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

It's like, well, what it means for my startup? Okay, kind of interesting, but how can we make this more interesting or more tangible? And the question to ask is actually, which of these 10 things am I going to give the reader? Am I going to give them tips? Am I going to give them stats? Am I going to give them steps? Am I going to give them lessons? Right?

So for example, you know, and three lessons that can be learned from the, what's Netflix's market cap now? Something stupid.

Okay. Why, why did my brain immediately go here? Because again, another framework, big numbers and headlines, big numbers and hooks always perform well. Right.

Yep, exactly. Okay. So here's where things get really interesting. And I think that this step that we are about to talk about is the primary skill. It is the primary value. Okay. So we use the 10 magical ways and we clarify, what are we actually going to give the reader? We're going to give them three lessons. It's very simple. Okay.

If you don't have clarity over which thing you're giving the reader, guess what? The reader's not going to know. And if the reader doesn't know, they're not going to give you their attention. Okay. So you give them three lessons. Now, here's where it's so simple, it's complicated. If we were to break this into sections, what do we think the three subheads are going to be?

You want to take a guess, Greg?

Well, just generally, like the three subheads are going to share three

Three lessons, right? It's so simple, it's complicated, right? So this is lesson number one, this is lesson number two, and this is lesson number three. Here's a very simple rule of thumb. If your subheads do not deliver clearly on the promise in the headline, the reader will not take the time to figure it out. Okay.

So whatever magical way is in the headline is going to be the thing in the sub heads. Okay. Now the highest leverage decision about the entire piece is what the three lessons are. And this is what so many people misunderstand. Okay. 90% of the value is not in the writing. Okay. It is in the fact that you said, I'm going to give you three lessons.

And if those three lessons are, you got to work hard, you got to out-compete, And you gotta care. If those are the three lessons, you wrote a shitty piece. It doesn't matter how many beautiful sentences there are. It doesn't matter how clever your adjectives. Nothing else matters, right? So, editor-in-chief, we gotta come up with the three lessons.

Do we want to come up with them, or do we want Chachapiti to come up with them?

I think that that is the best lens and point of view for all of this. I think that you should always try yourself first and then weigh it against what Chachapiti comes up with and then improve the quality together. That is why I don't defer the writing to AI, I write with AI. Give me some lessons, Greg. And I'll help you improve them if you just say things out loud as they come to you.

Not alienate them. Okay.

100%. So said differently, my little framework for that is whenever I'm coming up with the main points of a piece, doesn't matter if it's an email, article, Twitter thread, doesn't matter. Once I've come up with all the main points, I then stack rank them in the ones that are most interesting or most compelling.

Because inherently, once you come up with them, usually there's one where you're like, oh, what a great main point. Well, you should make that the first one, right? Because that hooks the person.

Okay, so cool. So now what do we do? We take this, we take our improved headline, And we go, okay, great. So going back to writing this as an 800 word article, here's the headline I came up with. Feed that into there we go. And here are the three lessons I came up with. We take these copy paste here. Then we say, but I want to stress test the quality of these lessons.

Can you please come up with five more batches of three lessons related to this article headline? So I can see if there are any other opportunities to improve. GHPT's thinking. Again, I want to emphasize this process that we're going through is exactly the process that an editor-in-chief and a columnist go through. It's the same thing.

You're just deferring to someone else's brain, or you could use the AI brain, right? So here, adopt a contrarian mindset, treat frustration as a business opportunity.

Yeah.

Again, great example of how AI gives a bunch of options, but your taste has the context to be like, the risk reward of me using that phrasing maybe isn't going to be as effective, right? You are editor in chief. Little writing pro tip for everyone. A lot of times when people come up with subheads, they think the same way that AI does. They think in terms of quippy main titles.

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