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:
The new B2B go-to-market strategy for the age of AI-slop supersaturation
The midterms and AI backlash
What I’m reading: Sales Pitch - How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win, by April Dunford
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:
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).
A buried feature. One feature, hidden in a bullet list, that matters a lot to one niche.
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.
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.
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:
“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.
“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.
“Take me back to that last call. What did you ask in that moment?” Now you’re reliving it, and the details come out.
“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.
“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:
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.
Your speaker pages. When you speak at a conference, ask the organizers to put your One Unforgettable Idea on your speaker profile.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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