Nicolas Cole

speaker

203 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2024 last heard Jan 2025

Nicolas Cole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Startup Ideas Podcast · This AI Writing Hack Made Him Millions (Full Breakdown) · 20 Jan 2025 podcast

Yeah, it does. So this is where my years as a ghostwriter, that part of my brain is kicking in. Because if we sort of change the lens for a moment, let's pretend that what we're doing, you are a client and I'm a ghostwriter. It's very similar. This is exactly what I would be doing with a client anyway. And you just said something really smart. And so I go, okay, that's great.

I just don't know where to put that yet. So I think of it like a Lego block, right? You're like, that's a really great Lego block. I just don't know where it fits yet. Okay. So we put that there. Now we've got some ideas swirling around and in some way we can, let's summarize sort of our goals here. Our goals are we want this piece to be connected to startup ideas.

We want this piece to, in some way, be actionable because a lot of the value that you provide is like how to, how to get started, how to do something, right? And ideally, we want this piece to be connected to our Reed Hastings, you know, strange rule during Netflix's early days. Fair enough?

Yep. Yeah. I mean, it's so simple, right? The majority of people don't have a talent problem. They have a thing called, I don't want to practice and execute the basics. And I would rather, no offense, drink a bunch of coffee, close my eyes and hope that something smart comes out when I hit the keyboard, right? And that's not a very reliable strategy. You're good like one out of every 10 times.

So that's why these frameworks are so helpful. So before I I know how to do all of this manually. So I'm going to slow down and do this in stages so that even someone who's a complete beginner and you don't understand and haven't internalized these frameworks yet, you have a starting place. So whenever I'm coming up with ideas.

And I'm trying to narrow down the idea of the thing that I want to write. A really easy place to start is to take these goals and to plug them into AI. You could use ChatGPT, you could use Claude. It really doesn't matter. Those are the two big ones that I use most often. And the whole point here is not really for the AI to start writing yet. What you want is you want it to feed you ideas, right?

So how do you think about prompting AI? I think there's, let's just pause here. There's two very different types of ways of interacting with ChatGPT, Claude, any AI model. One is conversationally, so you're sort of chunking things out piece by piece and it's more of a dialogue.

And another is where you think through all of the potential situations and hypotheticals and you assemble a massive prompt that then you feed into the AI model and it generates some sort of output. And I think part of where people go wrong is A, they don't realize that those are two different things.

And then B, they sort of sit in the middle and it's like a half-baked prompt that's sort of mid-conversation and then the AI is not giving it the output that they want. So that's usually the problem that I see. So here, if we're starting to write something, I start conversationally. So I might say something like,

I'm going to take this, I'm going to say, I recently came up with an idea for an 800 word article. Reed Hastings had a strange rule, right? That thing. And then I go back and I take my goals and I'm like, here are the goals of the piece I want to write. And I might give some extra context here because I have a podcast where I share startup ideas with entrepreneurial listeners.

Because a lot of the value I provide is how to get started doing something entrepreneurial. and want this piece to be connected to our Reed to Hastings story. Can you please generate 20 potential headlines for this sort of piece, and under each headline, list out three to five main points that would make up the content of that piece.

So all we're doing is we're basically saying, here's the little bit that we came up with. Now, can you just start feeding me ideas? Here, the reason that I ask for these bullets and these main points is because the thing that most writers and most people who want to write don't realize is that many of the decisions get made before you start writing.

If you come up with an idea and your first thought is, I should open a Google Doc and I should start writing, you've already failed. You already did it wrong. And the reason is because so many of these ideas, you can come to the conclusions that you need to before you begin the writing process. And when you do that, the writing is significantly easier.

It gets compounded with AI where not only does it get easier, but now you can defer a lot of the lower leverage stuff to the technology. So there's like a hierarchy. And if you make the first mistake, then you make all the mistakes under it, right? So here's a, like, this is kind of cool. Stop saying blockbuster. Why ignoring the obvious can accelerate your startup growth.

Psychology of ignoring the market leader, right? All of these. Why Reed Hastings banned the word blockbuster, what it means for your startup.

I like that actually better.

Yep. Okay. So I just want to pause and point out, what are we doing right now? What we are doing is we just deferred the lower leverage task of come up with 20 different iterations. Now, for everyone who doesn't know, this is the hierarchy of every single magazine and publishing house and newspaper.

The editor or the editor-in-chief literally gives the columnist or the writer this prompt in the form of, hey, come into my office and let's talk about it. Right. And then the lower writer listens and goes, I better come back with 20 high quality ideas. Just so everyone, we're on the same page. This already happens. It just happens between two human beings.

All we're doing is we're going, hey, instead of me passing this along to my junior columnist, I'm going to feed this to ChatGPT, which means we just got to elevate ourselves up to editor-in-chief, where our primary value is taste. right? So, so we're looking through these and you're like, Ooh, I actually really liked the word ban. And you have all the context as to why that word works, right?

Oh, ban implies conflict. I think it'll make for a better hook, right? Like you have your own taste and metrics for why this will work. And that's why you picked that one.

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