If I Built An Audience From Zero In 2026, I'd Do This

So I've been seeing a few post go viral that is saying that value-based content is dead. And on the surface, it makes sense because AI can just generate it immediately. The barrier of entry for sharing useful information has gone to zero so much so that people don't view that type of information as useful anymore. And it doesn't help that there's just educational content everywhere as well. But the thing here is that if value-based content were actually dead, then it would no longer be value-based because then there's no value and value doesn't die. I'm talking about the content that changes your behavior. It hits you on such a level that you can implement it in your life and see a direct result. It's the type of content that you feel the urge to save and come back to, or it's the type of content that you share with a friend or in a group chat. So what people really mean when they're saying that value-based content is dead is that they're saying that basic educational content is dead. But that's what most beginner creators want to start doing. You've been told to start a personal brand, use this content template by me or other people. And it's kind of discouraging because you're like, well, now the thing I plan to do, to, I guess, save my future or do something that I've always wanted to do, doesn't work anymore. You can't just write a how-to post or a how-to thread or create a how-to YouTube video, or the top five ways to grow on social media on YouTube anymore and expect it to do well. As I talked about in the last video on how information products are dead or dying, all of this stuff goes through stages of market sophistication. And so now we've reached a point where we're just oversaturated with this how-to educational content. But value as a whole hasn't disappeared. It's just like with skill acquisition in the age of AI, the skills are just being abstracted up a layer. So the value is just being abstracted up a layer and you need to learn how to create that type of content or at least know what to try to create if you want to do very well. And this type of content, it's abstracting up into the layer of personal narrative, original thought, and taste. And if those don't make sense yet, trust me, they will because we have some cool stuff to talk about. This is the type of content that can't be replicated by anyone who just opens chat GPT and tells it in one sentence to generate content for them. Now, I know this is disappointing to some people. Oh no, you actually have to develop skills and you actually have to learn something. You can't just go the get rich quick route and gain a bunch of followers. But this is surprisingly good news for those who actually care about meaning, depth, authenticity, all of that stuff. You're doing this. You got into this whole creator game because you wanted meaningful work. You no longer wanted to work so that you no longer have to work anymore because you understand that retirement is just going to be as boring and suck at just as much as working. So while everyone is in this race for more volume, post more, publish more, and praying that they just win the algorithm slot machine, the real value lies in the complete opposite direction. It lies in the perspective that only you can provide, but that sounds very abstract. So we need to deconstruct that. So first, let's just talk about the psychology of value. Because if you don't understand what value is, how can you create it? And we'll start from a quote that I think is pretty common. We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. So most value-based content just feels interchangeable. And the important thing here is that anyone could post this type of content and nobody would know the difference. Because there's no energy signature that's yours. Now the fault of this lies in how creators are taught. They're taught to be objective, share facts, teach proven frameworks. They feel like if they don't do what works, they won't make it. But they aren't experienced enough to know what works. So they fall into that trap, obviously. But value isn't objective. Value is perception. And perception is shaped by the goal someone is trying to achieve. Think of it like this. Two people can read the same exact book. You think of a student reading a book and a businessman reading a book. They're going to get completely different insights from the book just based on what their goals are. The student is learning so that they can succeed in school. The businessman is learning so he can succeed in his project or product or business as a whole. They're completely different goals that require completely different actions to reach and the insights that they pull are going to shape the actions that they take to achieve those goals. That's just psychology and behavior in a very small nutshell. Now pay attention here because I feel like this could go over people's heads if you're just watching this just to watch it. Your audience on social media is composed of individuals with unique goals and those goals determine what registers as valuable to them. This means you can't create objectively valuable content. You can only create content that's valuable to someone with a specific goal and those someone's are randomly scrolling social media and you have a brief window in which they can be exposed to your content. So expecting one great post to just magically appear in front of the right people so that you pop off and go viral is silly. It takes six to 12 months to see any form of traction and AI isn't going to change that. Now when it comes to content there's one of two directions that you can take. You can go broader. You can target a broader goal. So something like improving your life and that attracts more people because more people can benefit from that goal and then you can go the specific route which is the traditional route of niching down which there's less people that can resonate with that goal and it may be difficult to get in front of people who have that goal because again, social media is so sparse. You can't directly target them like you can in ads or with cold outreach. So what people recommend when you start on social media is that you create a high ticket service so that you can make more money with less people because if you were to sell a low ticket product then you have to sell that to a ton of people in order to make the same amount of money that you would by selling one high ticket service to one person for like two to five thousand dollars and then they recommend that you focus on manual outreach so like cold DMs or cold emails to get a kick start which I think is an okay idea but it usually stems from a lack of understanding of how social media works which is what we're going to talk about closer to the end which is how to actually grow on social media because the thing there is if you start off hyper-specific then it's going to be very difficult to gain traction but if you start off super broad then it's going to be difficult to find the specific person that can benefit from the value you have to offer so you're stuck in this in-between and you don't know what to do so we're going to get to all of that I just wanted to preface with it but this means that you have to pick this means you have to differentiate yourself in some way this means you must have a perspective of your own you must share what you think rather than what you think you should think because some course taught you to think it so that's step one to creating actual value-based content not the stuff that AI can just replicate at the click of a button but with that said that doesn't mean that AI is the cause of the death of value-based content the person using the AI is the cause and personally I believe that most people maybe 95% plus people are going to be creating content with AI and that makes a lot of people angry because they think it's just going to lead to the dead internet but I don't think it is at all I think it's going to lead to a lot higher quality content higher signal content across the board because people will actually learn how to use AI and stop treating it as a slot machine and if that does make you angry and you're like no that's not going to happen come back to me in a year or two and I'll admit if I was wrong but this is also where the labor question comes in and when I say the labor question I mean the labor of actually putting words on a screen of actually typing out the content by hand to post it so the example I can give here is that writers get angry when they figure out that a best-selling author has a ghost writer the writers get angry but the readers don't care the writers say that they didn't actually write the book but James Patterson who has ghost writers is still a bestseller is still praised to this day he has an audience of readers that cares about the story not who typed the words Patterson provides the vision the direction the taste that's where the value lives a complimentary example to hammer this home is that a film director doesn't manually handle the camera they don't manually build the sets themselves and mix the audio they have a film crew but no one questions whether Spielberg Steven Spielberg actually made the movie it's still a Spielberg film so value lies in the distinction between labor and direction and content is moving the same way from content creator to content director and the people who resist this are the ones that have attached labor to their identity they can't separate the typing from the thinking so they assume that no one else can either they're still operating from the employee mindset rather than the entrepreneur or the CEO mindset who has to delegate an outsource while still maintaining the quality of the vision the taste, the et cetera the skills are abstracting up a layer but with this the reader only sees the output you don't judge a system by its process you judge it by the result and if that output or result is good meaning it's original, opinionated and shaped by taste the reader doesn't care how it was made because it still benefits it's still valuable to them and the goals they're trying to achieve like we just discussed so what I can say right now in this part of the video is to create the content that you want to see in the world because I'm guessing that that's not more flavorless AI generated content that comes out of the box so that leads to point number two which is the slop spectrum the spectrum of AI slop so for the slop spectrum we're going to think of it as like a rainbow I guess you could say right and you have slop on this side and you have art on this side and the best way I can illustrate the difference between the two is from a tweet from Lobo, a Lobo Salvaje on X and it says we live in a world without taste because taste requires judgment and judgment requires hierarchy we've been taught to reject both taste is slowly cultivated over time the exposure, repetition, comparison and the willingness to say this is better than that the modern world wants everything to be flat interchangeable and instantly gratifying real taste excludes to have taste is to believe in an objective reality to turn one thing down in favor of another to say no to inclusion the point there is that there was plenty of slop before AI existed in terms of content these were the generic how-to threads they were the recycle tips that were repackaged into a new hook they were the empty platitudes or fortune cookie quotes that was human slop but we just didn't call it that so the variable that separates slop from signal or slop from art has never been who created that specific part or what tool created it be it AI or Photoshop or some writing app or whatever it is it's taste and taste requires discernment it's the experience that allows you to say what should and shouldn't belong in the final result but most people are just afraid to do this it is so much easier to produce content that offends nobody or excludes nobody or says nothing now what I've noticed is that artists or self-proclaimed artists have their panties all in a bunch because AI people who use AI have the audacity to call themselves AI artists but it goes both ways just just think about it for a second we don't call food that came out of the stove stove art we don't call writing that was written on a page word art art is something that transcends it transcends the norm and art is as subjective as value not everyone who just draws cool looking doodles on a page or even hyper realistic people that's not always art most of it is closer to slop when we look at the entire spectrum so most artists or self-proclaimed artists don't create art that's not a jab that's just reality and most AI artists don't create it either obviously but there's absolutely a way to create something with AI that moves the soul of another and transcends the norm of what is generated normally with AI if you deny that you are blinded by ideology now pertaining to content on one end you have content that's just generated without any personal context you type write a viral thread on productivity for me into chat gpt and you publish whatever comes out you don't ruthlessly edit it because you didn't write any of it that doesn't require vision that doesn't require curation that doesn't require taste that doesn't require any ideas of your own you're outsourcing everything you wouldn't just hire 10 people onto a team in the business and just be like okay build this it would be a lot more detailed than that because only you have the vision and you have to transmit that accurately to them in order to get the vision built now on the other end you have signal which is content that could only come from you so we can think about this again like directing a film if you hand a camera to someone and say make a movie you'll get something generic but if you provide the script, the shot list, the color palette, the pacing notes, the references if you make every meaningful decision and use the crew to execute your vision the film is yours the labor was distributed but the taste wasn't the same applies to content most of the famous people you watch you're just watching the individual but they have entire teams of people doing it I don't know if this is true this probably isn't true but I could imagine Alex Hormosi literally just sits down and the script is plopped in front of him and he just reads it to the camera but he's passed off so much of his context and knowledge to his employees that the script is usually good enough so the point here is that the more context you provide to the AI or even to yourself when you're writing content the further you move from slop to signal so to do this to prime yourself because this doesn't this doesn't just happen automatically you don't just sit down and start writing the best content you've ever written I want you to create an idea museum so there's two types of people here there's people who already have content and then there's the people who are just starting out so if you're the first if you already have content you want to go back through it you want to pull your best lines you want to pull the ideas that resonated you want to pull the frameworks that you came up with and then you put them into a document or you save them into a folder and that becomes your context library this is actually what we're building with Eden where I can drag everything into Eden itself because you have your drive where everything is transcribed you can paste a link you can upload your files you can create notes or documents like this how I outline this actual video and then you can chat with it or reference all of it with AI like I have an AI chat here I can connect this tweet to it if I want it or other things I can start chatting with it my PDFs I can app mentioned folders inside of here because this is where I see the future of writing and content going with programming it's a bit different you can have it be all agentic because it's very linear it's very hierarchical but with writing and other things where you kind of have to direct it like you would have filmed that can't be completely agentic so your idea museum is one of the many things that you can just pass off to AI and reference while you're ideating or writing if you are writing yourself or other things of that nature that makes it more personal and more unique but the same thing here applies as it would to a team is that sometimes you're going to have to get your hands dirty we were promised with AI that it was just going to do everything for us and solve all of our problems and maybe it'll do that in the future who knows but if you want it to actually be good you have to be the director now if you're just starting out with content then you do the same thing but with content that you aspire to be like you do it with other people's content for a bit until you are able to create your own so you save the post that make you stop your scroll you save the ideas that make you think damn I wish I wrote that you collect the paragraphs from newsletters or books or other things that changed how you think you build a museum of taste and over time you'll notice patterns and the more you immerse yourself in that you'll notice those patterns start to emerge naturally in your own writing or speaking that's how you develop the skill of taste is it's exposure over time it's repetition it's comparison it's doing the thing and coming back to it a year later and realizing oh this wasn't that good let me rewrite it another way that I agree with now because I've matured so the people who are afraid of AI were the people who never developed taste in the first place or don't understand how it works they were producing human slop and now they're competing with the machines that can produce slop faster because the only reason you would be afraid of AI in terms of content there's other things of course is if it threatened you if it threatened your survival if it threatened your job if it threatens your work and you aren't able to adapt and do your own thing and stay out ahead of the curve so that leads to point number three which is how to provide your unique form of value we'll start from a quote from my book Purpose in Profit that you can read free on my substack and that quote is you will never have access to another person's state of mind and they will never have access to yours this is the essence of human uniqueness to start this off volume never mattered everyone said it did because I can hear Alex Ormosi in GaryVee screaming at you to post more to publish more and that the more content you put out the more chances you have at success and that can obviously work just like anything can obviously work because if people have succeeded with it then it obviously works for that person please don't be one of those people that just comments that they're the exception but this never really made sense to me because when I tried it my ideas started to suffer and ideas are the crux of what make content do well you can create this highly polished hollywood level production youtube video but if the idea for the video sucks and the subsequent ideas inside of the video as key points suck then the video isn't going to do very well it's like you're putting shit in a box and then wrapping it as beautiful as possible you're putting more effort into the wrapping then you did what's actually being delivered so personally my content strategy has always been to do the bare minimum that I can keep up with consistently with my lifestyle and what allows me to generate very good ideas and I post those ideas across all platforms almost all at once in the form of one long form newsletter and one short form post and I do that without worrying about repeating myself because I'd rather get one great idea across than a thousand bad ones as an example here my newsletters and youtube videos have always been unconventionally long I can't tell you the amount of times that people have said oh damn if you created shorter youtube videos and you edited them a lot better which is kind of a jab at devon he doesn't like that stop because we under we kind of know what we're doing to an extent we don't know everything but there's a reason that we intentionally choose to go long and simple and not over edit it's because the audience or one the videos that I watch are that way and those are the videos I like to watch so I assume that there are people in my audience that like to watch those videos too I do not like the videos that try to summarize everything in five to ten minutes just to get the key points across where I learn nothing because usually the value lies in the nuance so people saying that oh your videos would do better if you edited them more or if you shortened them I don't think they would at all why? because I've tested it and years later of doing that and sticking with my guns I can confidently say that that was my edge that's what allowed me to break out and this is becoming more and more of a viable option the simple the raw the long path because with AI anyone can produce more volume they can publish thousands of posts in advance how can you compete with that aside from not doing that but that's just the exact thing if ideas matter more than ever you have to understand that more volume just equals more noise it's more people praying for the viral hit or hitting the jackpot in the algorithm when you have to realize that winning the lottery is not a smart game to play so the point is that AI is accelerating the death of average content the baseline is rising and the things that have always mattered are mattering more which are originality of thought novel perspectives opinion over fact storytelling signal so let me explain that last one a bit more just so it clicks signal your brain notices important ideas when you read something that clicks or something that feels true in a way that you hadn't articulated before your brain releases dopamine and you feel the excitement you want to share that thing you want to save that thing you want to become more curious about that thing you want to dive into it more that's when you know that you're on to something valuable that is unique to you signal is the thing that AI can't manufacture because AI doesn't get excited due to a sequence of uncountable events since birth that have led to the mind deciding that something is important enough to notice AI doesn't have a mission aside from the one it is assigned that frames your mind to notice what aids in the achievement of that mission it doesn't have taste it pulls from the average of everything it's seen and produces the average of everything it's seen and less instructed to follow the personal process that you reverse engineered through reflection now you on the other hand have a specific path that you're walking you have a specific future that you're building toward a specific set of problems that you're trying to solve that's your mission in your mission determines what registers as signal to you so in my eyes the best route to take is mission based over topic based when regarding a niche so topic based is the traditional approach where you pick a niche you pick a target audience and you become the go-to person for that topic now this works again as everything does but it boxes you in and it's now extremely easy to replicate if you fail at that or you want to pivot you're now starting over from scratch and that doesn't sit well with people who know that they're going to change in six to 12 months because humans change so this traditional path is anti-continuous learning it's anti-polymath and it's anti-human in many cases but mission based is different because you're not building authority around a specific topic you're leading people toward a transformation and anything that helps move people toward that transformation is free game for content so if you're a fitness guy in your mission is to help people lose weight but go a bit deeper than that what are you actually trying to help them do or you're trying to help them become a human weapon or you're trying to help them feel like a masculine father again feel like they're in their feminine figure again so they can go to the beach whatever that transformation or mission is anything that can help with that can be posted as content as long as it aligns with that so that could be mindset that could be psychology that could very well be philosophy that can be obviously be fitness or training or nutrition that may even be business it could be anything it's less about what the topic actually is and it's more about the ideas that help people achieve that mission now when I have a clear mission like helping people become future proof which is the literal title of my newsletter that's when my best work is born because I'm less focused on just providing value for a specific topic creating an alignment with a mission is taste applied to content strategy so you need to notice the ideas that specifically stick out to you you need idea flow if you aren't consuming from books or content or whatever it may be and you don't have a mission that is very apparent in your mind you're not going to notice those ideas but when you do you need to note them down you need to write about them you need to expand on them you need to think about them from a different angle or apply them to your own life and that's what you post so that leads to point number four which is how to actually grow on social media from zero followers and now every time I talk about this part I feel like it goes over most people's heads or they just don't understand it or they understand it but they avoid it because this is the difficult work posting content is the easy work and that is that you can't rely on the algorithm alone because everyone is competing for the same thing everyone is posting content in hopes that it goes viral everyone is playing the slot machine and sometimes you strike gold but you can't build a business on sometimes now actual social media growth kind of looks like this it's like kind of sort of linear and then you get a big spike when you hit the algorithm and then it's kind of sort of linear and then you hit a big spike but if you only aim for these big spikes that's not really a strategy it's probably best if you act like these are just never going to happen and you just grow linearly at a solid pace so what do you do if you're not going to rely on the algorithm and there's a few different things but the thing is is that you have to get in front of other people's audiences that means that other people have to share or interact with your content but if you don't understand psychology and incentives then that's going to be kind of hard for you so what that means is that you have to network and I'm as allergic to that word as you probably are I just don't like it, it sounds too corporate but it's what you have to do and many people get on social media because they want to avoid that and they also want to do something that they can do alone with no boss or no co-workers is just you and your keyboard but you still have to develop and use your social skills because the internet doesn't just change human nature it amplifies it, it scales it for over 150,000 years humans lived in small, close-knit groups survival required social cohesion, trust and cooperation those who were loyal to their tribe had a better chance at surviving they hunted more effectively, defended against predators and supported one another through hardship this is how your brain is wired Robin Dunbar, which is an anthropologist, found that humans can only maintain about 150 stable relationships and in today's world that sounds insane so it could probably be much less but you can observe this number and hunter gather tribes or military units or modern business teams when we try to build a loan we're fighting against thousands of years of evolutionary programming and social media is no different every creator you know is in a group chat with other creators they talk strategy, they share each other's posts they help each other grow by using basic traffic mechanisms like replying to their posts, retweeting their posts sharing their posts to their stories things like that and if you think this sounds fishy or weird I get it, I really do it kind of does but good luck in the game of business if you aren't willing to form alliances or find mentors or just play the multiplayer game the other thing is that without these types of groups or these tribes of people I wouldn't have met business partners that I have today co-founders that I have today I wouldn't have met lifelong friends and if you think about it it's kind of like finding a group of friends to play a video game with you party up so that you're more likely to win the game so a few things you can do here is one just reply to people but in a human way not a corporate way you don't just respond with "oh great insight" so an example here this is from a while ago from Justin Welch if you're called DM or email starts with iam we are we're a it's always an auto ignore remember this the next time you're writing and then I responded for the sake of getting giving a good example of a reply is kind of like a personal story like this this just sounds like two people talking back and forth the only cold emails I open are the ones that don't look like cold emails they look like they have genuine interest in what I do and you can tell they've studied every corner of your brand happens maybe one out of 500 emails people are much more likely to look at this and click on my profile and then follow me then if you just spam everyone with great insight or some AI-generated response the more personal it is to you the more likely people are going to actually look at your profile and this doesn't only apply to x or twitter applies to literally every platform and so what you do after you reply to enough people is that what you're doing there is you're seeding relationships because if you leave a genuine response and the other person sees it they're going to respect you more obviously than the people who are just spamming their replies with AI-generated crap and then they may even respond and you start talking and then what you do after that is you DM them and you just pick up the conversation there you look into their business more you read more of their content until something sticks out and then you can talk about how that related to you or how you liked it or how you were thinking about something similar if they post about their health journey then talk about yours and ask them for tips send them an article that you read on the health journey it's just like you need to show that you're like minded and have similar interests because that's how tribes stick together now a few more actually practical ways to grow and of course these are just screenshots that I have from twitter but again they work on any platform just get creative and apply them to that platform but Dickie Bush has an example here he wrote a thread with 11 of his favorite posts and what he does is he tags the top people or not top people he tags people with a decent following that he is either connected with or wants to connect with and then quotes their posts so this does a few things first if people actually read this thread then they're going to go and potentially follow Cody or follow George Mack so it benefits both George Mack and Cody and the nine other people that he mentioned in here to retweet this thread so that it gets more traffic so that they also benefit from it and you're getting in front of them with value because imagine if you were to just post a thread without mentioning these people with larger audiences you wouldn't have nearly as much potential right because let's say each of these people have 100,000 followers they probably have way more but that's 1.1 million potential people that this thread can be spread to versus if you were to just make a post to your audience and you have 300 followers then that's like a potential of 300,000 to 1,000 people if it picks up a little bit in the algorithm so you just have to play the game smartly now a few other ways to do this is to write a thread on one specific individual like Jack did here a while ago with Naval Ravicon he wrote a great quote and then he included 10 of the most powerful teachings and I'm pretty sure Naval either liked or retweeted this I don't think Joe Rogan would but a lot of people know who this is so this is called leveraging authority so nobody knows who you are or at the time nobody knows who Jack Moses is but since you're talking about someone that they do know about then they're much more likely to read your content and if you have some of your own unique flare inside of it then you're good to go and if you don't know how to apply this to other platforms this is a thread you can think of that as a thread on the threads platform or a carousel on instagram or even a full newsletter on substack and the same exact thing here because he saw that that one worked he did one on Andrew Huberman who a lot of people love so if you're curating content from Andrew Huberman according to your taste then you're in a pretty good spot and you may have the chance to do well and if you have a network of people if you have that tribe in the group that you're in and you send this to them and say hey guys I worked on this for a long time I'm trying to blow it out of the water can you guys help me with this and then send me anything you want me to share later and then they're likely to engage with it to at least pick it off the ground now another mechanism by which you can do this so we have replies and just content while leveraging authority is to quote tweet or just I guess commentate on a post that was already viral and give either some kind of contrarian advice or just good valuable advice and the last example I have here is kind of the same thing is leveraging authority where tail and Simmons is talking about Justin Welsh's method and the form of a carousel on LinkedIn so if you were to literally just focus on those and do each of those things at least 10 times a week right two to three times a day one to three times a day then you're going to get a lot further than if you're just posting content into the void and hoping that the algorithm takes you somewhere so my last tip is reiterating that you need to create the content you want to see in the world why? because you are the niche there are people like you who can benefit from what you've achieved there are people who are at a similar level as you who want to join you on your mission if you create for your past present and future self paired with the strategies we talked about you shouldn't have a problem making this work if you want to be notified about my videos and get the written version when they go out subscribe to my substack link in the description if you want to join the wait list for Eden which is the canvas software an intelligent drive that i was showing you to store all of your knowledge and be able to reference it with AI anything from youtube videos as well you can paste the youtube link it downloads transcribes it and you can reference it there and you can view it you can comment on it you can share it with other people it's a drive then the link is in the description for that as well we are rolling out to the next round of people at closer to the end of January so if you're on the wait list you will get an invite then and that's while we're still gearing up for public launch we have the mobile app almost ready desktop app will be really cool but aside from that feel free to like subscribe they're just buttons on your screen you can press them they're right there that would really help me out if you want to watch the audio version of this or future videos you can follow me on Spotify link in the description as well okay enough of that thank you for watching bye