. She has tattoos everywhere. She’s into yoga, meditation, and Day of the Dead art, and she’s active in breast cancer survivor groups.

She attracts musicians, artists, and coaches.

If she wrote a book, it wouldn’t need to invent a category. It would teach a way of living your life, and the people who share her lifestyle would find her.

Or take an accountant who grew up making decisions differently than everyone else.

With layoffs everywhere and AI taking over, more Gen Xers and Millennials are starting businesses because they have to.

Maybe that accountant’s way of making decisions, which they figured out 15 or 20 years ago, is now a survival tool.

Write that book, and the people who need it will choose that accountant to do their books.

6. Create opportunities beyond what you sell today

Salesforce sells CRM software.

It also runs Dreamforce, one of the biggest conferences in the world. They pretty much take over San Francisco every year, and the conference is a business of its own.

A book can do the same for you, on your own scale.

Paid speaking gigs.

Workshops.

Advisory work.

Board seats.

Training.

You might run a software company, a product company, or a services firm. A book that connects with your market opens revenue doors your core offer never could.

So, is it worth the time?

Go back to that list of six.

A new perspective. A brand built on one idea. A category with your name on it. A sharper sales pitch. A market that shows up educated. And revenue you didn’t know existed.

That’s a lot to get out of a few months of focused writing.

And you never have to become an influencer to get any of it.

The book does the talking.

Now I want to hear from you.

What’s a reason to write a book that I missed? Hit reply and tell me.

And if you’ve got a book in you and don’t know what it’s for, reply with “book.” That’s the first thing we figure out.

Know a founder sitting on a gold mine he isn’t exploiting? Send him this.

We live in the world of marketing supersaturation.

What is supersaturation?

On January 6, 2014, Mark Schaefer published his groundbreaking article, “Content Shock.”

The key line from the article:

“Depending on what study you read, the amount of available web-based content (the supply) is doubling every 9 to 24 months. Unimaginable, really. However, our ability to consume that content (the demand) is finite.”

If only Mark knew what was going to happen on November 30, 2022, the date ChatGPT launched.

That content shock became supersaturation: not only has content exploded, but trust has taken a precipitous dive because of AI.

A 2026 Fractl study said that AI distrust doubled from 20% in 2025 to 40% in 2026, with Gen Z as high as 54%.

And Sociality’s 2026 “AI in Social Media” report said:

“The central paradox of AI in social media in 2026: 89.7% of social media marketers use AI at least several times a week. Simultaneously, 50% of Gen Z have unfollowed, muted, or blocked accounts because they think the content is AI-generated per Sprout Social’s Q1 2026 Pulse Survey. 88% of consumers say AI video tools have decreased their trust in social media news.”

The current super-saturation has had a devastating impact on the performance of experienced marketing teams and startup founders.

If you read subreddits, like r/b2bmarketing, r/startups, and r/agency, the conversations seem to be all about how difficult marketing is now, and how marketing has stopped working the way it used to.

One small business owner on Reddit said: “Feels like a lot of traditional channels are getting saturated - cold emails, ads, even LinkedIn outreach.”

A marketer at a B2B tech company said: “Why does managing B2B marketing across multiple tools feel like a second full-time job?”

And this one hit home for me:

“I’ve been noticing something interesting in b2b over the last year. A lot of strategies that used to work consistently are becoming less reliable.

Cold email still works… but response rates are lower. LinkedIn content still drives reach… but engagement feels inconsistent. SEO still brings traffic… but not always qualified leads like before.

It’s not that these channels stopped working completely. They just don’t work the same way anymore.”

Brutal.

What’s a marketer, founder, or business owner to do?

Let’s diagnose the problem.

Yes, the problem is the AI-induced super-saturation of marketing channels, as I explained above.

But the underlying problem is an error startups have been perpetuating for years, and it has only now reared its ugly head: startups have done nothing to differentiate themselves.

Startups, in particular, rely on growth marketing tactics: cold outbound (DMs, cold email), ads, social media, content marketing, newsletters, and more, and only later, almost as an afterthought, do they think about differentiating themselves.

The problem was always there, but B2B firms found ways to push through it.

Sending more outbound emails. Sending daily newsletters instead of weekly newsletters. Posting on Twitter three times a day instead of once. Spending more on ads.

SSU Studio, a boutique marketing agency, described it perfectly:

“Early-stage, you need a site fast. You look at what the category leaders look like. You reference a few shots. You pick a template that “looks legit” and move on to actually building the product. That decision feels rational at the moment.

Then you raise a round. The investor says the site looks fine, focus on GTM. So you do.

Then you hire your first marketer. They look at what the category leaders are doing. They optimize what exists instead of questioning whether the foundation is right. The patterns calcify.

By the time you are at $5M ARR and the brand is actively hurting your sales process, unwinding it feels expensive and risky. So you keep going.

The bland B2B SaaS brand is not a design failure. It is a prioritization failure that compounds over time.”

Did you notice the most damning line?

“Then you raise a round. The investor says the site looks fine, focus on GTM. So you do.”

Focus on GTM, differentiation be damned.

The AI-induced supersaturation has just compounded this lack of differentiation.

Your differentiation comes from inside you

The solution? I’m not going to give you the usual pablum everybody seems to be repeating everywhere: make your marketing “more human.”

Yes, it should be more human, but it should be human with a purpose.

In my upcoming book, Unopposed: Design a Personal Category Only You Can Own, I argue that founders should become the face of their startups - but they need to do this in a very particular way: they need to be known for One Unforgettable Idea.

What is The One Unforgettable Idea?

It is the single idea a founder owns so completely that they stop being compared and become their own category. It comes out of them rather than from an agency; it was there from the beginning, and everything their company is known for grows out of it.

The key to creating your One Unforgettable Idea is to find it within you: in your unconscious expertise. In the things you do so well it becomes instinct.

How to find your zone of genius

I’ve developed a method for uncovering that secret method, framework, or process you’ve developed over years and years as a professional, that you’re not consciously aware of.

I call it the Founder Excavation, and I lay out the method right here.

Informed by the field of cognitive psychology - a method called Applied Cognitive Task Analysis - or ACTA - the method identifies your zone of genius that you aren’t even aware you have.

But there is a problem

ACTA was designed to reveal how professionals perform a task. When applied to founders, it can only really apply to founders of services companies, like custom software development firms, accountants, management consultants, marketing agencies, solopreneurs.

But what if you’re the founder of a product company? What if the thing you deliver has value independent of you - the founder?

The process breaks down in that case.

But I came up with a solution.

There are three additional ways to differentiate yourself with your hidden zone of genius that have nothing to do with how you deliver a service.

Four places to dig for your hidden genius to cut through the supersaturation

Before I get into the four ways, let’s go over the questions.

The purpose of questions is to unveil knowledge you have deep in your bones, that you’re not consciously aware of.

Somebody - a colleague, an employee, even AI - shouldn’t come right out and ask you, “Tell me how you’re different.”

You’ll make something up!

However, these 14 questions should get to those lower layers of your consciousness to surface the wisdom you consider “instinct.”

The 14 questions of the excavation

These are the actual questions the applied cognitive task analysis discipline prescribes. They apply to the difficult work a professional performs by instinct:

Task Diagram Interview Questions

Goal: Get a macro-overview of the task, break it into steps, and identify which steps are cognitively difficult.

1. Step breakdown: “Can you walk me through the main steps of this task from start to finish?”

2. Identifying difficulty: “Which of these steps are the hardest or require the most judgment?”

3. Novice vs. expert gap: “Where do beginners or trainees usually struggle, make mistakes, or get stuck?”

4. Time and triggers: “What event or trigger signals that this task needs to begin, and how do you know when it is successfully finished?”

Knowledge Audit Interview Questions

Goal: Survey the expert’s toolkit and extract concrete examples of how they handle specific cognitive challenges.

5. Past incidents & cues: “Can you describe a time when you had to notice a subtle cue or warning sign that others might have missed? What was the cue?”

6. Perceptual skill: “What patterns, anomalies, or red flags do you look for that tell you something is going wrong?”

7. Procedure vs. improvisation: “When standard procedures don’t apply, how do you adapt or improvise?”

8. Costly errors: “What is a classic or dangerous mistake a novice might make here, and how do you prevent it?”

9. Mental models: “What critical piece of background knowledge or mental model do you rely on to make sense of a confusing situation?”

Simulation Interview Questions

Goal: Probe real-time decision-making, trade-offs, and strategies inside a high-stakes or complex scenario.

10. Scenario setup: “Imagine you are dealing with [insert a difficult, realistic scenario]. Walk me through what is going through your head right now.”

11. Prioritization: “You have multiple competing demands and limited time/resources. What do you address first, and what do you let slide? Why?”

12. Hypothesis generation: “When this key metric or indicator drops unexpectedly, what are the first two or three hypotheses you test?”

13. Uncertainty & incomplete data: “You don’t have all the information you need. What assumptions are you making, and how do you act safely with partial data?”

14. Recovery / Pivot: “Your first approach just failed. How do you re-frame the problem and pivot your strategy?”

Let’s apply these questions to the four founder scenarios

A services provider founder

If your company performs a service, like custom software development, marketing services, management consulting, or anything where a service is performed, use the 14 questions exactly as I laid out here.

A product founder with the product is the focus

Founders often overlook certain features inherent in the product. Use the following questions to get at the relevant differentiating feature:

• What’s a feature you consider obvious that customers are surprised or excited to discover?

• What happened that convinced you to build it that way?

• What did you notice about the customer’s problem that existing products weren’t addressing?

• If you removed that feature or capability, what would become harder for the customer?

A product founder with the sales process is the focus

Paul Graham, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist and startup philosopher, says founders should do the hard work of making the first sales.

The founder knows how to sell, and that knowledge could uncover gold:

• Tell me about a sales conversation where you realized the customer was asking for the wrong solution. What tipped you off?

• What question do you ask that reveals something important the customer hadn’t considered?

• Think of a prospect who initially didn’t see the value. What helped them understand it?

• When do you recognize that your product is the wrong fit, even though the prospect wants to buy?

A product founder where the founder’s worldview is the focus

When everything can be copied tomorrow by AI, or by a smart engineer in Shenzhen or Bengaluru, the only differentiator left is the founder’s world view, and the community you can attract because of that:

• What does your industry accept as normal that you find absurd?

• What experience led you to question that?

• Tell me about a product decision you insisted on even when others disagreed. Why did it matter so much to you?

• Where can a customer see or experience that belief in what your company actually delivers?

Let me tell you something: these questions work!

I just conducted an interview with the founder of a marketing agency, and he just let loose. I collected about 10,000 words worth of deep, detailed information about his process, stories of client scenarios, what he noticed that amateurs would get wrong.

Your next task is to turn these answers into a category you can own, and create your One Unforgettable Idea.

More on that next week!

I needed someone else to see it, too.

One cloudy day, I was having coffee with my friend Bryan Eisenberg in Round Rock, Texas.

I told him about my work: interviewing company founders and using AI to turn those conversations into content.

He thought about it for a couple of minutes. Then he said, “Viral Genius.”

I sat there stunned. “Okay…?”

Bryan explained that I was uncovering the founder’s hidden zone of genius and sharing it with the world. He had recognized something in my work that I hadn’t recognized or named myself.

You may have something like that in your own business.

A judgment call you make before the data tells you to. A shortcut you’ve worked out over years. Something you notice that a less experienced person walks straight past.

To you, it may be so obvious you’ve never thought to mention it.

But if buyers can’t see it, how are they supposed to choose you for it?

Start with what you actually do.

Ask a founder, “What makes you different?” and you’ll often get an opinion.

Ask about a specific decision - what they noticed, what they did, and where someone less experienced would have gone wrong - and you have something to work with.

That’s the purpose of a Founder Excavation.

In this guide, I walk you through:

• Four excavation questions that help bring overlooked expertise into the conversation.

• A four-step method drawn from cognitive science, with examples showing how to apply it to a founder’s work.

• The follow-up questions that get past “I just knew”, so you can identify the cues behind an expert decision.

• How an excavation becomes the starting point for One Unforgettable Idea, including the luxury realtor whose pricing approach we named Demand Surge.

You can use the questions with a peer or consultant to begin exploring your own experience. The guide helps you find material worth developing into a clearer reason for buyers to choose you.

The Founder Excavation is a free 25-page guide that shows you how to dig yours out.

In this guide, I walk you through:

• Four excavation questions that help bring overlooked expertise into the conversation.

• A four-step method drawn from cognitive science, with examples showing how to apply it to a founder’s work.

• The follow-up questions that get past “I just knew”, so you can identify the cues behind an expert decision.

• How an excavation becomes the starting point for One Unforgettable Idea, including the luxury realtor whose pricing approach we named Demand Surge.

You can use the questions with a peer or consultant to begin exploring your own experience. The guide helps you find material worth developing into a clearer reason for buyers to choose you.

Who it’s for: founders and company owners with real expertise who would rather build than self-promote.

About the author

Fernando Labastida is a marketing strategist, category designer, and author based in Austin, Texas. He coined the One Unforgettable Idea - the thing a founder does so naturally they’ve stopped noticing it’s rare - and founded the Viral Genius Institute to excavate it and build it into the brand that buyers, Google, and ChatGPT cite. He is the author of The Startup Book, The Viral Genius Playbook, and Nearshore Marketing.

In this edition:

1. This is the most confusing time in the age of AI

2. The 10 human in-person marketing tactics to try today

3. What I’m reading: The Compound Effect

4. News about my services: the spot was filled!

The news is awash in negative headlines about AI:

• A recent CNN poll says that 75% of Americans say they feel fear and concern about AI.

• Gallup said that 27% of workers now fear their job might disappear.

• The Tech Times said 225,000 tech workers were laid off since January because of AI.

But the AI models keep advancing at record speeds, with Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra able to reason and do more than we could have ever imagined.

We’re at this weird inflection point where more people want to learn AI, but more people are suspicious of AI.

AI has erased trust, so marketers are starting something old and new

It’s inescapable and inevitable: people don’t know what’s real or fake anymore.

Bryan Eisenberg, in a recent LinkedIn post, said:

“One prompt now makes anyone sound like they have decades of experience. Jeffrey and I started conversion optimization work in the late 1990s. A prompt can copy how I sound.”

And this is frustrating, because AI was supposed to be the great equalizer.

For those of us who didn’t have the time to write the deeply researched blog post, or film the 20-minute video, AI was a godsend.

Or was it?

Because you see, when the cost for doing something goes to zero, the value goes to zero as well.

Content used to be valuable because it took effort and original thinking.

But with the ease of a quick prompt, we can write a whole book, create a slick video, or compose a blues song about a lost love.

It’s time to stake your claim in the last un-polluted channel left

GaryVee is always encouraging his fans to flock to the next new social networking site so you can be the first one to stake your claim as a leading voice in that channel.

We’ve seen this happen with every major social network.

I remember the good old days when you could still go viral on Facebook by pasting a link to a blog post you’d written.

Can you imagine that? Pasting a link that goes viral!

But around 2014, Facebook’s algorithm started suppressing organic content so they could make money for their shareholders, and the land rush was officially dead.

Then people started rushing to LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Google Plus (RIP), ClubHouse (RIP), TikTok, Threads, BlueSky, Twitter/X (again).

All saturated. Al ruined by marketers.

But there is one channel left...

In-person human marketing is the next unclaimed marketing channel

In-person workshops. Chamber of commerce meetings. Physical events. One-on-one meetings at your local country club: these are all making a come-back…with a vengeance.

And they’re starting to become popular because they have trust built into them.

You can see, hear, touch the people at your local networking event. You know they’re not a HeyGen YouTube avatar.

The 10 human, in-person marketing tactics to try today

So what are these 10-in person, human marketing tactics?

I. Get in the room

1. Become the most useful person at your local chamber.

This is the move invented by Bryan Eisenberg, the Godfather of conversion rate optimization. He’s at every ribbon cutting. He helps organize events. He advises companies on their marketing strategies. He’s become the de facto “mayor” of the Round Rock chamber of commerce.

2. Hold court where your buyers already pay to be.

My friend Jenaro “Jedi” Diaz, founder of AI startup Smarts.AI, holds court at Great Hills Country Club in Austin. The brilliance of this move: the successful local business owners are all members there. He has a built-in audience to do one-on-ones with.

3. Take the speaking slots in the towns nobody’s working.

This is another Jenaro tactic. He’s joined all the local chambers of commerce in the bedroom communities north of Austin. Just the other day I saw him on an AI startup panel in Pflugerville. Not SXSW. Pflugerville!

4. Volunteer where there’s nothing in it for you.

Volunteer at your local accelerator in the historically disadvantaged part of town. There is a LOT of entrepreneurial activity there. I did this for years at EGBI in East Austin, and every city has an organization like this.

II. Make it a habit, not an event

5. Run a recurring workshop at the quiet hour nobody competes for.

Chrissy McDannell, founder of boutique M&A advisory The Magnola Firm, holds the AI Implementation Club every Sunday at Antler VC in downtown Austin.

For two to three hours Chrissy teaches 8-10 solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, moms and students how to build AI agents, workflows and skills.

Sundays are quiet. No emails, no clients, no team. People are out by four in time to plan for Monday.

6. Start a local podcast and interview local people.

Bryan Eisenberg makes another appearance here. He started the Rock Solid Round Rock podcast to interview local luminaries, Council members, new business owners, nonprofit people. These are the people in your neighborhood. You know who they are. HeyGen can’t fake this.

7. Invite eight people by name. Never a post.

This isn’t really a tactic so much as a mindset you can apply to most of the tactics here: invite up to eight people to your workshop, event, to a one-on-one.

Don’t do email marketing to them. Don’t post it on social media. Just invite them!

III. Make it travel

8. Put a camera on the in-person thing.

When Bryan Funk was VP of Marketing at Virtuous CRM, he flew real thought leaders into Virtuous’ swanky warehouse offices where they had built two stages, hired a film crew, and held a series of virtual summits with in-person speakers streamed live to an in-home audience.

But you don’t have to organize a whole summit. If you’re already speaking at the chamber, add a camera and stream it to your YouTube channel.

9. Turn your brain into a product, after the room proves it works.

Dana Snyder, founder of Positive Equation, turned her twenty years in nonprofit fundraising into a proprietary continuous fundraising concept (this is an example of her inventing her own personal category). Then she started advising large nonprofits how to implement continuous fundraising.

She then wrote a book, started a podcast, and started noticing something: the majority of nonprofits were small, ma-and-pa organizations who could never afford her.

After proving her model with large nonprofits, she created DanaGPT, trained it on her book and podcast transcripts, and now smaller nonprofits get access to her “brain” for only $50 a month,

10. Convene the whole thing yourself.

This is frankly the hardest one, and maybe proves I’m a bit of a masochist. I organized a whole conference, with my friends at Rogue Media Network, to gather local Waco businesses to learn about AI at the YouXAI Summit.

This is not something you do every quarter, but it puts real people together into a trusting environment to learn something that felt really hard from a distance.

Your homework for next week

Choose one of these ten tactics, and put something on the calendar.

Drop me a line here (reply to this email, or comment below on the article). I want to hear what human, in-person marketing you’re doing!

What I’m reading today: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

This book is an oldy but goody, and it was inspired by a Substack newsletter edition from Tim Denning, the straight-talking Australian business coach and founder of Modern Freedom.

The email that f#$%ed with my mind

I started subscribing to Tim’s newsletter back in May, but as always happens, I subscribe to something, read a few issues, then ignore it.

But this email caught my attention, because the subject line was so provocative:

“Your entire life changes when you realize 99% of society is stupid.” (You can read it here).

And the section that stopped me cold in my tracks:

Every goal or how-to in any field boils down to the cookie-cutter basics of self-improvement that are so cliche at this point in history that I feel disgusting and like I need to have a shower for sharing them here with you.

For humans to NOT be lazy & stupid and get stuff done, they must: make their goals daily habits, have the right mindset (optimism), record their results, hang around others with similar goals, take action daily, and learn from those who have already achieved a similar goal. There you go… that’s my Jim Rohn speech from 1970.

It’s so simple yet no one does it.

I started ruminating on what he said there, because he’s right. It’s so cliche, so basic. Every successful person does it, yet so few people do it.

I asked ChatGPT what book it would recommend for this kind of stuff…you know, to just remind me of the basics. And it recommended a book I already had in my Kindle library: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.

Darren Hardy was raised by a single dad. He remembers waking up to the sounds of clanging barbells because his dad was pumping iron in the garage at 6 in the morning.

He had a long list of chores to do when he got home from school. No time to chill on the couch and watch Batman & Robin.

Darren was mentored personally by Jim Rohn, and then he started Success Magazine to study the success habits of the most outstanding business leaders.

To say Darren embodies the basic success principles is an understatement.

And his book is brilliant in its simplicity.

Everybody should read it if you want to adopt the daily habits that will compound over time and make you a roaring succes.

The Spot Was Filled

A quick note about the last few emails about my consulting opening: the spot was filled. If you’re still interested in learning more, I’ll be happy to meet with you.

See you next week!

Best,

Fernando Labastida

Viral Genius Institute

I recently organized my first in-person conference in 15 years.

When I analyzed the source of actual ticket sales, social media came in at about 10%, but promotion via email newsletters accounted for more than 50% of sales.

Email is the best event promotion tool. Here’s why

When I was organizing the YouXAI Summit, I looked for any and all ways to drive ticket sales.

I got the speakers to promote it to their audience. I reached out to chambers of commerce. I reached out to newsletter owners.

When I looked at the tracking codes, the winner by far were the newsletters.

There wasn’t even a comparison.

Why is this? And why does social media suck when it comes to event promotion?

Email is the best promotion tool because subscribers choose to be subscribed

Due to CAN-SPAM rules, the EU ePrivacy directive, and just the nature of email marketing, if you’re subscribed to a newsletter, it’s because you chose to be subscribed.

But even before all the privacy laws, it’s just the nature of email marketing.

From his classic marketing book, “Permission Marketing,” the marketing book which set the stage for digital marketing as we know it today, Seth Godin talked about permission marketing as the antidote to interruption marketing.

The key quote from the book:

“Permission marketing is the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want them.”

Social media on the other hand is now no longer social media, if you didn’t already know that. It’s interest media.

That’s why you aren’t seeing all your friends’, cousins’, and neighbors’ posts anymore. You’re seeing posts that fall in line with your interests, tastes, and world view.

Social media is algorithmic and your connections are weak

That was a mouthful, wasn’t it?

GaryVee, back in 2024, said:

“We don’t even live in social media anymore. We now live in interest media. Doesn’t matter how many followers you have.

But what if your audience happens to see your event post? Probably a big “meh.” You see, your ties on social media are weak.

Mark Schaefer says, “In my classes, I explain that a social media audience represents ‘weak relational links.; What I mean by this is that a “like” or even a “follow” correlates to almost zero actual emotional connection to a brand or a business.”

What does that mean for you and your event promotion plan?

If your speakers or promotional partners say, “Hey, I’ll post about it three times on social media!”, tell them, “Em, can you actually send this to your newsletter subscribers instead?”

Only 5-6% of your social media audience will actually see your posts

After auditing 5,300 LinkedIn posts comparing impressions directly to total follower counts, the median organic reach was found to be 5.5%, according to The Shield Index.

“But how many of your newsletter subscribers will see your emails?” you might retort.

Glad you asked. Average email open rates vary between 29.81% and 40.04%, depending on the industry, according to MailChimp.

And email subscribers trust what they see in their newsletters far more than they trust what they on social media.

Here’s how to use email to fill your event

Ok this is all well and good, but how do you use email?

Here’s my quick and dirty four part guide for using email as a promotional strategy for your conference, meetup, summit or unconference.

1. Partner with a media partner that targets your niche or target audience

Notice the word “partner” there. I didn’t use that word casually.

Actually partner with somebody who will be your promotional partner.

My good friend Adria Munoz, a serial conference organizer (he organizes conferences across Latin America and Spain) told me that having a media partner is key to filling out his events.

And we’ve got to trust Adria, since he’s filling out events in Bogota, Santiago Chile, Mexico City, and Barcelona.

When I organized the AI Smart Summit, I partnered with CANACINTRA - Mexico’s national chamber of commerce for manufacturing companies.

Miguel Pirez, the Director of Events at CANACINTRA, said, “If we’re going to partner, we need you to put a large version of our logo on your event website.”

My client and I said, “Yes!” Why were we so easy to give away credit for organizing our 3-day virtual summit?

Because of CANACINTRA’s 52,000 manufacturing companies across Mexico.

And thanks to Miguel, CANACINTRA promoted the AI Smart Summit to the national email list, and the different email lists of every chapter, plus the WhatsApp groups for each chapter as well (more on groups like WhatsApp and Slack below).

For the YouXAI Summit in Waco, we partnered with The Waco Buzz, a three-times weekly newsletter that informs local Wacoans about events, restaurants, charities, and goings on around town.

I partnered with The Waco Buzz. The owner, Sam Harper, didn’t just copy and paste the templated event promotion text I gave him. He actively participated in helping write the copy.

2. Get the active participation of the founder / owner / leader

Whether you partner with a niche newsletter, a local newsletter, or an industry association that has your perfect audience, don’t just send them them a template for them to copy and paste.

Get the owner to actively participate in copywriting the ad for you.

And if you have a choice between just an image ad or a native ad, choose a native ad.

What’s a native ad?

A native ad is a newsletter article written in the same voice, tone and style of the regular newsletter articles, but you pay to have the newsletter operator write it.

This is an advantage for three reasons:

1. Newsletter subscribers are used to reading the newsletter in the voice, tone and style they receive everyday (or every week) in their inbox. A native ad does not interrupt that pattern, but blends with it.

2. Newsletter subscribers trust the recommendation of the newsletter, and by placing a native ad, the owner is putting her stamp of approval on your event.

3. Most of the time, the newsletter operator is a professional copywriter, and knows how to word the native ad in a way that’s most advantageous to your event.

3. Pay for newsletter distribution, but you can swing other deals by making them sponsors

When I organized the Strike Marketing Summit, more than half of my 416 registered attendees were from the two email sends from the Copyblogger newsletter. I spent a lot of money (for me) to make this happen.

And Tim Stoddart, Copyblogger’s owner at the time, wrote the copy for my two native ads.

If you don’t know anything about Tim Stoddart, he’s a master copywriter, and has built an eight figure business through content.

But I also convinced three other organizations to promote my event for free, in their newsletters.

How did I do that? I made them sponsors.

Here’s a screenshot of one of the sessions of my Strike Marketing Summit. Most of the logos on there were promotional sponsors that emailed their subscribers in exchange to being listed a a sponsor.

4. WhatsApp groups, slack groups, or other groups are good as well.

When I was promoting the AI Smart Summit, not only did CANACINTRA supplement their email promotion with WhatsApp group promotion, but one of my speakers promoted the summit to about 6 or 7 groups he manages.

WhatsApp groups, Slack groups, and other kinds of groups share similar characteristics to email newsletters:

• The participants chose to be there

• They trust the recommendations of the moderators.

So am I saying, “Don’t post your event on social media?” Not at all, go ahead and do it.

The secret I didn’t mention earlier, is that when everybody - your speakers, your team, and other promotional partners - share about your event on social media, you create this cascading effect that makes it look like you’re everywhere.

And you never know who might show up because of some popular person sharing on their Facebook account.

That was the case with one of our speakers at the YouXAI Summit. A popular Baylor Professor shared about our event twice, and she drive quite a few sign-ups.

Granted, her students idolize her, and she’s also a popular speaker at local events. Not all of us have her level of influencer with our followers.

And a funny story: I was promoting videos and posts from interviews I did with the speakers of the AI Smart Summit.

This is another promotional secret: interview your speakers before the event, and use the video and transcript as a “teaser” to potential event participants to excite them about the conference or summit.

I was promoting interview videos from my client’s LinkedIn profile as a ghost-writer, when suddenly an old middle school friend of my client came out of the woodwork, saw all the hoopla about the event, and then offered to promote the event to his 2500 subscribers.

So social media could even lead you to email promotions!

So the bottom line: use everything at your disposal to promote your event, but don’t rely on social media.

Partner with a newsletter operator or an industry association, like a chamber of commerce.

And make sure the owner/operator of the newsletter gets actively involved in the copywriting of the event.

Tell me about your experience promoting your event! How did you do it, what was your best tactic and channel!

See you next week!

Best,

Fernando A. Labastida

Tel/WhatsApp: +1 (512) 945-9273

My talk at the YouXAI Summit (the conference I organized last Saturday) was minimally about AI - it was more about how you can become known for something ONLY YOU can be known for.

And it all starts out with: what does AI say about you?

• Does it say what you want it to say?

• Are you distinctive and do you stand out from the crowd?

• Do you have a Google knowledge panel?

Ok that’s great.

But it sounds like an exercise in vanity metrics.

So what if ChatGPT can cite you correctly?

Who cares if Gemini says you’re “...a marketing strategist, category designer, author, and entrepreneur based in Austin, Texas…” as it says about me?

Good question, and I’ll answer it now…

Become known for one unforgettable idea

I don’t think I have to tell you, we’re living in the AI age (how ridiculous to say this), and our timelines are flooded with AI slop.

A speaker at the YouXAI Summit said, “People want something that’s authentic…we don’t know what’s real or not.”

And there’s the answer. You, with 30 years of experience and expertise, are getting drowned out by the AI content flood (and the thousands of people becoming “influencers” everyday).

It’s “content shock” to the 100th degree (Mark Schaefer was prescient when he wrote that blog posts in 2014).

So how can you get seen, stand out, become known for something that only you can become known for?

The founder excavation

You’ve probably forgotten more than all the Gen Z founders founding AI companies today.

But they’re getting all the attention.

So how do you get all your experience, knowledge, wisdom, insights, hidden genius, out into the open and get it to spread like wildfire?

Through a founder excavation.

What is a founder excavation? It’s a type of applied cognitive task analysis, which is a fancy way to say a strategic interview that excavates your hidden genius, which will become your unique methodology, framework, model or category.

Get somebody in your company, a consultant or even AI (Claude Fable and ChatGPT Astra are so good I bet they could figure it out) to interview to uncover your tacit strategic knowledge. That’s the knowledge that makes you an expert, but you’re unaware of it.

It’s unconscious to you.

This methodology was perfected in a model called Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), which requires hundreds of hours of courses and certifications.

But there was a new version created called Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA), which didn’t require advanced studies or certifications.

People in the field could interview long-time experts about how they do something to extract that tacit knowledge they have.

And that tacit knowledge is the most valuable knowledge an expert has.

Think about how a nurse can instantly find the right vein to insert an IV, or how a fire fighter can know - as if by pure instinct - when a floor is going to collapse in a house engulfed by flames.

When asked to teach a class about how they found that elusive vein, or how they knew the floor would collapse, they couldn’t tell you!

But an applied-cognitive task analysis interview can.

For example, an interviewer would ask the fire fighter to walk him through a recent scenario where he saved people from death by getting them out of the 2nd floor of a house that was about to collapse.

The fire-fighter would walk the interviewer through their thoughts, feelings, actions, and the cues they noticed.

And the skilled interviewer would note the patterns in the reply and turn that into the methodology that can later be taught to new practitioners.

Coin the term

The result of an applied cognitive interview on a founder (the founder excavation) can be turned into a:

• New category

• Model

• Framework

• Methodology

Out of all those, I like designing a new category the best, because that way you can eliminate your competition.

That tacit knowledge, made explicit, can become a unique way of doing something in your industry that differentiates you from the competition.

But you have to give it a name.

Jason Barnard coined the term Brand SERP to describe a Google Knowledge Panel for the personal brand of a founder.

Joe Pulizzi took the term “content marketing,” a term coined in 1996 by a journalist, and used it to describe a method of marketing that uses valuable, educational content to increase the authority and credibility of the person or company publishing said content.

My buddy Chris Stanley took a concept - Mini-Books - and applied it to an effective methodology he discovered during his insurance adjuster certification business as a way elevate and differentiate himself into the only educator in the space people would even consider.

You can see examples like these all over the place.

By coining terms (or taking forgotten coined terms and elevating them) to describe your new category or framework, you become the only provider on the planet that does what you do.

Your entity home

This next part is where AI comes in.

You want the AI engines, as well as Google - another AI engine - to cite you when people are asking how to solve their problems.

Create a personal website for you. Jason Barnard calls this your “Entity Home.”

Have it be something like “yourname.com”. I have labastida.com.

Then on the About page (e.g. https://labastida.com/about), describe yourself as the person who coined the term you coined, which solve the problem your framework solves.

Mine says:

Fernando Labastida is a marketing strategist, category designer, and author based in Austin, Texas. He coined the One Unforgettable Idea — the thing a founder does so naturally they’ve stopped noticing it’s rare — and founded the Viral Genius Institute to excavate it and build it into the brand that buyers, Google, and ChatGPT cite. He is the author of The Startup Book, The Viral Genius Playbook, and Nearshore Marketing.

The “One Unforgettable Idea” is my coined term. I will use this description on my “about” page, all over my social profiles, and in speaker and podcast description pages.

Make sure to use schema markup on your website. This tells the search engines and the various AI models what each part of your website is:

For a description of you - your biography - the schema markup is:

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “Person”, “name”: “Alex Morgan”, “description”: “Alex Morgan is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of three historical non-fiction books, focusing on 20th-century geopolitical shifts.”, “url”: “https://example.com”, “mainEntityOfPage”: “https://example.com”, “image”: “https://example.com”, “birthDate”: “1985-05-12”, “birthPlace”: { “@type”: “Place”, “name”: “Boston, MA” }, “jobTitle”: “Investigative Journalist”, “worksFor”: {

Where “@type”: “Person”, is the designation of you as an “entity.”

Your framework, methodology, or category is also an “entity.” The schema markup for this describes it as a “term.”:

{

“@context”: “https://schema.org”,

“@type”: “DefinedTerm”,

“@id”: “https://example.com”,

“name”: “The Agile Growth Framework”,

“description”: “A proprietary 4-stage business optimization methodology focusing on rapid iteration and cross-departmental alignment.”,

“inDefinedTermSet”: {

“@type”: “DefinedTermSet”,

“name”: “Corporate Optimization Frameworks”,

“url”: “https://example.com”

}

}

Note where it says “@type”: DefinedTermSet”,

And then underneath that: “name”: “Corporate Optimization Frameworks”,

That’s a made-up framework, obviously, but using this type of code on your entity home - your personal website - tells Google and the AIs that you are a person, with a biography, who named a coined term, which describes a framework.

Complex, I know, but this is another use for AI.

The models today can build you a personal website - your entity home - with the required schema markup, if you tell it to.

This becomes the canonical description of who you are.

Use your website to point to all the instances of you on 3rd party sites: author profiles, podcasts websites, conference websites.

This way you’re telling the engines: “this is me, this is how I want to be known, and these are all the instances of me all over the web”

Get the word out about you and your one unforgettable idea

It’s all fine and good to write about yourself on your own website, but where the real credibility comes in is when 3rd party sites mention you.

Write a book

I know, very “thought leader-ish.” But the book has been around for thousands of years, and it’ll be around for thousands of years more (maybe we’ll be living in climate controlled bubbles by then).

Encapsulate your new category or framework (your one unforgettable idea) so that your book becomes the manifesto for your idea.

I talk about this in detail in The Startup Book.

Become a guest on podcasts

This becomes your idea / book tour. You’re promoting your new category or framework, and your book as the vehicle to spread your idea.

There are millions of podcasts, and there are probably at least a dozen if not a hundred podcasts in your space, serving your ideal audience.

Get on the speaking circuit

Joe Pulizzi talks about the concept of “Platform. Speaking. Book.” (that hyperlink leads to a video of a livestream Joe did for me).

He says speaking is one of the three essential parts of what you need to get known as an expert in your niche. I’m just taking his model and repeating it here.

Again, this is where AI can help as well. I’m using a Claude Skill called “1000 rejections.”

My friend Victoria Westcott designed this skill so that Claude can find podcasts, speaking engagements, awards, and other things you can apply for.

I’m using it to find podcasts and conferences I can apply to so I can get the word out.

Eliminate the competition: design your personal category

The logical conclusion of everything I’ve talked about in this newsletter:

If you want to eliminate your category - if you want to be unopposed - design your personal category.

1. Perform an audit of yourself on un-logged in, incognito versions of the AIs to see what they say about you.

2. Become known for one unforgettable idea. This could potentially become your personal category (more on category design in another newsletter).

3. To find your one unforgettable idea, have somebody (or AI) perform a founder excavation, by applying the principles of applied cognitive task analysis to find your hidden genius that can be turned into a model, framework, or category.

4. Build your entity home - your personal website - and on the about page, write the canonical description of who you are, what your one unforgettable idea is, and what problem you solve and for whom

5. Get the word out about your one unforgettable idea. Your one unforgettable idea will become your new category - your personal category - to solve a problem for a specific audience.

If you’re serious about standing out, branding your company, and succeeding in the current era dominated by AI slop, this is the way to go!

If you want help with this, book a call with me here.

See you next week!

- Fernando Labastida

I’m sitting here at my desk on Thursday morning the 10th of September, at 9:11 AM, two days before the You x AI = Unstoppable Summit.

Staring at the speaker page with 25 amazing speakers.

And then I’ve got the MAICON conference on another tab.

Do you know what MAICON is? It’s only the most prestigious AI conference in the world.

They’re featuring 32 speakers Oct. 13-15 in Cleveland Ohio. Ticket prices range from $1999 to $2899 per person.

Am I comparing the YouXAI summit, to be held in Waco this Saturday, to the reference conference in the industry?

Why yes, I am.

And I’m totally amazed at what we’ve put together.

25 speakers, ranging from

• marketing thought leaders

• to AI startup founders

• to small business owners who have figured out how to 100X themselves with AI

• to major academics who study and research this stuff.

All for only $99.

And as my eyes dart back and forth between the YouXAI page and the MAICON page, I dare to believe that our David can compete with the MAICON Goliath.

What does this mean for you

If you live in:

Austin, San Antonio, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Buda, Kyle, Round Rock, Cedar Park Killeen, Leander, Temple, Bellton, West, and all points in between (or even Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mexico, Lubbock, Amarillo, New Mexico, etc.),

…you should make an effort to come to Waco this Saturday.

This is is a truly unique opportunity to learn how to automate your marketing, build your agentic AI workforce, create your own SaaS, expand your reach….or even just use AI for something simple like planning your book.

Overview of the speakers

Here’s a quick overview of the speakers and sessions:

Bryan Eisenberg, the OG of digital marketing, opens at 8:20 AM

Bryan Eisenberg, who thirty years ago coined the term ‘conversion rate optimization’ (a term digital marketers use in their day-to-day), will open with the speech, “Before the Algorithm, There Was Your Story. That Hasn’t Changed”. Bryan said, “[People] buy stories they can see themselves in. AI didn’t change that. It just removed the friction standing between the story you have and the person who needs to hear it.” In this session you’ll learn exactly where that line sits. What AI can carry for you, and what it can never decide on your behalf. You’ll leave knowing how to use AI to get your story found, understood and chosen faster, without losing the thing that made it worth telling in the first place. View the interview with Bryan here.

Jermaine Malcolm, Waco’s skills-gap builder, on the Main Stage at 9:05 AM

Jermaine Malcolm, CEO of Skills Gap Advocate, has helped more than 500 builders and partners turn ideas into real programs and businesses. His session is “Mine Your Business - Find Money in Your Daily Work With AI”. Jermaine said, “It doesn’t feel like you’re building something new. It actually feels like you’re building you.” Most small business owners are sitting on revenue they don’t know they have. Jermaine will walk you through a three-step audit of the skills, knowledge and daily work you already do, and show you how to use AI to package, price and sell it faster. It’s built on a real story of $70K generated in year one of using AI. You’ll fill out the audit during the session and walk out with a money-making idea tied to what you already know, plus your next step. No technical background required. View the interview with Jermaine here.

Kennisha Thornton, KWTX News producer and storyteller, in Room 1 at 9:05 AM

Kennisha Thornton is the founder of Create & Blossom, host of the podcast Beneath the Surface, and a KWTX News producer with nearly 20 years of experience. Her session is “The Human Story in an AI World”. Kennisha said, “My AI probably knows me like the back of its hand. I’ve groomed it to know how I think.” She’ll share real examples from journalism, publishing, branding and podcasting. You’ll learn practical ways to use AI to create content faster while keeping the human connection that makes a story worth hearing. View the interview with Kennisha here.

Bonnie Caver, global voice on responsible AI, in Room 2 at 9:05 AM

Bonnie Caver is the founder and CEO of Reputation Lighthouse, where she advises boards, CEOs and leadership teams on trust and reputation. She leads the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management’s Responsible AI Guiding Principles, the only global responsible AI guidelines written for an industry. Her session is “Rethink AI: A Leadership Framework for Responsible AI Implementation”. Bonnie created the Responsible AI Implementation Compass and is the author of the forthcoming book Reputation Currency: Creating Enterprise Value in a World Powered by AI. If you lead a team, this is the session on putting AI to work responsibly, from the person who leads her industry’s global guidelines on it.

Tim Hayden, CEO of BrainTrust Partners, on the Main Stage at 9:50 AM

Tim Hayden is CEO of BrainTrust Partners and our title sponsor. He has spent a decade helping brands grow revenue with first-party data, machine learning and applied AI, and he has led change inside companies like Ford, Dell, McDonald’s, Hilton and Walmart. His session is “Your Data, Your AI, and Your Future...”. Tim says that as of February 2026, more than half of all internet traffic is coming from AI agents. In this session you’ll learn how the data you’ve collected over the past two decades can become your ticket to customer and business intelligence. He’ll also cover how you can influence what the big AI models say about your brand and your competitors, and the laws and rules you’ll have to navigate along the way.

Sara Lohse, award-winning podcast producer, in Room 1 at 9:50 AM

Sara Lohse, founder of Branded Media, is a Signal Award-winning podcast producer and the author of Open This Book: The Art of Storytelling for Aspiring Thought Leaders. Her session is “Unpromptable: Using Your Story to Stand Out and Connect”. Sara said, “You can get anything from Google, you can get anything from ChatGPT, but you can’t get somebody’s story.” She’ll give you two frameworks. The first builds a three-part origin story that tells people who you are and why you do what you do. The second uncovers the “little stories” hiding in everyday moments that make your message memorable. You’ll leave knowing how to find the stories only you can tell, and how to use AI to strengthen them without losing what makes them yours. View the interview with Sara here.

Joseph Scaramucci, retired detective, in Room 2 at 9:50 AM

Joseph Scaramucci is a retired Sheriff’s Office detective and HSI Task Force Officer. Today he’s Director of Law Enforcement Training and Operations for Skull Games Solutions, and he has trained more than 800 agencies across 45 states. His session is “AI, Crime & Community: What You Need to Know”. Joseph said, “The AI’s not bad. The human eyes weren’t put on it and confirmed this. That’s the problem. The AI just sped the process up.” You’ll learn how law enforcement, criminals and everyday citizens are all using AI right now, and what it means for the safety of your community. View the interview with Joseph here.

Tommy Landry, AI visibility expert, on the Main Stage at 11:00 AM

Tommy Landry, founder and president of Return On Now, has more than 30 years in marketing and business strategy. He’s the author of seven books, including From SEO to AEO to GEO. His session is “The Signals That Shape What AI Says About You”. Tommy said, “AI can be amazing in the right hands, but the hands have to be there.” He’ll show you how AI uses signals to form a picture of your business, and why consistency matters, from your internal decisions to your public content. He’ll explain his Human + AI Framework (HAIF), AEO and GEO in plain English. Then he’ll give you five practical actions you can take the very next day. View the interview with Tommy here.

Dr. Mito Diaz-Espinoza, CEO of the Cen-Tex Hispanic Chamber, in Room 1 at 11:00 AM

Dr. Mito Diaz-Espinoza is President and CEO of the Cen-Tex Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. He’s a Waco native who spent more than 20 years in higher education. His session is “From the Pen to the Prompt: Making AI Work for You”. Mito will take you from pens and typewriters to telegraphs, telephones, computers and smartphones, and show you AI as the next step in that same line. Then he’ll show you how to build a personal AI system that understands your goals, your preferences and the way you work. You’ll leave with practical ideas for moving past one-off prompts to an AI that’s actually useful in your work and your daily life.

Katie Selman-Green and April Leman, hands-on workshop, in Room 2 at 11:00 AM

Katie Selman-Green is a Talent Partner at Muck Rack who builds AI tools and workflows, then gets teams to adopt them. April Leman, owner of April Leman Consulting in Waco, is a communications and marketing strategist with more than 15 years across health systems, the public sector and SaaS. Their workshop is “Dangerously Skip Permissions: A hands-on workshop to leverage AI for maximum output”. Katie and April said, “Most people are using 10% of what AI can actually do for them. This hour fixes that.” Bring your laptop. You’ll leave with a workflow that saves you time, built with skills, Cowork and real automation. It’s an intermediate session, and some prompting experience helps. And neither of them codes for a living.

Dariia Isyk and SJ Juraboeva, Baylor student founders, on the Main Stage at 11:45 AM

Dariia Isyk and SJ Juraboeva are Baylor University students and co-founders of AdmitAI, an AI-powered admissions mentor that has grown to hundreds of daily users. Their session is “Beating Admission Inflation: How We Built an AI Mentor for Every Student”. SJ said, “In the world of AI, we can learn anything from zero, or create anything we want from zero. The only thing we need is an idea.” They’ll walk you through how two students with no engineering background shipped a working AI product that matches students to universities, gives feedback on essays and surfaces scholarships. You’ll also hear what they learned about the admissions crisis, and why they think AI is one of the only ways to bring the cost of good guidance down. View the interview with Dariia and SJ here.

Dr. Renee Blackshear, TSTC professor, in Room 1 at 11:45 AM

Dr. Renee Blackshear is a professor at Texas State Technical College. She builds workforce training programs across information technology, advanced manufacturing, industrial automation and business. Her session is “AI Across Industries: Transforming Work, Skills & Innovation”. She’ll cover practical AI uses in manufacturing, healthcare, education, IT, business, transportation and more, and how AI is changing the skills people need at work. You’ll leave with practical strategies and an AI Integration Action Plan you can put to work right away.

Mike Hamilton, founder of Rogue Media Network, in Room 2 at 11:45 AM

Mike Hamilton is the founder of Rogue Media Network, Waco’s creator economy infrastructure company, and my co-producer on this summit. His session is “AI for People Who Remember Dial-Up”. If you remember the sound of a dial-up modem, this session is for you. View Mike and me talking about bringing YouXAI to Waco here.

Liz Fraley, Baylor Law professor, on the Main Stage at 1:40 PM

Liz Fraley spent 30 years as a defense lawyer before moving to Baylor Law School, where she became the first woman in 100 years to teach in the Practice Court program. She took over as its Director in 2025. She also chairs the AI committee for ABOTA, the American Board of Trial Advocates. Her session is “The Human Is Still on the Hook: Using AI Without Outsourcing Judgment, Ethics or Trust”. Generative AI seems to offer free legal advice. But no AI tool can promise accurate advice, and every tool talks as if it’s always right. You’ll learn when AI can help you with a legal question, and when you need a human being who is legally and ethically accountable.

D. Scott Smith and Mark Senefsky, AI-first builders, in Room 1 at 1:40 PM

D. Scott Smith hosts The WACO Experience, An American Story on KBBW and is a co-founder of Present Gifting. Mark Senefsky spent 30 years building digital solutions for businesses, then rebuilt his firm, MODEFORGE, around AI. Their session is “Build an AI-First Company”. AI is excellent at smart automation. So what else can it do? Scott and Mark will explore how to build an AI-first company, using PresentGifting.com as their case study.

Andrew Lane, founder of Brand Builder Pros, on the Main Stage at 2:25 PM

Andrew Lane has spent 15 years building online brands and business systems. He has done more than $5M in his own digital product sales, served more than 50,000 entrepreneurs, and helped Copy.ai scale from 28K to 10 million users. His session is “Build Your Brand with AI”. Most entrepreneurs are too busy to build a system, so they keep improvising. Andrew said, “AI just gives them a faster way to improvise. Instead of leverage, they get faster chaos.” He says the entrepreneurs who are winning with AI have a clear brand, a content system and a strategy in place. Watch my interview with Andrew Lane.

Me, in Room 1 at 2:25 PM

I’m speaking too. My session is “Uncovering Your Unique Genius: The Key to AI Visibility”. AI made average free, so competent content stopped working. Buyers tune out the slop. And the same thing is now true of the machines. An AI engine recommends you only when it can’t make the point without you. I’ll run real businesses through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and show you what the engines know, what they get wrong, and who wins instead. Then I’ll walk you through how I find the one unforgettable idea a founder has spent years developing without noticing, and how to turn it into the thing AI cites. View Mike and me talking about bringing YouXAI to Waco here.

Sam Harper, founder of The Waco Buzz, in Room 2 at 2:25 PM

Sam Harper started The Waco Buzz as a simple email to friends. Today it’s a newsletter reaching more than 15,000 local subscribers, plus a growing events community. His workshop is “Building Out Loud”. Sam said, “A lever could get pulled, the algorithm changes, and all of your revenue could be gone overnight.” He’ll share the lessons he learned building The Waco Buzz from zero into a trusted local brand. You’ll learn how to find your audience, create content that earns attention, build trust before you ask for a sale, and turn followers into customers and advocates. View the interview with Sam here.

Journalism Round Table with J.B. Smith, D. Scott Smith and Sam Harper, on the Main Stage at 3:25 PM

J.B. Smith is editor-in-chief of The Waco Bridge. He has spent 33 years in Texas journalism, 27 of them at the Waco Tribune-Herald, and his reporting has won statewide recognition, including a Headliners award. He joins D. Scott Smith and Sam Harper on the Main Stage for the Journalism Round Table.

Jackye Clayton, founder of PeoplePuzzles, in Room 1 at 3:25 PM

Jackye Clayton is the founder of PeoplePuzzles and has more than 20 years in HR technology, AI and talent strategy. Her session is “From Pizza Prompt to Practical AI”. Jackye said, “It will just help you do exactly what you’re asking it to do.” She’ll start with something familiar, a vague prompt for the perfect pizza crust. Then she’ll turn it into a reusable AI workflow that asks better questions, works within real limits, creates a plan, identifies assumptions and improves from human feedback. She’ll connect the same method to tools she’s built, like Momager and Who Do I Work For? You’ll leave knowing AI isn’t magic, and it isn’t just for technical people. View the interview with Jackye here.

Chrissy McDannell, founder of The AI Implementation Club, in Room 2 at 3:25 PM

Chrissy McDannell hosts The AI Implementation Club, a weekly in-person build session in Austin. She also runs The Magnolia Firm, an M&A brokerage for tech companies. Her workshop is “Build an AI Assistant”. Chrissy said, “Everybody was talking about AI, learning AI, talking, learning, but nobody was doing AI.” So bring your laptop, because you’re going to build. You’ll walk out with an AI that knows your priorities and projects, one real workflow saved as a reusable skill, an AI that triages your email and drafts replies in your voice (you still hit send), a morning brief of your day, and more. If you’ve used Claude Cowork at least once, you’re ready. View the interview with Chrissy here.

Dr. Hope Koch closes the day on the Main Stage at 4:10 PM

Dr. Hope Koch holds the Godfrey Sullivan Endowed Chair of Information Systems and Business Analytics at Baylor University. In 2026 the Lieutenant Governor of Texas appointed her to the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council. Her closing keynote is “Human Opportunity and a Period of Exponential Change”. Yes, that spells HOPE. Hope said, “A person plus AI can do so much better than AI by itself, or so much better than two people by themselves.” Through research, stories and practical examples, she’ll show why AI won’t replace what’s most valuable about you, your experience or your business. It can amplify it. She’ll also show how people without technical backgrounds are turning their business knowledge into useful tools, better workflows and new solutions. View the interview with Hope here.

Doors open Saturday at 7:30 AM

The You x AI = Unstoppable Summit is this Saturday, September 12, at the PACC, 924 Austin Ave in Waco.

Check-in starts at 7:30 AM. We wrap at 5:15 PM and head to the networking after-party at Cultivate, from 5:30 to 7:30 PM.

When I interviewed Hope, she said, “SXSW costs me $2,500 plus very expensive hotel rooms. This is a really good deal.”

MAICON starts at $1,999. Our ticket is $99.

Get your ticket at youxai.live.

See you in Waco! And hit reply if you want to know which session is right for you.

Nine days left till the YouXAI Summit, and every day is filled with the million tasks of organizing an in-person conference with a skeleton crew.

It’s a miracle I even got this newsletter out. But the show must go on!

In today’s edition:

1. VIDEO: The science of being different: How to use cognitive task analysis, and applied cognitive task analysis, to differentiate yourself in the marketplace.

2. Why you should travel to Waco on the 12th: Why a small AI conference in the small city of Waco could change your business trajectory.

3. Try this at home: How Claude Code on my phone has been a lifesaver for my crazy life.

4. What I’m reading now: The Long Game by Dorie Clark

1. VIDEO: The science of being different

Last week I told you every founder is sitting on one unforgettable idea.

A few of you wrote back and asked a fair question. How do I actually find mine?

So today I want to give you the science.

It’s not my framework, but an actual field of cognitive science, with named researchers and peer-reviewed papers, that has been solving exactly this problem since the 1980s.

It just wasn’t built for us. It was built for firefighters, doctors, nurses…mission critical professionals.

Let me start with why this matters more this year than last year.

Everything is copyable now

Vibe coding now enables anyone with an idea can ship software in a weekend.

And because of AI, the cost of building a startup is a lot cheaper.

And for physical products, a factory in Shenzhen can clone your thing and have it on a boat before you’ve finished your seed round.

So whatever your product does today, somebody else will do it too. Maybe next quarter. Maybe next month.

The typical product differentiator is a short-term advantage.

Today, the only way to differentiate is you.

The specific way you, as a human, solve your customer’s problem.

Naval Ravikant says “you are the product.”

But how do you implement this in practical terms?

The classic answer: say what everybody does

I’ll repeat a story most marketers know.

In the 1920s, Schlitz was the fifth-biggest beer in America. They hired Claude Hopkins. Hopkins asked to be walked through the brewery.

They showed him the plate-glass rooms where the beer was cooled in filtered air. They showed him spring-fed water pumped up from deep wells. They showed him the steam that sterilized every bottle, three times over.

Hopkins said: write about this.

The brewers said: everybody does that.

Yeah. But nobody’s talking about it.

Schlitz went from fifth to first.

The same trick shows up in Mad Men, when Don Draper asks the Lucky Strike executives to walk him through how the cigarettes get made. They mention that the tobacco is toasted. Draper writes one word on the chalkboard.

Toasted.

Every other cigarette maker toasted their tobacco too. Lucky Strike was just the one who said it out loud.

The real story dates back to 1917..the 1960s Don Draper version was creative icense.

That’s move one.

You take something everybody in the company already knows, something they think is no big deal, and you say it before anyone else does. You own the concept in the head of the market.

Here’s the problem with move one: Your competitor can read your website on Tuesday and say “we do that too” on Wednesday. They’ll add something on top of it. Now you’re back where you started.

Which is why I want to talk about move two.

The baker was twisting the dough

In the late 1980s, Matsushita was trying to build a home bread machine and could not get the crust right.

The dough came out wrong.

So one of their software engineers went and apprenticed herself to the head baker at a hotel in Osaka. She wanted to stand next to him and do what he did, every day, until she saw something.

What she saw was that he wasn’t just kneading the dough.

He was twisting it.

She asked him why he’d never mentioned the twist. He said he’d never thought about it. It was just part of the way he kneaded.

They built ribs inside the machine that knead and twist together. The bread came out right. The product blew through its first-year sales goal.

Now look at what actually happened there.

The most valuable piece of information in that entire project was sitting in a man’s hands. He had it. He used it every single day. And he could not tell you he had it.

That’s tacit knowledge. It’s the stuff you know and don’t know you know.

And it is the only differentiator your competitors cannot copy, because they can’t copy what you haven’t said, and you haven’t said it because you don’t know it’s there.

The firefighter and the floor

So how do you get it out of someone’s head?

This is where the science comes in.

There’s a field called naturalistic decision-making, built by researchers including Gary Klein, Robert Hoffman and Richard Clark. They studied how firefighters, nurses and doctors make decisions under pressure.

Here’s the example that made the field famous.

A firefighter is on the second floor of a house that’s fully engulfed. He’s looking the floor. And then something makes him stop and say: we’ve got to get out of here now.

They get out.

The floor collapses.

Ask him later how he knew, and he can’t tell you. He’ll describe what he did. He can’t describe how he knew to do it. When he goes and teaches the class, that part isn’t in the class, because he was never conscious of it in the first place.

That’s naturalistic decision-making. The expert decides by feel.

In conscious decision-making is the other thing, you look at a problem, you lay out the options, you weigh them, you pick the best one. That’s what we all imagine expertise looks like.

It isn’t. Not at the top.

A surgeon who has done a thousand of the same operation isn’t weighing options. A nurse who has placed tens of thousands of stents isn’t running a decision tree.

They just know.

And the whole discipline of cognitive task analysis exists to drag that knowing into the open so it can be taught to the next person.

The method, and why you can’t use it

Cognitive task analysis has a real toolkit. The critical decision method. Concept mapping. PARI, which stands for precursor, action, result, interpretation. Goal-directed task analysis. Think-aloud protocols. Richard Clark’s concepts, processes and principles.

Look them up. They’re worth an afternoon.

But there’s a catch. These methods are hard, and they’re really meant to be run by trained cognitive scientists.

Which is no good for a marketer.

Are you going to send the person who runs your Facebook ads to graduate school in cognitive psychology so they can write your positioning? I don’t think so.

Then in 1998, two researchers named Laura Militello and Robert Hutton published applied cognitive task analysis. ACTA. Same goal, built for practitioners.

Four tools:

1. The task diagram. You ask the expert to break their work into three to six major steps, and then flag which of those steps demands the most judgment. That’s your map, and the flag tells you where to dig.

2. The knowledge audit. A fixed set of probes drawn from expertise research. Noticing. The big picture. Anomalies. Job smarts. Self-monitoring. Improvising. Past and future. You take the hard steps from the task diagram and run the probes on them to pull out the cues, the strategies and the shortcuts.

3. The simulation interview. You walk the expert through a realistic scenario and have them narrate at every point. What do you see here? What are you assessing? What would a novice get wrong right here?

4. The cognitive demands table. The output. One row per hard element. Why it’s hard, what errors are common, and the cues and strategies the expert actually uses.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No graduate degree required.

Now point it at a founder

Everything above was designed to extract expertise from firefighters and nurses so it could be taught. I want to extract it from founders so it can be marketed.

The first thing to get right is the task.

The task is not your product workflow. The task is the thing you personally do over and over: diagnosing and solving your customer’s problem.

Paul Graham tells YC founders to do things that don’t scale. What happens when you follow that advice is that you spend a year or two talking to hundreds of people in your ICP, selling to them yourself, watching what lands.

You come out of it with a feel. You can hear a prospect describe their situation for ninety seconds and know what’s actually wrong.

You have no idea how you’re doing that.

So run the four tools on it.

Task diagram. Customer shows up with a problem, on the left. Problem solved, on the right. What are the three to six steps in between? Write them. Circle the one that takes the most judgment.

Knowledge audit. What do you see that the industry misses? What’s the first thing you notice about a customer? What shortcut do you take that would look wrong to an outsider?

That last question is the money question. I’ll show you why in a second.

Simulation interview. Get someone to walk you through a real scenario and make you narrate. This is where the twisting shows up, because you’ll say something out loud that you’ve never written down.

Run it with your co-founder separately, on the same scenario. If you converge, what you’ve found is institutional and it belongs to the company. If you diverge, it’s a personal brand, and it belongs to whichever of you actually does it.

Cognitive demands table, with one column added that isn’t in the original: what does the industry call this, and what should it be called?

Every unnamed row is a coinage candidate.

The realtor who prices low on purpose

Let me show you what one of these rows looks like in real life.

I worked with a realtor who sells in the luxury market. She had figured out how to start bidding wars on her listings, reliably, and drive the final price above what the seller had hoped for.

She could not explain it. She just did it.

So we excavated it, and here’s what came out.

A seller says: I want to list at this price. A novice agent takes the number, lists high, and the house sits. Weeks go by. Eventually the agent has the awkward conversation and they cut the price, and now the listing looks stale.

She lists it low from the start.

The low price pulls in a crowd. The crowd bids against each other. The final number comes in above where the seller wanted to be in the first place.

Look at that against the knowledge audit question. What shortcut do you take that would look wrong to an outsider? Underpricing a luxury listing looks like malpractice. In her hands it’s the whole mechanism.

We named it demand surge.

She’s the demand surge realtor now.

The step the cognitive scientists don’t take

This last part isn’t cognitive task analysis and it isn’t ACTA. It’s the Viral Genius Framework, and it’s where I go past the science.

Once you’ve pulled the tacit thing out of the founder’s head - or the CTO’s head, or whoever the real expert is - you have a list of moves. A list, if you will.

A list isn’t an asset.

So you turn it into one. List the steps. Draw it. A flywheel, a pyramid, a loop, whatever the shape actually is.

Then give it a name.

And then repeat that name everywhere. Your About page. Your LinkedIn headline. Your Twitter bio. The show notes of every podcast you go on - and you should do a podcast campaign. Your speaker page - and you should do a speaking campaign.

Because here’s what you’re building toward.

Somebody hears your name. They want to do due diligence. They Google you, or now they just ask ChatGPT or Claude who you are.

And the answer comes back: that’s Joe Davis, the cloud science guy. Cloud science is his methodology. Here’s how it works.

Your name, next to one idea, coming out of the machine’s mouth instead of yours.

That’s the whole game.

Your homework

Draw the task diagram on yourself. Ten minutes, on paper.

Customer’s problem on the left. Problem solved on the right. Three to six steps in between.

Circle the step you’d have the hardest time handing to a new hire.

That’s where it’s hiding.

Hit reply and tell me what you circled. I read every one.

Fernando

P.S. If you’d rather have someone else run the interview on you, that’s what I do. The excavation is the ACTA protocol above, pointed at a founder, and it ends with a named framework you own. Reply and we’ll set up a time.

2. Why you should travel to Waco, Texas, on Sept. 12th

The name “Waco” conjures up a lot of images in people’s heads: a charismatic leader, a tragedy, maybe Fixer-Upper, the reality show featuring Chip and Joanna Gaines.

But Waco is emerging as a burgeoning creator and startup community.

It will never challenge Palo Alto or Austin, but in this small city of 147,000, there are a surprising number of exciting startups emerging.

And this is why we decided to hold a first of its kind AI conference, the You x AI = Unstoppable summit.

On Saturday, September 12th, 23 speakers, from entrepreneurs, coaches, media personalities to academics, will teach you practical skills on how to use AI to:

• Automate your operations

• Build your agentic workforce

• Set-up your marketing hub

• Create your own software (you don’t have to know how to code)

• And create content at scale that sounds like you

From Bryan Eisenberg, who coined the term “Conversion Rate Optimization,” to Jermaine Malcolm, a community leader enabling small communities to fill their skills gap, to Professor Hope Koch, a top Baylor University researcher, and more, you’ll learn from top talents in the field.

And you’ll walk away with a changed perspective on what it means to run a business, become an entrepreneur, and become a super hero.

Join us on Saturday, Sept 12th. Tickets are only $99.

Buy Tickets Now

3. Try this at home

Or rather, try this when you’re out of your home.

I’ve discovered the joys of using the Claude Code mobile app (well, its’ the Claude app, from where you can access Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code) while I’m out running errands and I need to do something urgently.

I have a chaotic life (don’t we all?). And I need the flexibility to attend to family needs and run errands.

But if a client needs something, like yesterday, while I’m rushing out the door, I can start the task on my laptop, leave it running, and when I get to the store I can give any approvals, request changes, or initiate new tasks remotely.

The Claude mobile app has been a life-changer. Try it, you’ll like it!

4. What I’m reading now: The Long Game, by Dorie Clark

“Being consistent over a long period of time” has become a cliché in business circles, but not because it’s not true (it is very true). Because it has kind of become a cure-all statement for aspiring entrepreneurs who are ready to throw in the towel.

But what does it look like, in practical terms?

Dorie Clark, author of Stand Out and Reinventing You, wrote The Long Game, a book that genuinely taught me new information, or at least a new take on old information.

Clark’s premise is: we need space to think, yet we’re so busy with the hurry hurry of of everyday lives, of the daily minutiae that takes up our time, we barely have time to breathe.

But if you want to have success over the long haul, you need to make the mental space to actually think about what you want in five, 10, 15 years.

And that’s what we’ve lost.

Clark teaches us how to get that back, and how to put it into practical application.

Think in waves

One of my favorite concepts Clark discusses is thinking in waves. When pursuing success in a creative endeavor - whether you’re a software startup founder, a content creator, a consultant, a thought leader - you have periods of deep, creative work, and periods where you need to get out there and promote yourself.

She calls these waves.

When you’re working on your magnum opus - your original research report, your book, your startup - you need to spend one or two quarters with your head down pouring your heart and soul into it.

This is where focus is critical, and you can’t interrupt it taking on speaking gigs and podcast interviews.

But the next wave requires the opposite: requesting introductions to key players who can open doors for you. Pitching your work. Doing the conference circuit.

Becoming known for something

I found Clark looking for YouTube videos on long-term, strategic thinking, but I discovered she had written a best-welling book about becoming known for a big idea…very similar to my One Unforgettable Idea concept.

That’s her book Stand Out.

I read both in a week, and I really recommend you do too.

Two things:

• Check out the YouXAI Summit, and see if it’s for you (and watch the YouTube channel where I interview all the speaker.)

• If you’re curious about doing an a cognitive task analysis-like excavation session, schedule some time with me here.

See you next week!

Best,

Fernando Labastida

Round Rock, Texas

In this issue

1. The Main Idea — Jason Barnard’s whole method, in 30 seconds

2. How He Coins a Term — and the test he uses to kill his own bad ones

3. YOU×AI Spotlight — $79 tickets end September 1

4. Worth Your Time — Dorie Clark’s The Long Game

5. One Idea to Steal — The four-sentence audit

1. The Main Idea: A €100,000 Deal, Lost on a Train

Jason Barnard walked out of a meeting in Paris with a €100,000 deal all but signed.

Half an hour later, before his train got him home, the client emailed to cancel.

They had searched his name. Google told them he was a cartoon maker.

Google wasn’t wrong. Jason had spent years as the voice of Boowa the Blue Dog, a kids’ TV character on Playhouse Disney, with a website pulling a billion page views a year.

All of that lived in Wikipedia, IMDb, MusicBrainz - exactly the places Google and now ChatGPT go looking for facts.

The digital marketer lived nowhere.

The trip cost him €1,000. He lost the €100,000. So not only did he not make the money, the meeting cost him money.

And on the train home he started working on the problem that became Brand SERP, and then became Kalicube.

Here’s what I love about his story

Most of us are trying to get found at the top of the funnel. Jason flipped it.

He started at the very bottom, at the decision stage, where somebody has already met you and is now checking you out. As he put it to me, the top of the funnel has so many possible queries that you’re spitting in the ocean hoping to hit a whale.

At the bottom you know exactly what people are asking. They’re asking about you.

The method, in 30 seconds

Jason told me it used to take him ten minutes to explain. Then five. Then two. He’s got it down to 30 seconds now, and a friend once told him never to share his secrets. His answer: if I can explain it in 30 seconds, there isn’t much to keep secret.

So here it is, and it’s yours:

1. Build an entity home. A website in your name. yourname.com.

2. On the About page, say four things: who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why you’re credible.

3. Make everything you control say the same four things. LinkedIn, X, every profile, in any form. Corroborate that exact message.

4. Then go get third parties to say it too, with proof. Who you are, what you do, who you serve, why you’re credible - said by somebody other than you.

That’s the whole thing.

The rest is execution, and execution here means two words: clear first, then consistent. Consistent across the internet, and consistent across years. Not months. Years.

Why this works on the machines

Google is actively looking for an entity home. John Mueller has talked about it publicly - they want a source of reconciliation, a place where you give your version of the facts.

And it isn’t just Google. Jason has been collecting data since 2015, and he told me that the day ChatGPT launched, it said exactly the same thing about him and about Kalicube as Google did.

Same digital footprint. Same conclusion. A strategy he started in 2012 worked on a machine that didn’t exist yet, because they’re all reading the same web.

The part that should get your attention

With Google, somebody searched your name and looked at page one. That was your business card.

With AI, Jason says they go down what he calls the AI due diligence rabbit hole. The machine encourages them to keep researching you. It’s a much deeper narrative, and you don’t control any of it by default.

His line about the cost: even if the engines aren’t misrepresenting you the way they did him, they’re almost certainly underrepresenting you. That’s revenue leaking out of the bottom of your funnel from people who were ready to buy and never told you why they didn’t.

My favorite line in the whole interview came from one of his clients:

“I want to be able to sit in first class, chat with somebody, and never have to boast about anything I’ve ever done. Because when I get off the plane, I know they’re going to google me or ask ChatGPT. And ChatGPT and Google will do the boasting for me.”

That’s the goal. Not fame. Just having the machines say something at least as good about you as you’d say about yourself.

2. How He Coins a Term

This is the part I really wanted from him, because Jason is unusually good at it. Brand SERP is his. So is the funnel query pathway.

His trigger is simple: every time he runs into something he can’t describe without using six or seven words, he coins a term for it.

Then he does three things:

He writes the canonical definition on his own site first. The term, a comma, then five or six words defining it. Articles on his own property explaining what it is. His own site is the home of the meaning, the same way his entity home is the home of the facts about him.

He pushes it out and links it back. Articles elsewhere, podcasts, and - he says this explicitly - he asks podcast hosts to put his coined terms in the show notes, because that’s easier for the AI to digest. Wherever the term gets repeated, a link points home, so the machine can see that the mention over there means the same thing as the definition over here.

He gets other people to credit him with the coinage. He calls this temporal precedence. You need to be first, obviously. But you also need to demonstrate to the machines that you were first.

And here’s his bet, which I think is right:

He’s training the algorithms well enough that even when people use his terms without naming him, the AI names him anyway. The AI becomes the carrier of the ownership.

The test he uses to kill his own bad terms

He’s fallen into the trap of inventing too many, and terms people don’t understand. So now he applies what he calls the glossary test:

If you have to read a glossary to understand the term I just gave you, it’s not a good term.

He’s honest that some of his own don’t pass. “Entity home” is great if you’re a geek and you know what an entity is. It’s probably better as brand home or digital brand home. He’s retired some terms entirely, and he’s taking a lot of the coined language out of the book he’s writing from his 19-part Search Engine Land series, because he wants it accessible.

I told him about my own version of this. My friend Bryan Eisenberg - who with his brother Jeffrey coined “conversion rate optimization” - is the one who watched me interview founders, dig out the thing they take for granted, and said: that’s viral genius. That’s where the name came from.

And people still ask me if I’ll help them go viral on social media. So the glossary test is real, and I’m still working on mine.

One last thing he said, and it’s the whole game for a founder

I asked him: is it important to have a unique point of view, or is being really good at what you do enough?

His answer: yes to both, but you need the point of view.

AI already knows everything that’s been published. What it’s looking for is an information gap - something new. If you publish the same article as your competitor, that’s not interesting to a machine that already has your competitor’s article.

You don’t have to invent something completely new. You do have to have a different point of view. And if you have one, coin a term for it and teach the machines that the term means your definition.

That’s how you end up owning the perspective.

2. YOU×AI Spotlight — $79 tickets end September 1

The YOU×AI Summit is September 12 at the Performing Arts & Community Center, 924 Austin Ave, Waco. A full day on what AI actually changes about how you work.

Tickets are $79 until August 31. They go to $99 on September 1.

→ youxai.live

4. Worth Your Time: The Long Game by Dorie Clark

The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, Harvard Business Review Press, 2021.

Dorie Clark’s argument is that the things worth having - your career, your brand, the work you actually want to be known for - only get built over a horizon most of us never let ourselves look at.

What stands in the way is mental space.

We’re busy. We’re caught up in the minutia of every day. So we never sit still long enough to ask what we want to be true in ten years, or to work backward from it.

She wants you to make that space on purpose, and she treats it as the mechanism rather than a luxury.

Every one of us needs room to design the life we want to live over the long term. Almost none of us schedules it.

The audiobook is good, and so is the print version. I’ve done both.

She also references her earlier book, Stand Out, which I’d say is a precursor to what I’m doing with the Viral Genius Framework. Same instinct - find the idea that’s yours and build a following around it. The difference now is that you also have to be retrievable by a machine, under a term you own.

5. One Idea to Steal: The Four-Sentence Audit

Straight out of Jason’s method, and you can do it tonight.

Open your own About page and write down the four answers as they currently exist:

1. Who am I?

2. What do I do?

3. Who do I serve?

4. Why am I credible?

If you can’t find all four on that page, that’s your week’s work right there.

Then open your LinkedIn profile, your X bio, your company team page, and your last three podcast appearances. Ask the same four questions of each one.

You’re not looking for good writing. You’re looking for consistency. Four answers, said the same way, everywhere you control.

Then do the last one, which takes ten seconds and stings a little:

Ask ChatGPT “Who is [your name]?”

Whatever comes back is what your next buyer sees thirty minutes after they meet you.

Try the audit and hit reply with what ChatGPT said about you. I read every one.

Fernando Labastida

Viral Genius Institute

In this issue

1. The Main Idea — The genius you can’t see because you use it every day (plus the full question list)

2. YOU×AI Spotlight — Jackye Clayton on why everyone’s building AI agents backwards ($79 tickets end Aug 31)

3. Worth Your Time — I got an advance copy of my friend Gerardo Dada’s new strategy book

4. One Idea to Steal — My exact brainstorming loop with AI (steal the whole thing)

1. The Main Idea: You Already Talk About It Every Day

I want to state a bold idea: if you’re a founder, whether a technical founder, a non-technical founder, or the founder of a solo company, your marketing should be based around building your personal brand…with a twist:

You should be known for One Unforgettable Idea.

For example, you could be a realtor. But there are thousands of realtors, so how are you going to stand out and attract your ideal buyers to you?

You can become: “Maria, the ____ realtor.” (____ stands for that one big idea that communicates a unique model, framework or POV you own).

But here’s the catch: that one idea already lives inside you. You just don’t know it yet.

To learn more, read on.

The Story of McKinsey’s First Female MBA

In 1963, McKinsey hired its first woman MBA, at their Cleveland office. xHer name was Barbara Minto.

She started becoming famous inside the firm for one thing: she took the consultants’ reports - sharp thinking, buried under gobbledygook - and rewrote them so that the reports clearly communicated the brilliant solutions the partners had crafted.

Partners from far-flung offices started sending her their reports. She eventually moved to the London office because the demand was that strong.

What was Minto’s secret to re-writing these reports? She didn’t even know!

Minto literally couldn’t tell you what she did to those reports. It was instinct.

But Minto was very self-aware - a rare quality. It took a deliberate self-analysis before she saw her own pattern: put the conclusion at the top, then support it with three reasons, each with three supports of their own.

She codified it, named it, and today the Minto Pyramid Principle is taught inside McKinsey and every consulting firm that matters.

She excavated her own hidden zone of genius. Most people can’t do this, that’s why they need somebody else who sees it and can show them.

Her genius was invisible to her. It was just “how I do it.”

Yours is too.

Your One Unforgettable Idea

This is what I call your one unforgettable idea - the framework, the method, the point of view that tells your market who you are, so your reputation precedes you.

Donald Miller is the StoryBrand guy. Joe Pulizzi is the godfather of content marketing. Jason Barnard is the Brand SERP Guy. One name, one idea, welded together.

And here’s what separates this from the typical “find your niche” guru: you don’t invent this idea. You don’t hire a branding agency to make it up.

You excavate it. It’s already in you. In the thing you do by feel, the step you skip past when you explain your work, the process you dismiss with “well, obviously.”

A hundred years ago, Claude Hopkins toured the Schlitz brewery and watched them purify their water through an elaborate process. “Why don’t you advertise that?”

The brewmaster shrugged: “Everybody does that.” Nobody was talking about it. Schlitz did, and went from fifth place to first.

This matters double if you’re a technical founder. You’re brilliant - the PhDs, the patents, all of it - but you explain your work like you’re talking to other engineers, and the market’s eyes glaze over.

That’s your forgettable idea.

But your unforgettable idea is the bridge. It’s the framework version of your genius, stated so simply it’s like a spotlight that leads your clients directly to you.

So how do you dig it out?

Somebody has to interview you. Maybe a colleague, a friend, your AI, with questions designed to catch what you dismiss.

In the above video I promised you the full list. Here it is.

The Excavation Questionnaire

This is just a partial list of questions - if I pasted all the questions, you’d probably delete the email it’d be so long.

How you see the market problem:

1. Before you ever started the company, how were people dealing with this problem? Walk me through what it looked like for one specific person or company you watched.

2. What does everyone in this market believe about this problem that you think is wrong?

3. When you see a competitor’s marketing or a conference talk in your space, what makes you wince? What are they misunderstanding?

4. What do customers say they want, and what do they actually need? Where’s the gap?

5. What’s the real cost of this problem that never shows up on anyone’s budget line? Who’s paying it?

6. If this problem never gets solved, what quietly breaks at these companies in five years?

7. Why does this problem still exist? It’s not new — smart people have thrown money at it. What have they all been getting wrong?

Your origin insight:

8. Tell me about the specific moment you realized this problem was solvable and nobody was solving it right. Where were you?

9. What did you see in a previous job or project that gave you unfair insight into this problem? What did you have a front-row seat to that outsiders never see?

10. Was there a moment you tried to solve it the “normal” way and watched it fail? What happened?

11. When you first told people your idea, what pushback did you get? Who said it wouldn’t work — and why were they wrong?

12. What did you know to be true that you couldn’t convince anyone else of at the time? Can you convince me of it now?

13. Why you? What is it about your background that let you see this when others in the industry couldn’t?

Your methodology — with the product removed:

14. Forget your company exists. I come to you as a friend with this exact problem, and I can’t buy anything — I can only change how I work. What do you tell me to do, step by step?

15. You’re hired as a consultant to solve this for one company — no software, just you and a whiteboard for six months. What do you do first? Then what?

16. What has to be measured or made visible that currently isn’t? What would change the moment someone could see it?

And one rule for whoever’s asking: every time the founder says “obviously” or “I just did this,” stop them. “Hold on. You said that was obvious. Tell me more about that.” That’s where the gold is.

The one line that matters: your one unforgettable idea isn’t invented. It’s excavated.

Once you’ve dug it up, name it something functional, not clever.

A name that describes the end result, like my client’s “cloud convergence.”

Then test it on social, on sales calls, in your content, and watch for the moment someone repeats it back to you. That’s the evidence you’ve succeeded.

The full story - including how to build your entity home and why ChatGPT and Perplexity now rank people, not just content 0 is in the video above.

2. YOU×AI Spotlight: Jackye Clayton

Every week until the summit, I’m featuring one of our YOU×AI speakers. This week: Jackye Clayton, founder of Who Do I Work For? - a self-described “hyphenate” who spent years in HR tech and talent acquisition for West Coast companies before landing here in Central Texas.

Her session is called “From Pizza Prompt to Practical AI,” and it goes after something I see constantly: everyone wants to build AI agents before they’ve learned to give AI decent context. Her teaching tool is pizza. Ask AI for “the best pizza crust recipe” and you get something generic - because you never said what best means. Deep dish? Detroit? Thin and foldable? AI isn’t a search engine that hands you ten options; it gives you one answer shaped entirely by what you asked. Garbage context, garbage crust.

She’ll also cover knowing what “done” looks like before you start (”it’s never gonna be done - that’s what people have to understand”), and asking AI what could go wrong before you try. But my favorite line of hers, on keeping the human part human:

“Do not get your self-worth from a computer. That is where the danger lives.”

YOU×AI is September 12 in Waco — one day, two tracks (Creator and AI), built around one idea: the most powerful thing you can bring to the age of AI is the full force of being human.

🎟️ Tickets are $79 through August 31. On September 1 they go to $99. Grab yours here:

Register for YouXAI Live

3. Worth Your Time: Outpositioned by Gerardo Dada

My friend Gerardo Dada spent ten years and four CMO seats (Rackspace, SolarWinds, Bazaarvoice) writing this one, and I got my hands on an advance copy. It’s a strategy book that connects disparate systems most books split apart: strategy, positioning, and differentiation as one discipline, told through failures he watched from the inside.

Read it for the “optionality tax” alone - the invisible cost every founder pays each week they refuse to pick one customer. And as you read, watch for his real villain: it’s never the competition. It’s formulas, metrics, and tactics that often pass for strategy, but end up distracting you from the actual strategy you should pursue.

As Gerardo puts it: “When strategy and systems point in different directions, systems win.”

Pre-order Outpositioned here.

4. One Idea to Steal: My Brainstorming Loop with AI

This is exactly how I develop ideas now, including the one you just read. Steal the whole loop:

1. Dump first. I open my voice-to-text app and give Claude a stream-of-consciousness session on whatever I’m chewing on. I don’t edit while I talk, I just speak my raw thinking.

2. Demand backup. Then I ask it to find scholarship: research, studies, something real that backs up (or challenges) what I’m seeing. This either confirms my hunch or tells me I’m way off base.

3. Layer in more. I react to what it found, add more of my own ideas, and then ask: help me find a way to explain this to the public.

4. Walk away. Then I go think about it for another 15 or 30 minutes, away from the screen. The idea keeps cooking.

5. Come back and refine. I return with whatever surfaced, and we brainstorm together until the idea has a shape - and words - I actually feel comfortable putting on a website or saying to a customer.

When I start to feel very excited with the end result, that’s when I know I have something solid. Doable tonight, before you go to bed.

Hit reply and tell me: run the excavation questions through your AI, have it interview you, and ask it to name your methodology. What name did it come up with? I read every response.

P.S. $79 for YOU×AI ends August 31. After that it’s $99, and I can’t do anything about it. youxai.live

Last week I was late with the newsletter - a day late to be exact. Today I’m back to the regular schedule.

I’m trying to build an addictive habit with you, dear reader, and I want you to get mad when I’m late.

That’s the whole point of a media company, right? ;-)

In this issue

1. VIDEO: Brand entity optimization and the step that comes before step one

2. The Main Idea - Personal brand = “Lots of revenue”

3. The YouXAI Summit - Michael Wellborn on how to automate your VC pitch

4. What I’m Reading - Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie

5. One Idea to Steal - the clean-slate testIs building a personal brand just an exercise in vanity?

1. VIDEO

22 minutes on how to teach the machines who you are, and the one thing GEO guru Jason Barnard doesn’t teach.

2. The Main Idea - Personal brand = Lots of revenue

Is building a personal brand just an exercise in vanity? Is this whole thing just a popularity contest? Likes. Followers. Your name in lights.

I was listening to a podcast this week where James Dooley interviewed Jason Barnard.

Barnard is a world authority on what he calls AI digital brand intelligence. In plainer words, brand entity optimization. He’s the person who worked out the method for getting a Google Knowledge Panel.

Dooley asked him what the value of building a personal brand actually is.

Barnard said: “A lot of revenue.”

That’s it! Money.

He says 80% of the business his company Kalicube gets now comes from his personal brand. People searching his name. ChatGPT and Gemini recommending him.

And I was heartened to hear it, because we’ve been seeing this trend of founder-led marketing, and founders trying to build their personal brand.

And now Barnard confirms it: a personal brand can drive business to a B2B company. Software, manufacturing, services, consulting. It doesn’t matter which.

But there’s a technical thing underneath the personal brand.

Let me walk you through what I learned on this podcast series.

1. Understand that you are an entity

Your company is an entity. Google recognizes it. Every LLM recognizes it.

You are also an entity. As a founder. As a writer, an author, a podcaster, a speaker.

And then your podcast is its own entity. Each of your books is its own entity.

This is how the engines classify things, and they do it through words.

Think about Nike. It’s the Greek goddess of victory. It’s also a sneaker company. Same four letters, two completely different things.

For a machine to give anybody a useful answer, it first has to work out which entity you mean.

Same problem with your name. Right now there may be four people who share it, and no engine on earth knows which one is you, the founder with the unique POV and the successful company.

2. Get the schema markup right

Everybody talks about schema markup…but what exactly is it for?

It labels the entities. You as a person. You as an author. Your company. Your books.

Your website has to be structured properly and tagged with the right schemas. These are the machine-readable descriptors of you as a “founder” or an “author,” your books as a “book,” and your podcast as a “podcast.”

3. Build your entity home

This is your hub, your home base, where you start to educate the bots about who you are and what assets make you significant.

Your entity home is the single source of truth about who you are and what belongs to you.

It has a specific shape. Your About page is the human-readable version at yoursite.com/about. Then underneath it sits a page at /about/your-name.

Mine is going to be viralgeniusinstitute.com/about/fernando-labastida.

And on that page I explain who I am in liftable, bite-sized chunks that are self-contained packages of information.

I’m Fernando Labastida. I’m a marketer. I’m the founder of the Viral Genius Institute. My method is called the Viral Genius Framework, and here’s the link to the page that describes it.

I’m the author of three books, and here are the three links.

Here are the podcasts I’ve been on. Here’s my speaking page.

You’re teaching the bots. Barnard says to think of them as a junior sales force. They’re kids, and they’re also the people who are going to sell you when you’re not in the room.

You tell them everything, plainly, and you link to the proof.

4. Google yourself, because you’ve forgotten things

I did this and I found a page on General Assembly I had completely forgotten existed.

I have a page on South by Southwest Interactive. I have one on CEX, the Content Entrepreneur Expo. There’s a conference in Chicago and a couple in Mexico.

My podcast is sitting on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and Amazon.

All of those are entities floating around loose out there.

Google and ChatGPT have no way to know they’re all me and not some other Fernando Labastida.

So you link to them from your entity home. That’s what makes the connection.

5. Get corroboration, because the machines don’t take your word for it

The engines can’t just trust that you’re the best at what you do.

“I’m the best pastry chef in the world.”

Says who?

You need somebody else saying it. So you go find every place where that already exists, and then you work out what you still need to create.

Books are one of the strongest assets you have. I have three. The Startup Book has 15 reviews, mostly five stars, and it carries forewords from Christopher Lochhead and Joe Pulizzi.

So I built a books page at viralgeniusinstitute.com/resources, gave each book its own page, and linked out to the Amazon sales pages.

Now the books on Amazon have a home. They’re associated with me. And those reviews count toward my credibility instead of sitting in a corner of Amazon doing nothing.

Podcasts work the same way. Give the show its own page. Give every episode its own page. Link each one out to Apple, Spotify and Amazon.

Barnard does exactly this. I looked. He has five to seven outbound links on every single episode page.

It’s sweat equity. There’s no version of this that isn’t.

6. Then go get the third-party proof

White papers. Research reports. Guest articles in an online magazine or Forbes.

Guest podcast appearances are one of the best. When the host writes the episode description and mentions your framework by name, that’s somebody other than you saying it.

If you serve a local area, get a Google Business Profile and pull those reviews onto your site.

If you don’t, what you want is a Google Knowledge Panel. You can’t create one. Google creates it for you, once you’ve done all of the work above. It’s slow and painstaking and it’s worth it.

I’m going to build a Crunchbase profile. And Barnard has an IMDb page, which I thought was crazy, because I assumed IMDb was only for people in the movie business.

The best one of all is when somebody independently writes about you. The Wall Street Journal. The Austin American-Statesman. Anything where you didn’t ask and didn’t pay.

7. Now here’s the part that isn’t in the playbook

Kalicube runs thousands of queries against the LLMs using clean slates.

If you’ve been using ChatGPT for a year, it already knows you. Ask it about yourself and it just plays back your own conversations. You have to ask a model that doesn’t know you from Adam.

Barnard ran 10 different queries. Who’s the best AEO thought leader. Who’s the best known authority on Brand SERPs. Who should you read on Google Knowledge Panels.

He came up number one on all 10.

He owns that space.

And here’s what I keep thinking about. Somebody else could do every single thing he did. Entity home, schema, descriptions, books, podcast, corroboration, all of it.

They still wouldn’t dislodge him.

So you need something distinctive where there’s no competition yet.

Which means the real first step happens before step one, and it isn’t technical at all.

You have to find the distinctive point of view you already have inside you and haven’t recognized or said out loud yet.

That’s the excavation. Your one unforgettable idea. The thing that becomes your category, or your new standard for how the work gets done.

Your one unforgettable idea can be expressed in three different ways:

1. A new category

2. A new standard of excellence

3. A persona

Buc-ee’s built a company on clean bathrooms while every other gas station had filthy ones. That’s a new standard of excellence.

A real estate agent or a consultant in a totally commoditized market can do it with a distinct persona.

A software company can create a totally new category.

Three different ways to apply the same idea.

I love Barnard’s methodology and I’m applying all of it. You should too.

But run it on a description of yourself that fits forty other people in your category, and you’ll be perfectly understood and still not recommended.

8. Start with you, not the company

You can build a personal brand entity and a company brand entity. But Barnard says the personal one is faster and easier, and it carries over to the company by default.

So start with yourself.

It took him 13 years to get where he is.

You won’t need 13. Start now and you could have a Knowledge Panel inside a year, and be getting recommended for something only you can lead.

Excavate the idea first. Then go teach the machines.

3. YouXAI Summit - Michael Wellborn on how to automate VC pitches with AI

YouXAI speaker Michael Wellborn had a project he figured would take three months.

AI did it in 14 minutes, he told me in a recent interview I did as part of the speaker preview series for the YouXAI Summit.

Michael is co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at FireBrake Interventions, a startup building devices that stop wildfires at the ember stage. They’re raising money right now, which means talking to venture capitalists.

Here’s the math that makes that miserable. A cold introduction gives you about a 3% chance of a conversation, and Michael thinks that’s generous. They need three or four conversations. So they need roughly 230 VCs.

And you can’t just pull a list. Every firm has to be ranked. Do they fund fire tech? Do they write million-dollar checks, which is a rounding error for most of them? Do they invest pre-revenue? Who have they backed, for how much, and who are their own investors?

That’s 10 or 15 data points per firm. Some of those have 10 or 15 of their own.

Now the honest part, because Michael was careful about it.

It didn’t produce 230 finished dossiers in 14 minutes. It produced the research. The dossiers come three at a time, on demand, because three a day is all a team of four can actually work.

He says “I’m ready for the next three,” and a cascade is triggered. It writes them. Sends them to Mike Ralston, the CEO. Loads them into the CRM. Creates a task for Mike to call. Then creates a second task for Michael, to check that Mike called.

He built it in Claude Cowork.

I asked whether he’d engineered some sophisticated agent architecture. He stopped me.

“I am not a thought leader. I’m a guy that has a startup that’s underfunded and has too few people working for it.”

He’s a sales guy. He did this out of desperation, because there was no way to do it himself. Not enough hours, not enough people.

At the summit he’s running a workshop with co-founder Mark Ralston, and a big part of it is what AI can’t do. His framing is that AI is a new employee. You train it. You coach it. You trust it less at the start than you will at the end.

“Who has hired an employee where they did everything perfect the first day? Nobody.”

That’s the whole premise of YouXAI. Practitioners, not gurus.

“Anybody can do this. Now it’s just a matter of actually doing it.”

Michael Wellborn is Co-Founder and CRO at FireBrake Interventions. Reach him at michael.wellborn@modeforge.com.

YouXAI is September 12 at PACC in Waco, 8:00 to 5:00. $79 through August 31, then $99. youxai.live

Register now!

Register now - only $79

4. What I’m Reading

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet - Hannah Ritchie.

Hannah Ritchie at her Ted Talk on the climate

It’s a little weird to have a book about climate change in a marketing newsletter, but it’s a beautiful book.

Hannah’s position is that the data supports neither the doom and gloom of climate activists, nor the deliberate ignorance of the climate denialists.

Hannah works at Our World in Data, which is one of the most widely cited independent data sources on the internet. Journalists quote it. Researchers cite it. The AI engines pull from it constantly.

The sensationalistic headlines get all the attention, but the data tells a different story: things are actually getting better.

Hunger’s going down. Poverty is plummeting. Air pollution is dramatically better. And there’s hope on the horizon for the environment.

But we can’t become complacent. We need to keep the pressure on, keep developing solar and wind, keep pressing for global agreements.

What I love about the book is the role she attributes to technology for improving our situation.

In fact in a recent Ezra Klein podcast episode, in which Klein interviews climate activist Bill McKibben, McKibben explicitly states that costs for solar panels and batteries have come down so far and fast, and the technology has improved so much, that whole areas of Australia and California are completely self-sufficient in energy thanks to solar.

Read the book. Your doomsday panic about an environmental end-of-the-world scenario will subside….substantially!

5. One Idea to Steal - the clean-slate test

I stole this exercise from Barnard:

Open an AI you have never used, or a logged-out incognito window.

That part is not optional. Your own ChatGPT has been talking to you for a year. Ask it about yourself and it plays your own words back to you and you’ll feel great about it.

Then ask the three questions your buyer would actually type:

Who’s the best [what you do] for [who you serve]? Who should I read on [your topic]? Who are the leading companies in [your category]?

Count how many times your name comes back.

The scoring, which is what makes it usable:

It names you. The machines already have an entity for you. Your job is corroboration, and you’re further along than you thought.

It names your competitors. They’re findable and they’re distinct. You’re missing one of the two, and this week’s video tells you which.

It gives you a vague answer and no names at all. Nobody has claimed the category. That’s the best result on this list and almost nobody reads it that way.

Ten minutes, and you can do it before lunch.

See you in the next edition!

Fernando Labastida,

Founder, Viral Genius Institute

Hi there!

Writing to you from Round Rock, still recovering from a 56-minute video I recorded last night that was supposed to be 20.

In this edition:

1. VIDEO: The one idea AI can’t copy — and why ChatGPT only names three companies

2. The three things YouXAI is actually about — we finally named them: Build, Get Found, Sound Like You

3. I asked ChatGPT for tacos — and accidentally proved my own point

4. Worth Your Time: the book two of my summit speakers announced from my own stage

5. One Idea to Steal: the one-question test that tells you if you have an unforgettable idea

1. VIDEO: The One Unforgettable Idea AI Can’t Copy

2. The three things the YouXAI summit is actually about

For months when people asked me what the YouXAI Summit was about, I’d say something like “putting the human back at the center of AI,” and I’d watch their eyes do that polite thing where they’re still listening but they’ve stopped hearing.

It’s true. It’s also a bumper sticker.

So we sat down and got specific. There are three things a small business owner actually wants from AI right now, and every session at the summit does one of them.

Build. You’ve had an idea for years. An app, a tool, a thing that would make your business run better. And you’re not an engineer and you don’t know any VCs, so it stayed an idea. That’s over. Dariia Isyk and Shakhlo Juraboeva shipped AdmitAI while studying finance and international studies at Baylor. Not computer science. Finance.

Get Found. When somebody asks ChatGPT who solves the problem you solve, it names two or three companies. Not ten. Three. This is the one that keeps me up at night, and it’s what this week’s video is about.

Sound Like You. My sister once told me a piece of my writing had “that awful AI language.” She was right. If you’re going to use AI to make content, it has to sound like you wrote it, which means feeding it your stories, your customers’ stories, your actual voice.

Build. Get Found. Sound Like You.

That’s the whole summit. Twenty-one speakers, one Saturday, September 12th in Waco.

Tickets are $79 through the end of August, then $99 from September 1st. youxai.live

Register for YouXAI Now

3. I asked ChatGPT for tacos

Wednesday night I gave a talk at my meetup in downtown Austin, and afterward I was starving.

I pulled up Google Maps and searched for tacos. It gave me a cluster of dozens of little dots stacked on top of each other, all of them apparently equally good.

Useless. How do you choose?

So I switched to ChatGPT and asked for the most authentic Mexican tacos in downtown Austin.

It gave me three.

One of them was Tacos De Diez — a Tijuana-style place where you shuffle through a line that spills out onto the sidewalk, and you can watch the guys carving meat off the spit and assembling the tacos and throwing the salsa on right in front of you. Everyone behind the counter is speaking Spanish. For about ninety seconds you’re not in Texas anymore.

Great tacos. But that’s not the story.

The story is that I got three options instead of the ten Google gives you.

Think about what that used to look like. You’d Google something and get ten blue links on the first page. If you didn’t like those, you’d go to page two. You browsed. You had choice.

Now people aren’t even typing search terms. They’re typing whole questions. Narrating their situation. And the machine hands back an answer with three or four companies in it, and that’s the entire shortlist.

So the question changed underneath all of us.

It used to be: can they find me?

Now it’s: am I one of the three?

The part where I have to be fair to my friend Tommy

Right now there are AEO and GEO specialists popping up everywhere, like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

My buddy Tommy Landry is one of them, but he’s the real thing.

He was one of the top SEOs in Austin for years before he went deep on this. He’ll tell you to get your schema markup right so the machines can identify your entities.

Make your site crawlable with good internal linking. Write liftable paragraphs, which means every paragraph has to be a self-contained unit of information that ChatGPT can lift out whole, instead of the old slippery-slide copywriting where each line just teases the next one.

All of that is real. All of it is necessary. I do it for clients.

And it will not get you named.

Because here’s what the schema markup can’t fix: if your company does the same thing, the same way, described in the same words as eleven other companies, there is nothing for the machine to retrieve you for.

A retrieval system can’t cite what it can’t tell apart.

Being findable and being worth naming are two completely different problems, and almost everybody is solving the first one.

So what actually gets you named

Something distinctive. One unforgettable idea.

And here’s the thing that took me years to see: it’s almost always already inside the founder. Unexpressed. Because it feels ordinary to them.

Buc-ee’s is built on clean bathrooms. That’s it. That’s the idea. Everything else - the department store, the beaver, the Dutch tourists filming the beaver - grew out of one founder deciding that people shouldn’t have to dread stopping at a gas station.

I asked my wife in the car once: one word for Apple. She thought for two seconds and said “beauty.” That’s a barefoot 20-year-old Steve Jobs reading about Buddhism and appreciating the beauty of everyday things, still running the company fifteen years after he died.

Neither of those was a marketing campaign. They were the founder’s DNA, infused into the company from the start.

And the reason a competitor can’t just copy it? Because it’s hard.

Keeping every bathroom in every Buc-ee’s spotless, all day, every day, forever - that’s not a secret. Anybody could do it. Almost nobody will. Your average gas station owner just doesn’t want to.

That difficulty is the moat.

I go through the whole thing in the video: where these ideas come from, the twelve questions I use to excavate them out of founders, and the three shapes they take. It’s long. I got carried away. Fast-forward if you need to.

4. Worth Your Time

The Category Creation Formula, by Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse.

Small bit of pride here: these two announced this book from my stage at the Strike Marketing Summit. They presented the premise, live, before it was out.

The formula is three parts. Context + Missing + Innovation = a new category.

Context is what’s happening in the world right now, whether or not you’re selling anything. Missing is what that shift turned from normal into glaring. Innovation is the thing you build to fill it.

My favorite worked example is a company called Qualified. Their founder used to be the CMO of Salesforce, so he’d spent years watching sales development reps work leads. Context: agentic AI arrives. Missing: the SDR function is one of the last unautomated parts of the sales process. Innovation: an AI SDR.

New category. And per the Category Pirates, about 74% of the economics in a new category go to whoever leads it.

Notice how much of that work happens before any marketing exists. That’s the part most people skip.

(Kevin Maney also co-wrote Play Bigger, which is where a lot of us met category design in the first place.)

5. One Idea to Steal

Here’s how you find out whether you have an unforgettable idea, and it takes one text message.

Ask a client - or a friend who knows your business - this: “When you think about my company, what’s the one word that comes to mind?”

Now, the scoring:

If they say your category - “marketing,” “insurance,” “consulting” - you don’t have one yet. You’re findable. You’re not distinctive.

If they say something only you have ever talked about - that’s it. That’s the thing. Write it down before you talk yourself out of it.

And you will try to talk yourself out of it. That’s the part I want you to watch for. The right answer feels obvious and slightly embarrassing, and your first instinct is “well sure, but everybody does that.”

That’s the tell. It feels ordinary to you because you’ve been doing it for twenty years.

It is not ordinary to anybody else.

Ask one client what word comes to mind when they think of your company. Hit reply and tell me what they said. I read every response.

See you next week!

Fernando Labastida

PS: YouXAI is September 12th in Waco. One Saturday on being more human in the age of AI. $79 through August, $99 from September 1st: youxai.live

I was thinking about writing a whole discourse on why you should attend the summit, but I thought it better to share this video that explains it better than I could.

Register for the summit now:

Get your $59 early bird tickets now!

Best,

Fernando

In this edition:

1. VIDEO: The contradictory premise of the YouXAI Summit. Am I trying to have my cake and eat it too?

2. One day left for early bird pricing!

3. “Papa, I hope you don’t take it the wrong way.” An uncomfortable conversation with my son about AI

4. What I’m reading right now: Tommy Landry’s book on AEO/GEO has got me all excited

5. Idea Worth Considering: Your AI self-interview

1. VIDEO: My Daughter Asked Me If My Video Was AI. She Had a Point.

2. One Day Left for Early Bird Pricing!

The YouXAI Summit is Saturday, September 12, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, at the Performing Arts Community Center in Waco.

Twenty speakers across two tracks, one long day of people who were doing real work long before any of this was fashionable.

Early bird tickets are $59 through tomorrow, July 31 - after that they go to $79 for August, and $99 from September 1 until the doors open. If you've been meaning to grab one, tonight's the night to stop meaning to. youxai.live

3. “Papa, I hope you don’t take it the wrong way”

It feels weird to be talking about the “AI backlash” and AI as a human “amplifier” together in the same breath.

I seem to be at the center of this AI backlash, yet I’m very AI-positive.

My millennial kids have criticized me for going all-in on AI. And I participate daily in online conversations about how AI slop is littering our timelines.

But I see AI is a solution to this.

Am I trying to have it both ways?

An uncomfortable call

My son phoned me the other day to specifically call me out on my whole-hearted embrace of AI.

After a little discussion about my daughter-in-law’s pregnancy and the new apartment they’re moving into, he got right to the point:

“Papa, I hope you don’t take it the wrong way,” (gulp…I think I know what’s coming).

“But I’m not comfortable with how much you’re embracing AI. You know how those data centers are hurting local communities…” and so on and so forth.

I tried to argue with him. I told him how I’m advocating for the responsible use of AI. But it didn’t faze him.

So here’s my attempt to build a cogent argument that might satisfy him (and my other kids), while at the same time explaining the premise of the YouXAI Summit I’m organizing in Waco, Sept. 12th.

Humans need to be at the center of AI

“We’re putting the human back in AI!” Sounds like a campaign slogan, but how we can put the human back in AI if it was never there in the first place?

Ok, all seriousness aside. Humans need to be at the center of AI.

And more specifically, your zone of genius, your POV, your experiences, opinions, your unacknowledged great ideas you take for granted.

AI has given us a wonderful opportunity to outsource the busy work, while we finally focus on our craft, our art, our innovations.

And AI can help us!

Here’s a little story to illustrate my point.

I had a weird experience with Claude. I was using it (him? her?) as my confidant, sharing maybe a little too much personal information.

It suddenly told me: “Your patterns all point to one thing: you’re great at highlighting other people and extracting their zone of genius. You ghost-write books for them; you organize events so they can speak; you interview them and spread their message. You’re giving everybody a platform but yourself.”

Claude almost made me want to cry by showing myself to me. (Get yourself together, Fernando).

But what this showed me is that, despite what my son told me, AI can be beneficial…at extracting that sumthin’ sumthin’ that makes you special.

Which in today’s world is more important than ever.

AI can handle the busy work so we can focus on our art

Artists feel like they were put on this earth to create their art, not balance their books or create funnels.

But sometimes they drown in busy work.

The beauty of AI is that we can automate all that stuff so we can do the wonderfully human task of creating art.

And yes, I also mean entrepreneurs, founders, and creators. We all do art.

What’s more artistic than innovating new technologies that are a pleasure to use everyday?

AI can make our dreams come true

Ok, stay with me here.

Two of the speakers at the YouXAI Summit, Dariia Isyk and Shakhlo Juraboeva, from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, respectively, designed and shipped their own app called AdmitAI while still students at Baylor University.

The app helps international students navigate the labyrinthine process of applying to an American university.

Are Dariia and Shakhlo engineering students?

No. Shakhlo is studying finance. Dariia is pursuing an International Studies degree.

In my interview with them, Shakhlo said, “In the world of AI I think we can learn anything from zero, or create anything we want from zero, because everything is easy, the only thing we need is an idea.”

We need an idea. That’s deep.

The one skill we need now is to actually develop ideas, but our idea muscle has been under-developed because we’ve been so focused on the “how” instead of the “what.”

If we have the idea, then “...we can learn anything from zero, or create anything we want from zero because everything is easy.”

AI makes it easy to implement our idea.

Think about a movie producer or a director. They don’t carry the camera or hold the mic boom. They don’t put the make-up on the actors, nor get their wardrobe ready for the next scene.

They created the idea for the movie, and orchestrate the whole thing through a team of specialists.

They were the intellectual authors of the blockbuster.

That’s the same for those of us who have a crazy idea we want to bring into existence. AI is our team of specialists.

What’s missing in today’s world are ideas. AI can take care of the rest!

This is where I see that apparently contradictory explanation of the post-AI backlash - the putting of the human back into AI - while going whole hog into AI.

It’s a new paradigm, a new way of thinking.

Just like TV used to be just radio shows on a sound stage, until we figured out we can do so much more with it.

Right now we’re using AI like we’re on a sound stage with cameras filming us.

But we need to use it as our implementation partner, our specialists, and as a way to help us see our hidden genius

4. What I’m Reading Right Now

I’m really excited about my buddy Tommy Landry’s book, “From SEO to AEO to GEO: The New Rules of Search in the Age of AI.”

Tommy’s been a friend since 2009. We met during that weird period when the Great Recession coincided with the rise of social media.

We were both going to the new meetups popping up like mushrooms all over Austin: the Big Ass Twitter Happy Hour (which later became the Big Ass Social Media Happy Hour); the Austin Social Media Club; Blogathon, etc.

Tommy staked his claim as Austin’s SEO expert, won a bunch of awards, and became the guy we all referred our clients to when they needed SEO.

Then the sky fell again, but this time it was AI. It pulled the rug out from content marketers and SEOs.

And Tommy being Tommy, he pivoted, immersed himself in AEO/GEO research, and emerged as an expert.

His book is the culmination of this work.

From schema markup, to .JSON files, to entity optimization, and snackable, self-contained paragraphs, his book as it all.

Ignore it a your peril!

You can pick up his book here on Amazon.

5. Idea Worth Considering: Your AI self-interview

I told you above about Claude reading my patterns back to me and nearly making me cry into my coffee.

I want to be careful about how I frame that, because if you open a fresh chat window and type “what’s my zone of genius,” you’ll get a horoscope. Warm, flattering, completely useless.

It worked for me because I’d been feeding it for months. Meeting transcripts, half-finished ideas, client calls, the story about the girl at the leadership retreat in Houston that I’d told maybe four people in forty years.

It had material. It wasn’t guessing about me, it was noticing something across a pile of evidence I’d handed over without realizing I was building a case file.

So if you want to try this deliberately, start by giving it something to work with.

Dump in a year of your LinkedIn posts. Transcripts from three or four client calls. The origin story you tell at every networking event. Then ask it what you keep coming back to without noticing, or what you do for people that you seem to think is normal.

Here’s the part that matters, though. The right answer will not feel like a revelation. It’ll feel obvious, and slightly embarrassing, and your first instinct will be to wave it off.

“Well, sure, but that’s just how I am, everybody does that.”

That’s the tell. That’s the whole thing. What you dismiss as “just how I am” is the thing your market can’t get anywhere else.

(And if it tells you you’re a visionary thought leader, close the window. It’s flattering you.)

See you next week!

Fernando Labastida

There are only two days left for the $59 early bird price for the You X AI = Unstoppable summit.

This pricing tier expires at midnight, July 31st.

Get your ticket here:

https://youxai.live

On August 1st, prices go up to $79.

Still not sure about the summit?

Check out the YouTube channel where we interview the speakers:

https://www.youtube.com/@youxaiwaco/videos

And check out our trailer. Give me your feedback on the video; reply below!

In this issue

1. YouXAI Speaker Announcement - Hope Koch, the Godfrey Sullivan Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics, Hankamer School of Business · Baylor University

2. Franken-Marketing - A battle-hardened CMO texted me an unprompted four-level diagnostic. I’m posting it.

3. Worth Your Time - The book on why B2B marketing became a sea of sameness, from Gong’s first CMO

4. One Idea to Steal - The 3x-a-day AI chief-of-staff practice I run my whole business on

YouXAI Speaker Announcement:

Closing Keynote Speaker, Hope Koch, the Godfrey Sullivan Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics, Hankamer School of Business · Baylor University, Joins the YouXAI Speaker Roster

When I first met our closing keynote speaker at the Starbucks just off I-35 on exit 304, right next to the Buc-ee’s, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Was she going to be some ivory-tower, unapproachable professor? Was she going to be academic and judgmental?

I was nervous.

But instead I met a charming, approachable, in-the-trenches AI practitioner who also happens to have a PhD and publishes in prestigious academic journals.

A perfect combination.

And when I asked her to be our closing keynote speaker, she enthusiastically said yes.

First, the official stuff: Dr. Koch is the Godfrey Sullivan Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University.

She’s been teaching emerging technology for 25 years; she’s a· member of the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council; and she has been teaching “the future of business” since the internet WAS the future.

In our podcast interview for the summit, she told me: “I’ve been at this since the internet was the emerging technology.”

Dr. Koch’s talk title itself, “HOPE: Human Opportunity in a Period of Exponential Change,” is a compelling look at the parallels between today’s unique confluence of events, and the events of the 1960s: The Vietnam war, civil rights, chaos and friction, combined with the exponential leaps in technology - sending a man to the moon, the invention of ARPANET (the precursor to today’s internet), and the explosive growth in jobs, university education, and prosperity.

“It feels like a lot of tension right now and a lot of friction, but with our help, it’s gonna raise us all to a new level,” she told me.

And when she said those words, I too felt a sense of hope.

In case you think that Dr. Koch is just going to give an “inspirational speech,” she will actually show us how to build our own AI agent.

How cool is that?

If you want to catch Dr. Koch and loads of other fascinating, approachable speakers and workshop instructors, sign up for the You X AI Summit now.

Register Now

The $59 early bird tickets go away next Friday, so buy your tickets now!

Franken-Marketing and the 5-level founder POV maturity model

I was at the gym with my wife in Uruapan, Mexico this week, listening to a podcast interview with the CMO of a $500-million-a-year HR software company.

He was explaining why he’d been hired: to build the brand.

The company had already run the whole performance marketing playbook: ads, outbound, SDRs making cold calls and sending cold emails.

But now, with growth slowing, they were going back to figure out their messaging and positioning. Testing messages with segments. Trying out value props.

When I made my way from the free weights to the squat machine, I realized what was bothering me: they were doing marketing backwards!

Messaging and positioning aren’t the paint you buy when the ads stop working. They’re supposed to be the founder’s DNA infused into the company from the very beginning!

What this company was doing - and what I’ve since confirmed most SaaS companies do - is stitch a brand onto a body that grew up without one.

Franken-marketing.

Here’s how it feels from inside a company living it: It’s a dull toothache.

• Ads cost more and convert less.

• The SDRs make more calls and book fewer meetings.

• The reps struggle to explain the product

• Prospects can’t tell you apart from the other eleven tabs they have open.

Everyone works harder for less, and nobody can point at the thing that’s broken, because nothing is broken.

The whole go-to-market just gets expensive and anxiety-ridden…like Sisyphus pushing a boulder uphill, every quarter, from the bottom.

And you ignore a dull toothache, right up until midnight, when it becomes a roaring emergency, and then you have to get an emergency root canal at 8 AM the next morning.

Now the other path.

The One Unforgettable Idea

When I drove to the San Antonio airport last week, I stopped at a Buc-ee’s, like every sensible Texan.

Buc-ee’s was built on one unforgettable idea: clean bathrooms on a road trip. Everything else - the gas station department store, the carnival atmosphere, the well-trained staff who spontaneously break out into a chant, the Dutch soccer tourists filming the beaver - grew out of that founding conviction.

But the original, unforgettable idea was clean bathrooms.

FedEx had one (next-day delivery). Domino’s had one (30 minutes or it’s free).

And driving with my wife the other day, I tested one unforgettable idea that doesn’t have a slogan, but almost everybody knows it intuitively.

I asked her: when you think of Apple, what’s the one concept that comes to mind? She thought for two seconds and said, “Beauty.”

That’s Steve Jobs’ zone of genius. The barefoot hippie with the Bhagavad Gita, imprinted so deep into a company that it still runs the place fifteen years after his death.

The unforgettable idea was never bolted on. It’s Jobs’ DNA on the company he co-founded.

He is literally the ghost in the Apple machine.

So where does that leave the rest of us?

The Founder POV Maturity Model

I was thinking about how to sharpen this idea of the founder’s zone of genius - their one unforgettable idea that literally sends their company into the stratosphere- and I decided to bounce the idea off my buddy Russ Somers, a serial marketing leader.

He said, “Fernando, I think in infomercials.”

Picture those late-night TV infomercials, when you’re eating ice cream and pizza, watching a guy with a balding problem, embarrassed to ask that pretty girl out on a date. And then the afterimage of his full head of hair, looking debonair, at a fine dining establishment with his beautiful date.

In Russ’s late-night infomercial, you have the harried marketer looking at their Meta advertising dashboard, wondering why the cost of ads is going up, why conversions are down, and dreading the come-to-Jesus meeting with the CMO.

Then the after scene: the marketer is in a celebratory pose, two fists punching the air. Their ads are landing spectacularly well, conversions are through the roof, clients are attracted by the message.

And the solution? The marketer had excavated the founder’s previously unrecognized point-of-view - their zone of genius - which just so happened to be that one unforgettable idea that forms a traction beam to their ideal clients.

About 30 minutes after our call, Russ texted me a framework: a maturity model for that founder’s point of view, which eventually turns into that unforgettable idea.

Five levels.

• L1: At the bottom, the founder doesn’t have much of a POV, and they randomly evangelize it when they remember to.

• L2: The founder has a POV they love, and they start talking about it on social media. But it doesn’t resonate with the market.

• L3: The next level is the founder's POV that resonates, but it doesn’t result in any commercial activity.

• L4: This level is almost nirvana. The founder’s POV resonates and converts, but it only lives in the founder’s mouth. The sales, marketing, and product teams haven’t incorporated it yet.

• L5: At the top, the POV is so synchronized into the company that the product, sales, and marketing all carry the same unforgettable idea. The company becomes a runaway success!

Every founder already has the idea inside of them, but it hasn’t been excavated yet.

They brush it off like, “That’s common knowledge.”

But the idea is staring them right in the face. And if they only recognized it, they could go from struggling to interstellar in 5 seconds.

I explain the full ladder, with what to do at each level, in this week’s video above.

Where do you fall on the founder POV maturity level?

Next week: what happened when I started running founders through the excavation.

Worth Your Time

The book Courageous Marketing — Udi Ledergor. The Gong CMO-turned-evangelist opens with the diagnosis this whole issue orbits: B2B lives in a sea of sameness because marketers won’t paint outside the lines.

Safe marketing, boring results. Worth reading as the “what it costs” companion to today’s video.

While you read, notice how many of his examples of courage are really just a founder’s conviction finally allowed out of the building.

One Idea to Steal

Put your business on a three-status-check-a-day rhythm with an AI chief of staff.

Mine runs on Claude: a 7 AM briefing that reads yesterday’s meeting transcripts and my inbox, then proposes the day’s priorities.

A 2 PM pulse to catch what blew up.

A5:30 PM debrief that extracts every promise I made on calls - and overnight, drafts the deliverables so they’re waiting for my yes/no in the morning.

The steal: you don’t need my whole setup. Start with one scheduled prompt - “read my calendar and inbox, tell me the three things that matter today” - and run it every morning this week.

Success signal: the first morning it surfaces something you’d forgotten you promised.

Reply prompt

Which level is your founder POV stuck at - 1 through 5? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.

PS: YouXAI is September 12 in Waco - one day on being more human in the age of AI. Early Bird is $59 through July 31, then it goes up: youxai.live

I get to make a big announcement today, and I’ve been sitting on it impatiently.

Bryan Eisenberg is opening YouXAI.

If you’ve been in marketing long enough, that name needs no introduction: Bryan and his brother Jeffrey coined the term “conversion rate optimization” back when most companies didn’t have a website worth optimizing.

Eleven books. Two million published words. Columns in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Thirty years spent understanding why people say yes online.

That’s the man who walks onto our stage first on September 12 in Waco.

And it’s more than a big name on a poster. When I interviewed Bryan for the speaker preview series, he told me something disarming: everything he spent 30 years mastering can now be generated for free by AI.

Instead of flinching, he rebuilt his whole operation around the one thing that survived. That conversation is below - and don’t skip the part about the job listings that beat an industry with 80% turnover.

The summit is in Waco, Saturday, Sept. 12th, 8am to 5 PM. Early-bird tickets only $59 until July 31. Register below:

Grab your early bird tix!

Bryan Eisenberg has spent 30 years getting good at something that just became free.

He and his brother Jeffrey coined the term “conversion rate optimization” before most marketers knew there was a science to it.

They published two million words across eleven books, wrote columns for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and built an entire professional identity around understanding how to persuade people online.

It is, by any measure, hard-won expertise.

And in a preview conversation ahead of his opening keynote at YouXAI, September 12, in Waco, Bryan said the quiet part out loud: none of that scarcity protects him anymore. Anyone can generate the content he spent decades learning to write.

Every technology that ever mattered did the same thing

Bryan’s framing for this moment isn’t really about AI. It’s about friction, and the long history of technology removing it.

“What happens in each step of those, there’s friction that got removed that makes it easier for people to publish,” he said, walking through the sequence: hand-scribed books, then the printing press, then radio licenses, then a handful of TV channels, then a million streaming services, then the democratized internet.

Every step, the barrier to putting out content dropped.

“And so when you kind of inverse that, there’s no friction. In all persuasive momentum, there’s two things that you gotta work on.”

Today, he said, that friction has hit zero. “You can generate print, you can generate pictures artificially, you can generate videos now, automatically. Zero friction.”

Which leaves exactly one variable that still separates one piece of content from a million identical ones: motivation.

And the only motivation that survives zero friction, Bryan argued, is human connection. “That trust factor only happens between real humans.”

This is the exact inversion the YouXAI thesis is built on. When the technical barrier disappears, the differentiator stops being technical and becomes personal — the specific, unautomatable fact of who you are and who trusts you.

The system: one recording, five outputs, zero manual labor

Bryan didn’t leave this as theory. He built the actual production line.

Every Friday, he records one or two guests for his podcast — a show with a 12-to-15-week publishing lag long enough that, by his own admission, “I barely remember what we discussed during the podcast.”

When an episode nears publication, the old process meant manually finding the YouTube video, copying the transcript, pulling clips through a separate tool, and then writing a blog post for his podcast’s home, a separate post for his personal site, a LinkedIn post, and posts for Instagram and Facebook. Each one, by hand, one platform at a time.

“I have now automated every single one of those steps,” Bryan said, “including the initial draft of both our blog posts. But it’s doing that in a very humanized voice.”

That last clause is the whole point. He didn’t build a system that produces generic AI content across five channels. He built a system that produces his voice across five channels, faster than he could type it himself.

The job posting that beat an 80% turnover industry standard

The clearest proof of what “humanized voice, automated at scale” actually buys you didn’t come from his marketing business. It came from his home care agency.

Bryan recently interviewed Kelly Moreno, chief solution officer at Workforce Solutions Rural Capital of Texas, about aligning job requirements with real skills.

He took her advice and applied it to something that matters directly to his bottom line: how his home care agency writes job listings for caregivers.

“Telling the right story in our job listings has made our recruiting for our caregivers so much easier,” he said, “because they’re coming in with the mission. Our retention far outweighs the industry standard of 80% turnover.”

The mechanism is exactly the same one from his content system: he wrote the story once, in his own voice, and used AI to generate consistent variations in that same brand voice going forward, “because sometimes you get busy, you forget, and you don’t want to retract your own.”

The story has to start human. The scale comes from AI. In an industry defined by churn, that combination is the difference between constantly re-hiring and actually retaining people.

The Chamber calendar, or: buying back the thing AI can’t replace

Bryan is, by his own description, “almost a fixture” at the Round Rock Chamber of Commerce - at nearly every one of the more than 100 events it runs each year. That presence isn’t decorative. It’s the actual mechanism behind everything else he does.

But a weekly podcast recording collides with a Chamber event every other month, and he kept missing them.

So he built an AI agent to scrape the Chamber’s calendar month to month, cross-check it against his own schedule, and flag conflicts before they happen. As simple and unglamorous a use of AI as exists, and one of the most valuable things he’s automated.

“I want to be present in person,” he said. The AI’s entire job is protecting the thing AI can’t do for him.

Bryan traces the whole philosophy back to a line from his first mentor, long before the internet existed: “I’m temporarily motivated to be permanently lazy.”

That is, he said, “the blessing of AI.” Not removing effort from your life, but removing the repetitive effort so what’s left is the relationship-building no system can fake. “The reason I can get to do so many things is because I keep buying back my time.”

What this means for you

Bryan’s one-line summary of all of it: “The more you are you, the better the AI is actually gonna be.”

That’s not a slogan. It’s an operating instruction.

Before you automate anything, write the thing in your own voice first: the job listing, the blog post, the brand story.

Then use AI to scale that voice across every channel and every repetitive task standing between you and the next in-person conversation.

The automation isn’t the differentiator. It’s the delivery mechanism for the differentiator, which was you the whole time.

Bryan Eisenberg opens YouXAI on September 12 in Waco, and he’ll go deeper on the exact systems behind all of this.

Early bird tickets are $59 through July 31 at youxai.live.

— Fernando Labastida YouXAI Speaker Preview Series

Grab your early bird tix now: $59

Hi there!

I’m writing to you today from Round Rock, Texas, the up-and-coming suburban city just to the north of Austin…home to Dell, The Round Rock Express baseball team, and James Talarico!

In this edition:

• The YouXAI Summit, September 12th, 2026

• Why the Viral Genius Framework could be the next business model for the post-AI era

• Why you might already be positioned to be found on AI

I’m putting my money where my mouth is

_{Me with Hope Koch, closing keynote for YouXAI, at the set of Rogue Media Network}

A few weeks ago I repositioned this newsletter from Strike Marketing to B2B Events. My thesis: in-person and virtual events are the post-AI marketing cheat code.

And because I’m so immersed in my daily tasks (sometimes it feels like I’m a trout swimming upstream against a current of tasks), I hadn’t realized: I’m already doing the B2B events thing!

I’m actually organizing the You X AI = Unstoppable summit in Waco, TX, on Sept. 12th!

I’m literally already putting my money where my mouth was!

Come to Waco Sept. 12th

Look, I get it. Waco has had a bad rap in the past. But I’m telling you, it’s a different city.

Chip and Joanna Gaines, the TV personalities from the reality show “Fixer Upper,” have built Magnolia Market, a flagship retail experience featuring home and garden shops, a baking company, coffee shop, and a lawn with food trucks.

You also have Baylor University. The Dr. Pepper Museum. Startup Waco. 25N coworking, and so much more.

It’s a rising city.

And we’re hosting the You X AI = Unstoppable summit there at the beautiful Performing Arts Community Center.

The premise: the future doesn’t belong to the people who use AI the best. It belongs to the people who use AI to amplify what makes them unmistakably human.

Some of the notable speakers:

• Bryan Eisenberg, New York Times bestselling author of 11 books, including “Call to Action” and “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark

• Hope Koch, Godfrey Sullivan Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics, Hankamer School of Business · Baylor University

• Russ Henneberry, co-author of Digital Marketing for Dummies. He’s the Founder of theCLICK, an AI marketing training and community platform for the modern marketer.

• Andrew Lane, founder of Design Hacker and Brand Builder Pros, helping entrepreneurs leverage AI to build standout brands, marketing assets, and visual identities that convert.

• Tommy Landry, founder and principal of Return On Now, an Austin, Texas-based digital marketing and AI visibility consultancy.

• Two international students from Baylor who have created and launched an AI app called AdmitAI that helps foreign students navigate the American university application process

To get to know them, check out our YouTube channel where we’ve posted interviews with our speakers (more videos coming soon).

And much much more…

Come to Waco! I’d love to see you there!

Click here to register - early bird pricing of $59 ends July 31st.

Get your $59 early bird ticket

Why the Viral Genius Framework could be the next business model for the post-AI era

I recorded my first video in a series on the Viral Genius Framework (the framework that undergirds the YouXAI Summit).

Outside Lamppost Coffee in Round Rock, eleven months ago, my friend Bryan Eisenberg went quiet in the middle of our conversation.

I’d been explaining how I work with founders: the interviews, the pattern-hunting, their beliefs, and how I was turning those into books and events.

He stared off into the trees long enough that it got awkward. Then he looked at me and blurted out: “Viral Genius.”

I said, “Viral Genius?”

He saw the perplexed look in my eyes, and went on to explain: “What you do for founders…by extracting their hidden zone of genius…that’sthe Viral Genius Framework!”

I thought it was a really clever name. I tested it out at networking events, and with friends.

Everybody was intrigued. One company owner said, “That’s a really cool name.”

Then I ignored it for almost a year.

And the other day I got together with Bryan again, and I was explaining to him the concept of the YouXAI Summit.

He looked at me with that look in his eyes that said, “Are you serious?”

He said, “That’s the viral genius. You’ve been ignoring it for a year, but it’s all you’ve been doing.”

You see, I was uncomfortable with the word “viral” because I wasn’t making anybody go viral with the LinkedIn algorithm. I was just sharing their ideas.

Bryan clarified: “Think about it. You’re helping extract their unique ideas and getting their ideas to spread. It’s like TED: ideas that spread.”

Ahhhhh, now it all makes sense. And yes, I’ve been circling around this idea for years!

What I’ve been running away from has been staring me in the face the whole time, and I never noticed it.

So I decided to go all in on my own zone of genius.

This week I published the first episode of a seven-part video series built around those two words. It’s embedded above, and I want to give you the short version of why it exists.

The AI shift that spurred the framework

You’ve felt the shift even if you haven’t named it.

You read a post and it’s pretty good. Then you read another, and another.

Different authors, different industries, all polished, all articulate, all forgotten ten seconds later.

AI has made average incredibly easy to create, and when average becomes free, being average stops being valuable.

We’ve hit one of those rare moments when technology changes the basis of competition itself.

• The Industrial Revolution commoditized manufacturing.

• The internet commoditized distribution.

• AI has commoditized average.

So what becomes scarce? The things no model can generate on your behalf: judgment, taste, originality, trust, humanity.

The hundred-year-old story that’s still relevant today

There’s a hundred-year-old story that explains what to do about it.

Claude Hopkins, the copywriter behind Scientific Advertising, was hired to fix sales for Schlitz Beer.

The brewmasters walked him through their process:

Bottles sterilized with live steam.

Water drawn from deep artesian wells.

Obsessive filtration at every stage.

Hopkins asked why they didn’t tell people any of this. The brewmaster shrugged: “Every brewery does this!”

“Maybe they do,” Hopkins said. “But your customers don’t know that.”

Schlitz became one of the biggest beer brands in America without changing the beer. They changed what people noticed.

And I’m convinced every founder has a Schlitz moment of their own. Something clients constantly thank you for that you’ve stopped seeing, because you’ve lived with it too long.

The Viral Genius Framework is a five-step answer to that blindness, and the episode walks through every step.

You find what you’re blind to: the stories you keep telling, the questions people always ask you, the process that feels ordinary to you and remarkable to everyone else.

You give it a name, because your genius isn’t useful until people can remember it. You turn it into intellectual property - books, frameworks, summits, keynotes - assets that compound instead of content that evaporates.

You create trust experiences, because AI can generate infinite information but it can’t create the shared human gatherings where trust actually gets built.

And then, only then, you bring in AI to amplify it all. The order is the argument. Amplified average is still average, just louder.

One line from the episode matters more than the rest. Five years from now, nobody will ask whether you know how to use AI; they’ll assume you do, the way nobody asks today whether you know how to use email.

The question they’ll ask is why should I choose you. Your answer won’t be your product or your prompts. It will be the person you’ve spent your entire life becoming.

It took Bryan five seconds to see my viral genius. It took me eleven months to believe him. My hope is this series helps you find yours a whole lot faster.

Next week, Episode 2: how I actually start excavating a founder’s genius, and why the answers are almost never where people expect.

What’s the thing your clients keep thanking you for that you’ve stopped noticing? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.

Note: I created an app to get the process started. Answer 12 questions about you and your business here, and you’ll get a complete strategy:

• Positioning

• Messaging

• Your new category

• A plan for your book, event, content cascade.

Check out the app here:

Discover Your Zone of Genius

One Brilliant Idea: Tell the Same Story Everywhere — or AI Tells Your Old One

Tell the same story everywhere, or AI will tell your old one for you.

That’s the warning from Tommy, founder of ReturnOnNow and a YouXAI Summit speaker.

ChatGPT and Claude describe your business by assembling signals from your homepage, about page, LinkedIn, directories, and reviews.

If your messaging has evolved but half your properties still say the old thing, the models get confused.

They’ll place you in the wrong market, against the wrong competitors.

Tommy’s fix costs nothing: audit every channel you control and make sure each one describes you the same way.

Catch Tommy’s full talk at YouXAI, September 12 in Waco.

That’s it for today’s newsletter, and I’ll see you next week!

Cleveland, Ohio, September 9th, 2013. 8 AM.

It was the morning of the first date of Content Marketing World - the third CMWorld after its debut in 2011.

I was at the opening keynote of Content Marketing World. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, gave an amazing, inspiring speech.

All the breakouts, the keynotes, the vendor booths, the after party at The Blues Brothers nightclub, and the trip to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, created an experience like no other I had participated in.

I felt like I was part of an exciting new movement. A marketing revolution where artists, writers, and intellectuals could finally participate in marketing in a meaningful way.

I went again the next year. And the next.

I made new friends. I got to know the man, the myth, the legend - Joe himself - and we became friends.

And the most important thing: I felt like I had found my tribe. My community. My people.

What started as a blog - the Content Marketing Institute blog - turned into an annual conference, an advisory, a physical magazine, a series of podcasts, and the intellectual nerve center for the discipline and practice of content marketing.

But the foundation was the annual conference - Content Marketing World - where friends, partnerships, companies, and a tribe of loyal adherents were forged.

In 2016, Joe sold the Content Marketing Institute to UBM - a global events business based out of the UK.

From that one exit, Joe and his wife Pam became wealthy. Joe leveraged his newfound wealth to:

• Write a novel

• Travel to Italy to meet his extended family

• Boost his “Orange Effect” nonprofit organization

• And start another company - The TIlt - to help creators start content-based businesses

But the important thing to note: the main asset UBM was buying was Content Marketing World

UBM CEO Tim Cobbold said: “Our Events First strategy focuses on improving the quality of UBM’s portfolio. And Content Marketing World, as the leading event in this high-growth sector, enhances our portfolio...”

And it gave Pulizzi $17.6 million.

Tonight at 6 PM, at Besos Cocina & Cantina, I’m speaking about this at my debut meetup for my new meetup group, “B2B Events”.

I’ll explore:

• Why Content Marketing World became so valuable that UBM acquired Content Marketing Institute - and what that teaches us about building business communities.

• The shift from the Attention Economy to the Trust Economy: why events may become more important, not less, in an AI-saturated world.

• How conferences, meetups, summits, and communities create “collective effervescence” - the emotional energy that no AI-generated content can replicate.

• Why the future marketing funnel may look less like a funnel and more like a gathering place.

• How founders, consultants, agencies, and B2B companies can use events to build authority, relationships, and revenue without needing thousands of followers.

If you’re interested in the future of B2B marketing, community building, events, AI, and thought leadership, join me for a lively discussion and networking with fellow professionals.

Sign up here, and I’ll see you tonight!

Register Now

https://www.meetup.com/b2b-events/events/315173678/

P.S. Remember: your drink (margarita, mojito, Cuba Libre, whatever) is on me!