Katelyn Bourgoin: You don't need a personal brand. You need an ownable idea.

The expert's paradox is the reason why this shit is hard, and it's why you can sit and talk to Claude for four hours or in some of my clients case months and months of conversations trying to figure out their messaging and not feeling like they're getting anywhere because that off-hand flip it thing that they say that nobody catches is the brilliance and they just dismiss it. Hey, welcome to the RealMine podcast where I, Alex M.H. Smith, the author of No Bullshit Strategy, explore the uncommon behaviors and outlier ways of thinking that produce outlier of results. We're knowledge and expertise as they are are converging around this best practice sludge. What you've got here is the high leverage antidote. And today is a special episode for solo businesses and thought leaders with a woman who has the exact prescription that you need to stand out in that space. So I hope that you enjoy it. Well, I'm delighted to be joined today by Caitlin Borgoyne. What did you just give people a little bit of your background and what you're up to now because it's some interesting stuff? I would say that background initially started as back in an agency life. I've started a branding agency and really had no business starting one. And it bill building that up to about an eight person team working with some pretty cool clients got restless, decided, hey, you know, it's not cool selling time for money. Maybe I should just start a tech company. Hard can that be. Turns out very fucking hard. Many, many such cases. Yeah, yeah, it looks so great from the outside inside. Like it's hard. But you know, managed to bootstrap it to the point where we were, you know, featured in Forbes. They were calling us the next LinkedIn for women, got some venture capital, built the team. I was a non-technical solo founder. It was real hard. And from the outside, it looked great. Inside everything was not working. We did not build a sticky product. People would come and not stay around. So within a few years, ended up having a close-back company, go bankrupt and decided, what am I going to be when I grow up? And luckily, for me, I had built this incredible network of startup founders and my VC had their portfolio of companies. They came to me and they were like, hey, we've got all these great companies that are building these like game-changing technologies, most of them technical founders. They have clients like NASA and Tesla. And yet they can't actually get people to buy the thing. And so I was like, all right, like I'll go work with them. If you're going to pay the bill, I need money desperately. So let's do this. And I would sit down at the table with all these really freaking brilliant people. And it asks in the question that we need to understand as marketers, which is tell me about your customers, like why are they choosing you? And nobody could give me a straight answer. And that led me down this rabbit hole. Like, why is that such a hard question? Why are some of you struggling to answer that? And I became obsessed with customer discovery, found jobs to be done, Bob and West End Clayton Christiansons work, mind blown, and eventually found my way to buy our psychology. And that's kind of where I hung my hat for the last five years. What are the kind of principles of the way that people pay attention and get persuaded? And how can we teach people those? Because if I understand those, creating content becomes infinitely easier. And so built that. And from that saw this thing that kind of became clearer and clear to me, which is that the people who were really popping off and building meaningful businesses and being seen as thought leaders, people like yourself, they had, they figured out this thing, which was they figured out how to be known for something hyper-specific. And they committed to it enough to get that. And I was like, why isn't that happening more often? And that became my new obsession. So now I help people find their ownable idea. And that's kind of the mental territory that they can play at their flag, become known for. And if they do it right, it'll sound like an echo coming from anyone else and it will spread beyond them. So that's the work today. So long journey to get here. What jumped out to me about your ownable idea idea is that I feel like that industry has evolved very, very rapidly. It went from nobody doing it to there being this huge window of opportunity where lots of people piled in and had quite an easy time of it. And I was perhaps, you know, part of that pile in maybe on the sort of latter, latter end of it. But now, now that everybody's trying to do it, it feels to me like the drawbridge has gone up and to actually build a reputation online as a solo person has become harder than ever. Hard to the point where I personally almost look at it now. And I'm obviously being slightly facetious when I say this, this isn't totally true. But I sort of think if you're starting now, don't bother. And but I do think that your ownable idea angle on it is one of the few remaining ways that a person can actually still start to get, still start to build leverage in a reputation in that game. But before we talk about the ownable idea, what, what do you think about that? My sort of intuition that there was a moment in time and it's passed. I would disagree with that. I would say there's a moment in time for every channel, right? And what's changed from what used to exist to today is that, of course, content creation has never been easier. There's a real anxiety in the world around becoming a thought leader building distribution. There's a big narrative out there that distribution is the mode. If you're an entrepreneur, you have to have distribution. What that essentially translates to is means like you need to be able to get your message out into the world. And one of the best ways to do that is to be the voice of that message and build your own thought leadership around it. So I think there's a lot of people who are feeling anxiety, feeling that they need to pile on. And watching some other folks in the space talk about how easy it is to create content now. Just use my tool, blah, blah. And so I do think that yes, there's absolutely more content than ever. I feel like there's also there's moments where what Gary V used to call underpriced attention. There's moments on platforms when they're still picking up steam where growth feels easier. You joined on LinkedIn as did I at a time where there wasn't a lot of great content on LinkedIn. Creating content was really hard. And I think that it was much easier to grow on that channel when we were there. And so the question becomes not necessarily that it's don't even bother. I think that there's absolutely, it's absolutely harder than it used to be. And anybody who tells you that it's not harder on LinkedIn is not putting time there. But there's, you know, the old saying goes like when's the best time to plant a tree like 10 years ago the next best time is now. It's not going to get any easier. And ultimately when it's still important, my belief though to echo what you've said and I obviously this is self-serving so people can poke holes all in it. But I think that what used to work before, I look at people who were great thinkers and could translate that thinking into great content. And they didn't necessarily need to be as dogmatic about like really nailing one concept and being known for one thing because there was just a lot less noise. And now those people create that great content and somebody who's hired a ghostwriter goes off and steals that great content and they run it through AI and they change a few words and then somebody else is posting it and suddenly everybody starts to sound the same. And so I do think that the opportunity is around really zeroing in on a perspective that you have on the problem that you solve for customers and coming up with something that feels revotory and different and fresh and just digging your heels in and being willing to repeat it over and over. And that's where a lot of people fall off. They just don't have the conviction. And so I think that was it easier to grow before kind of falling into this like broader category. People would see you maybe as like the email marketer. That was what you're known for. Yeah. But now that every single email marketer is standing up on their show box and screaming as loudly as they can and they can create 100 posts in 10 minutes whether they're good or not is the other question. There's just a lot more noise. You need something more than just the category. You need something that's stickier than that. That can travel farther than that. And I think that the onable idea, it was always the it was always kind of the shortcut. If you could find that thing you could break through faster like obviously Justin Welsh found it. But I think now it's not just a shortcut, but it's a must have if you really want to have a meaningful breakthrough. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And yeah, it's funny because it does. It could seem from the outside a bit like itself serving and I'm selling a hat. I'm selling a hammer. So here's a nail hundred kind of thing. But I really don't think it is that people are often I often get people asking sort of solo consultancy type people asking me for advice and coming at it from a different angle to you, I'm completely aligned because I think that I look at my own content that I put out there. Now back in the day, you could put out content that was very sort of how to-ish like so. How to do a strategy or like how to do email marketing. I think that even if we ignore the crazy increase in volume of content out there that's come up, I think we also have to consider that just AI rightly or wrongly has basically taken up the bandwidth for how do I do something. Tell me what strategy is. Tell me the basics of email marketing. So like three or four years ago, like you You didn't read it. have a good way of sort of like gaining just generic understanding of these things. But now AI can make you a generic expert in everything. So if you're trying to then build this reputation, the onus is on you essentially to not be a generic peddler of that. If you're the best email marketing expert in the whole world, unfortunately, people are going to assume that your email marketing knowledge is no better than AI's is because these are generic concepts. But so but if you have a personal oh go on yeah yeah yeah yeah go on yeah pull it up. Because here's the thing I think that you're hitting on something that I think is actually also a big opportunity because you're absolutely right that people don't know what they don't know you know the diving group are a fact like we all think that we know a lot until we actually try to go deep on a subject and realize how little we know. And that I think I think that the fact that AI can kind of like make us an armchair expert fast is actually again a big opportunity for personal brands because it's something from the behavioral science world called the messenger effect which is the effective message is tied to the messenger. So you might get an output from AI that is not dissimilar than something that let's say you know Joanna we the conversion copywriter she coined the category she's worked with all the biggest brands like she might give you similar advice but when you hear it from her you're probably going to believe it more you're going to be more likely to act on it you associate the success that she's had in copywriting and that kind of is imbued into the message. So I do think when we want to build our own our own thought leadership we need to be comfortable and I know as a folks in the UK struggle with this more we need to be comfortable with it tuning our own horn sharing our successes and showing our hard earned like understanding because that's part of what differentiates because yeah if you just look like another person share an email marketing tips and I don't have a reason to believe that you have status credibility all of that I'm going to think AI is the same. So we need we it forces us as experts to have to show our shit more show the depth of our thinking more and then people recognize oh this is actually much more nuanced than what I just got from AI. Quickly if you're enjoying this and you want to get the full thinking blueprint that sits under basically all of these ideas then you're going to want to grab a copy of my book no bullshit strategy. I'd like to say that you can pick it up wherever you get your books but let's be real you're probably just going to go to Amazon and that is all fine because it is on there too obviously. Two of my favorite reviews are one where a professor from USC said that she made it required reading for all the first students quite quite right too and another where a guy called it a spiritual masterpiece masquerading as a book on strategy. Now that is obviously the kind of praise I am here for so if you're curious what the hell he was on about then go and check it out. It's really interesting that you think that I hope I hope that you're right and I think you could well be right. My much more sort of doom-ish perspective is that when people hire experts like copy writers or whatever they might be they have an itch that they need to scratch and they've somehow convinced themselves oh my landing page isn't great or something like this and they're looking around and the only way they can scratch that itch is by hiring someone and so they do that and they scratch the itch and whether that person does a good job or a bad job is kind of incidental to the fact that they got that monkey off their back. What AI is really good at unfortunately is scratching these itches and therefore deflating the demand for that thing so if that person goes and has a session with Claude like whether or not they actually get to where they want to go they've kind of let the they've let the air out of the balloon and suddenly they're like you know what probably don't really need to hire someone and so the so there's a lot of opportunity that vanishes that we don't notice that it's vanished because it never even entered the market in the first place. We obviously don't know the the briefs that never sort of materialized but if so what you're relying on which and this happens to me so why shouldn't it happen to other people what you're relying on is the customer the client the AI user having the having the what's the word that well let's say the wisdom to question what's being fed to them by AI do people do that do they do that they will I think that you just have to think you need they need to have the wisdom to question it so let's just say that they're lucky enough to follow you and whether they just watch one of your YouTube videos or they've read something you posted on LinkedIn and you have this particular perspective you've shared this lens this nuance take that makes them think oh that's different and then they go well I'm just going to go into like you know clawed because that's the one to jaw and I'm going to ask about I want to strategy earlier well what can I one of the things you talk about is like effective strategies come with sacrifice I remember the first time I heard you say that and I said oh that's interesting like I hadn't thought about it that way before but when he shows it it's like that's so clear and they go to like clawed and they go okay I want to come up with a strategy my business is like you know I've got this copywriting business like what what can I sacrifice like they're going to get answers that feel man like because they're not going to like as long as you've created that awareness in them that makes them learn that makes them want to do something differently when it comes down to time when they look at the output from clawed I think they're going to be disappointed I think they're going to say this doesn't scratch that itch because I think one of the things that we do is as individuals everyone talks about taste and judgment being the the new mode taste is built through reps reps is pattern recognition reps is like this like algorithm we're running in our brains when we look at a problem that allows us to see it from a specific lens and if you can get good at articulating that in your content I think people will then trust you more in the AI output one way I'm strategically trying to do this in my own business is that I asked myself what am I willing to sacrifice and I looked at vulnerable ideas as a concept what makes it challenging to find one and how can I ensure that people feel like they should work with it outsider to get this perspective because I do believe that there's an enormous amount of value to come to that but then I went and I looked at like well what does the science actually say like why is it so hard to figure the shit out on our own like and I found all of these biases that make it hard and then I was like okay the there's the experts paradox which is a coined problem that I'm talking about now it's kind of like the enemy and I'm like the experts paradox is like the reason why this shit is hard and it's why you can sit and talk to clawed for four hours or in some of the like my clients case months and months of conversations trying to figure out their messaging and not feeling like they're getting anywhere because that offhand flip it thing that they say that nobody catches is the brilliance and they just dismiss it and so if I can raise awareness of that problem then they go oh well I'm actually not going to be able to solve this by brains turning away my way through with clawed it's not getting me the progress that I want so I think part of the the goal of the creator I think in this sense with the entrepreneur is recognizing where people are likely to get stuck and generating awareness around that so that they can see the hollowness that would come from other solutions. Yeah yeah I'm with you so we talked on one level there then about which to be fair or something that I think I've been really underestimating the the value of credibility in in in the messenger even if you are just a completely generic expert in your in your field so then the ownable idea is obviously another layer above this where and tell me if you if I'm getting this wrong like you're not just a generic expert in the field of whatever it is and you have a unique perspective and point of view on that field that is owned by you that you become known for and I would venture if you would agree that now in particular this is effectively the only way that you are really going to reliably be able to get cut through in in that field so instead of talking about for sake of argument just I talk about email marketing it's going to be very hard starting from scratch to get anywhere with that you then need to have this ownable idea about email marketing and then that is the thing that is going to put you over the edge is is that the thesis? Absolutely and so I'm oh I feel terrible that I'm blanking on his name but it'll come to me after a call and I'll fill that but somebody who is a friend of mine like you know an internet friend with had a few calls he is an email marketing guy and he had a breakthrough moment with his ownable idea and he found this thing that he calls money moments and the revelation was like that all these people are spending all this time on crafting these kind of generic email sequences and drip funnels and things but if you can identify the money moment like what's the moment where that something happens he specifically works with SaaS products what's the moment where something happens and they get the point of value or where there's some type of friction where it's the perfect time to send that sequence or it's the perfect time to send that email and if you can identify those you can be so much more targeted with your emails and so he started he learned this from Patan Recredition right from working with many different companies. companies over the years, identifying that this was this trend or the specific moments, and if you could target them. So he coined it. He started talking about money moments. Suddenly, his DMs are full of clients looking to hire him. He is case studies showing where he's actually doing the work inside of companies, helping them to employ, you know, find those moments and activate them. Suddenly, he's not the generic email marketing for SAS Guy. He's the money moments guy. And money moments is brilliant language, right? And it's part of making an onable idea spread is not just coming up with that central argument that you can repeat over and over, but it's shaping it into something people want to hear. And you hear money moments and you immediately lean in and you're like, what's that? That sounds interesting, right? And so I think for us, yes, it's something that is, it's always, the sharp idea could cut through was always true. I think it's, I think it's really now a default that you have to aim for. I also, this is going to piss some people off and I'm just going to say it. The reality is that the effectiveness of your onable idea is again, I'm going to come down to your credibility, your lens. Do people have a reason to believe you? This person had worked with so many different SAS companies that we know he created value for them. When he tells me there are money moments hidden in your email funnel, I'm going to listen. When somebody who just decided last week, like that they want to be an email marketer because it took a course and now they think email marketing is the next big thing. When they say it, it's not going to be as effective, which is why one of the things that we teach and that we work with with our clients is like, how can we help them find a lens where we can shape that their experience is letting them see something and that we can show why they're trustworthy. And oftentimes that means not necessarily going head to head with other folks in that space that are just better known or just using something similar because you're not going to win. I remember a brilliant person who was creating great content on the surface that went through on Ignorable was using solar perner as like his like there was an aspect of solar perner in his thing. I'm like, who's going to choose you over Justin? Why try to make that the thing you're known for? It's just there's so many other ways and his content was good and he had good consistency and I was like, this is not the territory that you want to own because it's just going to be a bloodbath. Right? Yes. Yeah, definitely. You just sounded like an echo. You need to say something different. But on the subject of things that will piss people off in addition to the credibility, like, well, in my experience, like it's all worth, we could say that you need to have an ownable idea, but in my experience, most people being real, they don't actually have, even if they're deep experts on a subject, they don't actually have any particularly original or interesting insights or thoughts about it. And now from what from my perspective, this is just, well, bad luck because I would say by definition, not everybody can be a world leading name in their field and not everybody can have an ownable idea because it is by definition. It's an elitist practice like in the world of leadership gurus, Simon, there aren't a thousand Simon Sinek's. There's one Simon Sinek, right? So obviously there aren't going to be that many people who can do this. So I would look at it and I would say that like, can you really pull an ownable idea out of the average expert practitioner's heads? I've been thinking a lot about this question because you posed to me before and I have a fundamental belief that I think everyone does have one. I think that they have one. I think that we as a society have conditioned people not to question things. So when a fleeting moment goes by where they are looking at the best practices in their industry and they see them being, you know, they see behind the curtain and they're like, I don't think that's right. They go, well, I must be thinking about this wrong or I must not understand because these people have so much more experience and therefore, like obviously they're right. And so I think I was thinking about this. I think that at the end of the day, part of the work that I'm going to need to do and it's funny because I was thinking about you because I'm going to be writing this post. I'd read your book prior to going to meet Neil O'Grady who is my co-founder in the Gennigarble Challenge for the first time. We'd run the thing virtually. We hadn't met in person. And one of the things that you pushed for in the book, if I'm remembering this correctly, was to have like, can you explain your strategy in a line? Can you have like a one line that actually explains what you're trying to do because if you can compress it down to that, then you have something people can buy into. And so I started looking at what we were really doing with Unignorable and where people were really struggling and it was never really in the tactical stuff. Like you can learn to write like hook hooks. That's all doable. Where most people struggled was confidence and conviction to actually put themselves out there and risk having somebody disagree. Risk having somebody saying, well, why should I believe you? Risk the kind of like the social fear of judgment. And so I'd written this one liner that I shared with Neil and Justin when I got to California or a meeting. And it was like, what we're actually building at Unignorable, the original Unignorable Challenge. And so we're actually building confidence factory. Like if we start thinking about it that way, instead of thinking we're here to help you build an audience or we're here to help you build a personal environment. Like if we actually think, no, if we're a confidence factory, how does that change what we do? Because now some of the things that we did that I that were different than what other places do. And I think we're really effective. You weren't part of this because it's in the later cohorts. But we started like we put people into a group of peers that they could get feedback on their ideas from. We created what we call the top hooker challenge where it was actually a gamified thing where you could share your hooks for your posts. So of course the hook has so much impact on whether somebody reads and you could share yours and get feedback on them from other smart people and give feedback. And there was prizes. So the more feedback you gave, the more, you know, the more points you got, the more feedback you got, the better you got. And what people started to see it started to build their confidence. Well, they would toil over their own hook for days, right? They're writing in their head, you know, that's not good. They could immediately give feedback to somebody else and be able to help them get clarity on their thing because it was so much easier. And so all of this has led me to to answer your question this round about way. There's this great story from how Pixar became what Pixar is and how they helped to reinvigorate Disney. And what they did, do you know this story? It's written in the book Creative. What's the name of the book? Creative. That book is epic. Yeah. Oh. And so what they did was what they realized was that a lot of the best ideas were getting killed before they ever had a chance to get developed because they would get you to get shot down. Somebody wouldn't fully understand them. And so these great creative ideas didn't even have a chance because they were too precious. They were too vulnerable to criticism. And so they would just get killed. And so they created something called the Brain Trust, which was a group of trusted peers who would give candid and rigorous feedback on films as they were developing. And those people were not allowed to necessarily stop the thing from going forward. The director still had the final say, but what it created was this environment where you could float out what sounded like a crazy shitty idea. And people would sit with it and they'd talk about it and they'd work on it together. And that's what made Pixar put out hit after hit after hit. And then they brought it to Disney and Disney had been doing like a decade of shitty films and they produced Frozen, which was like their biggest breakthrough in like a decade. And so I think that ideas are these precious things. And part of the work that we need to be able to do is to help people believe that they have them because if they don't believe it, then they're already dead in the water. And help them to nurture them and feel confident in them. And that's something that I don't see that existing in the market being done well when it comes to this stuff. So I'm thinking about that for us because I think that the, I think that there are people like you and me that just naturally like to think a lot. We like to poke holes in things. We like to be contrarian. Those people, it'll be easier for. But I still think there are people who don't default to that personality, who fear questioning authority, who have brilliant ideas locked in their head that can change the world and change their lives. And I want to figure out how we can pull those out. And I feel like it's probably in the realm of building a confidence factory or a conviction factory. And I don't know exactly what that looks like in practice yet, but I want to figure it out. It's a really, really interesting angle on it that I'd never considered. Like, you know, the way that I guess I sort of look at it when I look at other people in our, in our kind of sphere is that just because you do something all the time, doesn't necessarily mean that you think about that thing. Sometimes you're just, you're just doing the thing and you're a kind of best practice merchant. And I sort of figured, well, that's, that's just how, you know, that's just how some people are sort of personality wise. And there is an element of that. But I guess it never occurred to me that confidence was a, was a factor that contributed to that. So I suppose it does then beg the, beg the obvious question. And in a, you know, in a very sort of basic podcast, potted way, if I am an expert in something, what is the What is the sort of hack to figuring out, oh, that might be my ownable idea? >> Mm-hmm. So I'm thinking a lot about this because as I work with clients, and I'm doing work with clients in batches. So I do a batch and I learn from it and I figure what's working and then I do it on our second batch now. And so I've been able to break it down to this kind of like five-star step process for finding your own idea. Now one thing that I talk about a lot is like, you can have like a very distinctive point of view on how to do the work and a lot of people do. If you show them kind of like the category cliches in their space, you show them common assumptions, you show them what their competitors are saying. They will respond in visceral ways. What we need to do and part of the work is then taking that response and then mapping that back to what people want to hear. Because those two things have to go together. You need to say something different that people don't know they need to hear. And so how do you do that? How do you systematically do that? And how can we do it predictably? Because again, if I want to build this company and it works, we need to figure out how to help people do this predictably. And so I've broken it down to kind of like five questions. And this is inspired by April Dunford's original five-question framework for finding your positioning. But these are the five questions they all build on each other. And what's fascinating about this is that depending on how you answer the question, the whole trail that comes after of logic changes. So most people have 100 different ways they could express their idea. And how they express it is going to be what matters whether it becomes ownable or whether it spreads. So the five questions are the first ones like aspiration. Like what does your buyer deeply want? Because that matters, right? If you've got an idea that doesn't attract the type of person you want to work with, and it doesn't actually show them how they're going to get something that they want, you're screwed. Next one is the problem. So what's the real problem that's stopping them from achieving their aspiration that they're going to pay you to solve, right? I think find a lot of people will like, they'll have a hot take about something. And that hot take, they think, is like the same as an ownable idea. But it's not something people would solve. You can hate like marketing bros as much as you want. That can be a hot take. If people can associate you with the hate marketing bros, that's not going to bring you business, right? And so it's going to come back to something that they're willing to pay to solve the lens. So what does your experience let you see that others miss on that problem, right? And why trust you? Because again, this is the piece where I think it falls down. There's people who can have strong opinions and they can be valid. But if they don't have a earned lens and we don't believe that they can give us the answer, then we're going to ignore them. Then the revelation, right? So what's the hidden truth that once known, reframes everything, this one is the hardest one to get because it needs to be read. Like for an ownable idea to spread, it can't just be obvious, right? There's lots of good ideas that are obvious. They're so obvious they become clichés. And so it's like, it needs to have novelty. And most people, they don't push for that. They push for safe. They push for it sounds like what somebody else is saying with this little twist, but it's not enough for people to poke, poke and go, oh, that's different. And then what must people do, believe differently after they hear it? So that's like the directive. Like has to tell people what's interesting. So those are the five that I figured out. And then the directive ultimately takes people back to their goal. The way that people answer these questions, it's going to completely change where they get to with their answer. And so I think that that's part of the work, right? But I see an ownable idea, the more work that I've done on this is like, because initially to me, it was just kind of like obvious after I started thinking about it, that this is the thing. This is the 80/20. You get this right. You can do a lot of other shit wrong and you'll still find success. And when you don't have this, you can execute flawlessly in content and it's still not going to work. And so it goes like, if this is the 80/20, why are so few people figuring it out? And like, that's an interesting problem to solve. And I'm hopeful. We can solve that for people because as I do the work with my clients, there's times where I just becomes clear to me. It's like, okay, this direction isn't going to work this one is. And then I need to kind of reverse engineer my thinking of why. Why was it clear to me? So it was one of the clients that I just delivered. We give them two directions to choose from. We pull a bunch of their ideas out of them. And these are their beliefs. And then what we do is we figure out how do we map these back to what the market needs to hear. And that usually leads to the, it's how the thing gets compressed into something. And it leads to like two versions of a central argument that they might be able to make. And I presented back to this client and she was so excited. She said, this is what I've been saying, but nobody gave a shit. And the reason nobody gave a shit was because she wasn't framing the problem right. She was leading with the answer, not creating the problem that people cared about. And so it's like, that's where people get stuck. It's like, the things there, the unique thing is there. They haven't figured out how to frame it in a way that makes people care. And that's the work, right? Well, then, okay. So I'm going to take this opportunity to obviously educate the listener, but more over get, get free advice from you. So I'll throw, I'm going to throw my latest, my most recent sort of hypothesis at you. It's obviously not framed as an honorable idea. And then let's see if you can critique it through the lens of the, of the, of the honorable idea. So I can really grasp, grasp these pieces that you're talking about. So, so I'm not going to spend like hours on it. I was just like a 30 seconds. So the main thing that I'm sort of looking at at the moment is how the increased ease of execution and obviously the democratization of information with AI is leading to conditions of what I'm calling hyper competition, hyper abundance and hyper competition. And I think that everybody's feeling this, even if they haven't put a name to it, that just like the intensity in every field is growing and the ability to actually kind of like stand out and get leads is, is going down and down, down and down all the time because there's just like, there's just so much stuff now, such a condition of oversupply. So then how do you then, how do you break through this? Because the problem is if you, all of the normal things that people were doing in the past, doing good positioning, like sensible sort of sales scripts and like product development, all this, all this like good stuff that was enough in the past. Now everybody can do. So the level of what you need to do in order to succeed raises and it's gone up one click from where it was even like two, three years ago. And the way that I see it is that like essentially like for a business now to be able to kind of like attract necessary attention in its market to get cut through, not just a solo business but any type of business, it needs to be, it needs to be doing something that is sufficiently interesting that it gravitates attention to it from potential hires, potential investors, potential, potential customers. So the strategy that the business is employing, it doesn't just need to be effective, effective strategy isn't enough anymore. I think about it that the strategy actually has to be charismatic. It actually has to, it has to make people notice. The strategy itself has to be the attention grabbing asset. So I'm sort of talking with this is this idea of charismatic strategy to be distinct from just strategy that's focused on, on working. So within that like rough thesis that I've like spelled out there is there an ownable idea in that 100%. Like I remember reading a email that you sent where you started sharing this thesis and I was just like nodding. I think I emailed you and said like this is so good. But stood out to me in that and I, this is, this is changing the way that I'm building unignorable. So this is the thing like does it actually, if you know an owned by idea is good, if when someone hears it, it changes the way they think and they take, they know what action to take. You said something in that email and I love the charismatic business. I think that that's like, you know, Cody Sanchez coin boring business. I think charismatic business is really. I didn't do that parallel. That's good. But you said something that I thought was so like it was like do what is hard and do what is rare because I think right now there's this land grab happening and people are thinking, oh, it's easier than ever to build a business on gunna and I'm going to do the thing that's easy. Like, you know how many people right now are running creating like, like product-high service businesses doing content, right? Well, guess what? That's easy. Because everyone has the same AI army behind them. And so the idea of like the way to be to to insulate yourself from obliteration is to actually choose to do the hard thing, the rare thing. The thing that people aren't doing because it's hard. I remember when you said that, I was like, it's solidified, I believe, that what we were doing with unadorable, with ownable ideas was the right strategy because it is hard. It's way fucking harder than other things I could be doing. Sorry. And like, you know, a cohort on helping people to build their personal brands and there'd be a lot of them out there. And yeah, we'd like, you know, it might be similar to the ones that are out there. I could start a community and lots of people are doing that because I have a big following because people trust me because I deliver value. I'm sure I could build a business there. Would that business be sustainable long term? Would that business insulate me from the many, many, many people who have that exact same ideas and are executing it because it's easy? So to me, what stood out, like, I love the idea of the charismatic business, but what stood out to me more in your idea when you shared this was the directive of if. Everyone else is gonna play the game, then you need to play it on hard mode to win. And you need to make a conscious choice to do that, to do the hard thing. But then the idea of the way that you do the hard thing, and the way that you get people to care about the hard thing is through the charisma, through the magic, like that stuck out to me right away. It got me thinking about how I was gonna build my business. It made me feel confident that I should do this because I was like, yeah, it's really fucking hard. And that's why other people aren't gonna do it. Like, one to one done with you is a lot harder than me putting out a self-skited course, right? It's way harder. But do I think I'll be actually able to get more out-construable because of it? Yes. Do I think that if I work hard enough, I'll be able to build enough systemization into the backend that we can do things much more efficiently than we could have if I didn't really invest in this being the thing. Yes. Does that mean that other people are gonna be able to compete? No. Because they're not gonna be able to have that efficiency built into the business. They're not gonna put the time in to actually build the infrastructure required to be able to do this work and make it really profitable because they won't, you know, if it's a passing thing, they won't do it. So that was what stood out for me from the idea of the charismatic business. But it's kind of like, there's almost two ideas there. But like the idea around the thing that you need to be willing to do something that's harder and that that, and you need to do the rare thing. And the way that you get people to care is the cares about your business. There's a whole argument there. I think there can be, I think those ideas could be combined into one. To me, there's also probably enough for them to both stand as individual like arguments. And they might be, you might succeed more in leaning into one. But I think that for a lot of people who want to start businesses right now or who want to insulate themselves, like the pain point is real, I hadn't heard anybody else frame it that way. And as soon as I did, I was like, yeah. And that's what you want. That's when you know the revelations there. - Yeah. Well, that's very helpful. And actually the one way, I often think about it. I don't know if there's something you think about with your clients, but I found it to be, well, it's not a tallies. It's very difficult, but it's like, I think it's important is that sometimes you've, you've got to have a division between what your content is about on a macro and then what you sell on a micro. So I mean, I'm not sure that to give an example using what we're talking about, like, you know, I could write broad content where the spirit of the content is do what's hard, do what's rare, but that could apply to all sorts of domains, but it's got broad reach to bring people in top of funnel. But then the actual product is the charismatic strategy for the charismatic business, right? - Yeah, that's great. - And so I think that could always be a really cool way for people who, what their business is about, if it's very sort of idea-driven, to actually, it's very hard to have a content theme and a product that are exactly the same because normally the product is gonna be much narrower than you want the content to be. - The product is the solution, the content theme, the idea. And so I absolutely, - Right, okay, cool, yeah. - So, so going back to this client that I just delivered her strategy, like, she wanted to sell this thing that there's no market demand for, but it's absolutely necessary. But because there's no, like, it's a new thing, it's a new category, it solves a real problem. The reality is that the problem that she solves is so big that like, people are literally, there's literally a tons of stats to show that people are dying because they're not doing things, they're not solving this problem in the right way. And so my approach was like, okay, well, we need to actually raise the stakes of inaction or the solutions that people are using right now. And so we need to lead with a hyper, like, stake-driven message, which then creates the demand for her new category of thing. It makes it the natural defective solution. I think that that's what you're doing. Like, you're basically saying, you're coming with this like, incredible idea around doing the hard and rare thing. And then the how is the charismatic business? I like that. But it's the difference between a good idea and an ownable idea in my perspective is whether or not you're willing to keep repeating it. Because I've realized the actual element that makes something ownable, it's not surfacing the great thing. Like, that is the first step. The extraction, the fine dealing, that's the first step. It's shaping it into something that travels, that compressing it into something that can like be in a room when you're not. That's hard. A lot of people need help with that. And actually sharing it on repeat so that people start to associate with you. Not everybody, but the people who are your best that customers, that's where the battle is won and lost. You need to say that I have enough conviction in this being true. I think I can build a body of work around this being true. I think the answer is the charismatic business. I'm going to commit to that. And that commitment, that conviction is what a lot of people never do, which is why they don't actually break through. They come up with something good. They go through unignorable because you might remember this, but the last exercise in unignorable was you had to come up with like, what are your big ideas? And I just like have some of the people who went through and they did the pro version where we did calls and stuff. We would talk about their big ideas. And they, this one girl came up with this amazing one. I was like, oh, damn, that's really good. And like she ended up putting it in her LinkedIn profile. She created a post about it, that post went viral. She created a couple more posts. And then she kind of shied back from it and started talking about other stuff. And I was like, well, that's not going to work. (laughing) There's not gonna be that level of commitment. - That's a fantastic point at his funny because obviously your unilable idea at the moment is the unilable idea. And when no first saw you put it out there and this really says it all, my first reaction was like, I can't believe that somebody else doesn't already own this. But certainly I can't think of anyone who does. And I must have heard the words, unilable idea before. Those two words have been put together before. But as you say, there's like a big difference between have the words been put together before and who actually owns it. And if nobody has actually taken ownership of that thing, then well, frankly, even if you didn't come up with it, you can actually still take ownership of it. So yeah, it's very important to think of that. - Justin Wellstin coined the term "solar printer." - I always wondered that. - He did it. - Somebody who went through unignorable who put in, like I remember having a conversation with her, she coined that word. - No. - She put herself as, you know, in her LinkedIn profile, she says the OG solar printer. But the difference of what she did and what Justin did is meaningful because what Justin did and what the charismatic business must do and what somebody must do if they want to have an ownable idea is Justin framed the story around. He made solar apprenticeship heroic. He made it aspirational, right? - Yes. - Because before I remember running my first agency, I was a freelancer, I was a solar printer. I didn't, that term wasn't my vocabulary then. But I remember having a bunch of faces of my team who were actually just other freelancers that I would work with on my site, because it was embarrassing to be a solar printer. It made you feel small. It felt like it was admitting that your business wasn't that meaningful or trustworthy. And Justin came along and said, no, this is actually an alternative lifestyle. It's for the people who could crush it in their nine to five so who are rising at the executive levels, who could go off and build the next VC back startup. But they don't want to, because they value freedom more. They see this new path and they see this new opportunity. He romanticized it and created a true, like cult following around the idea. I bought into that idea for a long time. And I would say this to Justin do his face like, I don't want to be a solar printer. I realized that in the journey, it sounded great. The reality for me is I want a team. I want to build a real company. Not a real company, because that's not fair. But I want to build a business. - I don't even know. - Is it Caitlin? And but it took, but I totally was completely wrapped up in the idea for several years until the realities of it became quite obvious. - That is awesome. That is awesome. And I had, like I say, I had always wondered, did he invent it? And now I know. So listen, I think there's gonna be a lot of people who for sure listening to this, who are like, right, right, right, I need my ownable idea. Basically, well, any solo-ish type person is pretty much in that bucket. So for those people, is there a way that they can find it? - Yeah. So go to onableidea.com. - I would think you can go to on.com. How did you get that? - It just shows a show. You lots of people talked about it. Nobody tried to own it. But you're actually going to, like you're gonna go, you'll land on a opt-in page for our newsletter, Unignorable. And that's where you'll get on our list. Right now, I'm old, like I said, I'm only taking in clients and batches. And so I'm booking, probably next batch will be in June. And when I open up spots, a lot of people know about it. But that's the way to work with me one-on-one. But if you get on the newsletter, then you'll see art, we do breakdowns on amazing idea owners and how they did it and kind of the psychology behind it. So join the newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn. And that's where you'll find out if there's just opportunity to continue working together. - Terrific, terrific. Let's check that out myself. Thanks a lot, Kaitlin. Great to chat. - Thanks a lot for listening. If you wanna keep expanding the way that you think and the results that you get, then make sure you hit subscribe here. And also check out basicarts.org/rearmind where you can subscribe to my substack which features deep essays on these topics, deep practical essays, and fundamentally is all about how businesses can win in this crazy post AI world.