The Right Way To Write With AI

Greg Isenberg (0:00)

Nicholas Cole's made over 30 million dollars writing on the internet, so when he talks about content, I listen. And this episode honestly felt less like an interview and more like just a free masterclass. He breaks down why most people's content gets ignored in the AI era, why AI is making generic writing worthless, and how to build what he calls a digital brain, a library of your stories and your opinions and your lessons and ideas that gets you customers 24-7 that builds you trust and gives AI something real to work with. If you write online, you sell online, or you want ideas to compound, this is honestly worth thousands of dollars, but it's free for you. The people that stick around to the end of this are not going to be writing AI slop. And I think the people that use AI to actually create interesting content, I mean, of course, those are the people that have the highest probability of success. Enjoy the episode. I learned a lot, I think you will too. Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. My company's been on Brex for a year and a half, and I started because I kept hearing companies like Versel, OpenAI, Anthropic were using Brex, and I figured if they're using it, why shouldn't I? It's been a game changer. The thing that got me is how smooth it is. It's got high limit cards, it's got banking, it's got AI that handles the back office busy work like expense reports, which I don't want to do on its own. It's really just built for this agentic world. If you're building something new, it's time to get Brex. Check it out at brex.com/solutions/startups.

Link in the description.

Nicholas Cole, thank god you're here, man. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?

Nicholas Cole (1:52)

By the end of this episode, you will better understand the short, medium and long-term value of everything you create and write and market on the internet before you create it. That is the goal. Before you invest the time, you will understand why you're doing what you're doing in the first place.

Greg Isenberg (2:09)

Yeah, and I think that matters a lot because all of us are vibe coding software. We know there's a lot of opportunity to build apps, ship SaaS, things like that, but it's hard to get customers. And what I love about you is through writing, you understand how to get seen, how to create stuff that goes viral, and there's sort of a bit of an art to it.

And what I hope to learn selfishly by the end of this episode is to get some of that art from you, to learn about that so that the products that I create, I could accompany it with content writing that tells stories, that hopefully goes viral, or that just resonates with people. And Cole, can you commit that to me? Will I learn that?

Nicholas Cole (3:01)

Yeah, that's what we're going to talk about. So something I see people talk about a lot these days is that in the AI era, SaaS no longer has a moat.

And I actually think that that's not true. I think that SaaS has a moat when you have a point of view.

And I didn't, that was a nice little rhyme there. But what I mean by that is if you're just building commodity SaaS, meaning like you're just providing features that accomplish tasks to people, that's fundamentally a commodity.

SaaS with a point of view means that you're building some sort of product or platform that enables users to do things in a certain way. Like they're executing a certain method. So for example, like we have a SaaS platform called Typeshare.

And the goal of Typeshare is not, well, there's a gazillion scheduling apps and there's a gazillion writing apps and our writing app does writing and scheduling too, right? Like that is a commodity. The goal of Typeshare is to quote unquote automate or make tasks easier for people who want to execute a different methodology for writing on the Internet. So there's a point of view that drives the product. And if someone says, well, why would that create a moat? For example, if we say inside Typeshare, well, your goal is we're going to help you build your personal language model. And our point of view is that there are certain types of content, commodity content, personality content, original content. Each of these different types of content creates different leverage inside of your personal language model. Even as I'm articulating that, imagine you're trying to build a SaaS platform that does everything our SaaS platform does. Every time you build a feature, it's like you have to turn back and look at me and go, oh, but wait, what does that actually mean? What's the point of a personal language model? What does commodity content mean? So you will forever be one step, two steps, three steps, five steps, ten steps behind because you constantly have to look at the person who's creating the point of view or creating the methodology to go, whoa, they're the one doing the thinking. I'm just going to copy them, which means you're always behind. And so I think it's funny when people say there's no moat in SaaS because it's like, well, yeah, there's no moat in anything if you don't have a point of view. But there's a ton of moat in SaaS and product and writing and marketing if you do have a point of view. And so that's kind of what inspired this convo is like. So how do you create a point of view in the first place?