In this issue
The Main Idea — The genius you can’t see because you use it every day (plus the full question list)
YOU×AI Spotlight — Jackye Clayton on why everyone’s building AI agents backwards ($79 tickets end Aug 31)
Worth Your Time — I got an advance copy of my friend Gerardo Dada’s new strategy book
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:
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.
What does everyone in this market believe about this problem that you think is wrong?
When you see a competitor’s marketing or a conference talk in your space, what makes you wince? What are they misunderstanding?
What do customers say they want, and what do they actually need? Where’s the gap?
What’s the real cost of this problem that never shows up on anyone’s budget line? Who’s paying it?
If this problem never gets solved, what quietly breaks at these companies in five years?
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:
Tell me about the specific moment you realized this problem was solvable and nobody was solving it right. Where were you?
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?
Was there a moment you tried to solve it the “normal” way and watched it fail? What happened?
When you first told people your idea, what pushback did you get? Who said it wouldn’t work — and why were they wrong?
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?
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:
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?
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?
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Walk away. Then I go think about it for another 15 or 30 minutes, away from the screen. The idea keeps cooking.
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