Thanksgiving Mailbag: Are all the good ideas taken? What should I do about AI? What single skill should I focus on?

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Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡

I used to love the mailbag editions of columns I used to read growing up, and we get a bunch of mail, and I figured a Thanksgiving commute was a fun time to rip through a bunch of ‘em.

We touch on how to actually use AI with your startup idea if you aren’t an AI fanatic, how to deal with competition during the earliest days, and the single best accountability tactic.

Have a great Thanksgiving! 🦃

Pod References

• Tacklebox - "muchadoaboutstuffing"

• Claude

• How to Engineer Luck

• Slow HorsesTimestamps

• 00:30 Intro - The Mailbag
  02:08 Question One: How to Actually Use AI Right Now
  06:00 Electric Vehicle Problem Language
  08:52 Question Two: Which Tactic?
  14:09 Question Four: Are All The Good Ideas Taken?
  19:24 The End - how to help

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today, we’re going to do something a little different. It’s thanksgiving week which means our downloads will drop by about 50%. But, I’ve learned that if I skip this week, like I did two years ago, or release an old episode, like I did last year, people get angry. Because the 50% who do listen are apparently really looking forward to a little startup talk and smooth jazz while sitting at their gate at O’hare.

I’ve only gotten like 10 passive aggressive emails in idea to startup history and they’ve all been from flubbing those Thanksgiving episodes. Some version of “sure would’ve been nice to have a new episode during this three hour car ride” came in so much you’d think I charged for this thing.

Anyway, I won’t make that mistake this year. I’ve got a special mailbag edition today, where we’ll answer a bunch of non-passive aggressive emails for everyone cherishing the last of their travel time before they get to their inlaws.

And, since we’ve only got the most dedicated listeners today, here’s a snark free thank you. 20% off the 6 month self paced membership and 30% off the year-long self-paced membership. Access to all the content that’ll walk you through building a business while you’ve got a job at the lowest price it’ll ever be. Use code “muchadoaboutstuffing,” or code “turkeyday” also works if you also weren’t sure how to spell ado. And yes, the main reason I’m offering this coupon was so that I could brag about the much ado about stuffing pun.

Anyway, let’s dig into the mailbag. We’ll get to four or five questions today, and we’ll start with the one I get asked the most these days by far.

Here it is succinctly from Craig in Detroit:

“I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do with AI. Everyone tells me it can come up with an idea, market that idea and even code the product for me, but… what? The only thing I tried to use it for was making a cartoon version of our family for a Christmas card and the results still haunt my dreams. It gave my dog three heads. What can AI actually do for entrepreneurs who are regular people working on an idea right now?”

Thanks for the question, craaaaaig.

There’s a ton that AI can theoretically help you do, but, theoretical help plus a dollar fifty will get you on the subway.

We’ll go into the one, specific thing you should start doing with AI immediately, but the general way I’d think about AI is in relation to specific problems. It’s easy to look at AI and think possibility - it can help me do this new thing and that new thing. But the right way is to say, where am I stuck? What barrier have I been struggling to break through? And, how might it help?

During the early days, your startup work should be organized around one thought that was put well by Kent Beck and you should probably tape to your laptop.

“You need to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.”

A great place to start with AI is, what problems do you have around getting feedback?

You might be having trouble finding people for feedback, synthesizing that feedback, or putting something in the world that’s capable of getting feedback in the first place.

Today, we’ll focus on the third case. Specifically, we’ll help you use AI to turn your crappy copy that won’t give you quality feedback into targeted, useful problem language that will.

I’ve worked with thousands of entrepreneurs at this point, and my guess is that only 1% of them can write compelling copy. Even people who’s full-time job before Tacklebox was copywriter usually can’t, because the copy you need for entrepreneurship is different from any other copy you’d write. Entrepreneurship is all about helping someone know why you’re useful in 3 seconds or less, so the copy hinges on problem language - the best tool for that job. And very few people know how to do it.

You likely know what problem language is if you’re listening to this pod, but if not, I’ll remind you:

Let’s say you’re walking down the street and I offer you $100. You’ll almost certainly look at me like Craig’s three-headed dog and walk away as fast as you can. But, if I say, 'Hey, your shoes look tight and you’re getting a blister,' and you are getting a blister, you’ll stop and chat with me. That’s problem language.

Our brains are fluent in problem and illiterate in solution. We walk around all day passively looking for someone speaking about our problem. That let’s us know we should engage.

As Dale Carnegie said, talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours. Problem langauge is you talking about your customer.

This is, partially, why Craig doesn’t understand how to use AI. Everyone is marketing AI in solution language. It can code for you and market for you! But Craig, like most people, can’t digest that easily because it’s in the wrong language. It isn’t clear how it relates to a specific problem he’s got. It’s the $100 on the street offer.

So, we’ve reached our problem and how AI can be helpful.

Entrepreneurs are naturally terrible at copy and, when they do write copy, they write solution language. We naturally think talking about your product or your business is inspiring or compelling or persuasive, but it isn’t.

AI is going to help us swap out our ineffective solution language on our landing pages, our cold emails, and our ads, with problem language so we can get useful feedback from customers.

Here’s an example.

I just randomly googled electric vehicle charging startups and pulled up the first one called L Charge. Their landing page says, quote;

Accelerate your electrification!

Fast and reliable charging for commercial fleets.

Then, lower on the page,

“EV truck sales are growing almost 300% per year, but charging options are not keeping pace

L-Charge delivers turnkey commercial fleet charging as a service without the cost and time of a grid connection”

The call to action is a button that says I’m Interested.

Great.

Now, I pull up Claude, my AI of choice, but feel free to use chatgpt or whatever one you like. They’re functionally all the same and everything we’re going to do you can do on the free plan.

I opened up a new chat and wrote, quote:

“I'd like to fix a website to make it use problem language as a way to attract the right customers. Problem language describes the problem in as much detail as possible, as most customers are more likely to convert if they see the specific problem they have rather than a solution.

Here's a screen shot. What are a few suggestions for problem language?”

I attached a screenshot of L Charge’s website.

A second later, it came up with a bunch of problem messaging. Here’s what I liked the most:

For the H1:

“Are Grid Capacity Limitations threatening your EV rollout?”

Then, for the H2

“Your EV fleet is growing 300% annually, but unreliable charging infrastructure is becoming your biggest bottleneck.”

This is way better copy because it does what copy needs to do - it helps the reader make a decision. Is this for me, or not? Is my EV fleet growing but being hamstrung by charging infrastructure? If so, I read on.

For the call to action, I asked Claude to suggest a few wedge products - a way we could add value immediately that would be more compelling than just, I’m Interested, and start to solve the problem we’d just outlined.

It came back with a few options, my favorite of which was a grid independence guide - specific ways to avoid utility upgrade costs after you input a few details of your business. This would kick off a relationship and is more compelling than I’m interested.

Using Claude or chatgpt for auditing your copy to ensure you’re using problem language will create a massive increase in conversion. Like 5-10x. And you should do it immediately.

I’ll do a fuller breakdown of this in a video in the weekly post, No Whisper Ideas, which you can subscribe to at gettacklebox.com at the bottom of the page if you want the visuals.

There are a bunch of other tactical uses, but this is the lowest hanging fruit. Problem language just converts way better than non problem language.

And, if you feel like pulling together a marketing consulting company, just change people’s websites to problem language and charge a percentage of new sales.

Ok - one question down, and my favorites yet to come. Including one of my favorite questions of all time, which we’ll get to, after….. a little smoooooth jazz.

Sneaky smooth jazz today. The coupon for the thanksgiving crew -

20% off 6 months of the self-paced program, or 30% off a year of it. Use code “muchadoaboutstuffing” or “TurkeyDay” if ado is still giving you trouble.

And, since we’ve got a little Jazz time left, I’ll suggest a book for you to read before the end of the year. It’s an older one, but I recently re-read it and loved it as much as I did about 10 years ago when I first read it - it’s called The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin, who’s actually the kid searching for bobby fisher is based on. It’s a great one and inspiring heading into the new year. I’ll pop it in the show notes.

Ok, let’s get back to the mailbag.

Mailbag Question Number Two -

A quick one, because it gets asked a lot.

Elle in Colorado says…

“I’ve been listening to the pod for years, and you’ve mentioned all sorts of tactics for founders to do each week or at least consistently - from journaling to the problems and opportunities log to sand and stones and probably a bunch of others I can’t remember. If you had to pick one thing that I should prioritize over everything else, what would it be?”

Actually a really easy one. I love journaling and I love my internal system and I think they’re both unbelievably impactful. But the answer, again, goes back to the framing of the last question.

What is the biggest, hairiest, uniform problem most entrepreneurs I meet have, and what method will combats it the best.

Simple - put yourself on the hook.

The problem most entrepreneurs I meet have is ambition. Not in a they need to think bigger and build a company that goes to space sort of way, but in a “if this thing I’m working on goes right, what’s the best case scenario” sort of way. And, again, I don’t mean “the company” when I say this thing - I mean whatever the current project is that’s a subset of their business.

First time entrepreneurs especially have no idea about the levers and mechanisms of startup success. It’s wonky and unpredictable but it doesn’t come from normal actions. And the least normal thing you can do is put yourself on the hook, so it’s the thing you have to do. Startups are about contrast - about doing what other people don’t.

So, what’s put yourself on the hook mean?

Doing something public and uncomfortable, constantly. Until it doesn’t feel uncomfortable any more, and then you push a bit further.

Put yourself on the hook until it isn’t uncomfortable, then find a new hook.

Arbitrary deadlines are an unbelievable tool because anyone can set them at any time, and if you add a bit of heft to those deadlines if they’re broken, you’re really cooking.

An example.

Thinking about a startup idea where you get chefs to come to busy families homes on Monday morning and cook 10 healthy meals and put them in tupperwares for the rest of the week? Host a dinner party where you invite a bunch of parents and have the chef cook, then send everyone home with leftovers and try to sell them the service after.

There obviously needs to be a balance between this type of work and other foundational startup work, but in my experience founders never do this sort of thing and it nearly always works. Because the offshoots of putting yourself on the hook are endless - you increase serendipity because people know what you’re doing, you get tons of feedback, you build process, you get energized, you get nervous, you remind yourself you can do hard things. Hooks bring what in hindsight we call luck. More on that in the episode how to engineer luck from a few weeks ago.

Every week you should ask - when’s the next time I’m on the hook and if there isn’t a hook, your first priority is to create one. That’s the beauty of hooks. You don’t ahve to wait for anyone else for them.

That’s the most important thing, Elle. Great question.

Next up!

Palette cleanser from Jeff in St Louis:

“You seem to watch a lot of tv based on the pod references. What’s your current favorite show?”

First of all Jeff, I watch like 30 minutes a night after we get the little guy down. Settle down.

And second, the answer is Slow Horses on Apple. It’s a g-d delight. And there’s nothing startuppy about it. And, of course, the great british baking show. We’re a few back, don’t spoil it for me, Jeff.

If I had to give a show rec that was somewhat startuppy, I’d suggest Alone on the history channel. Ten people get dropped in some remote, awful location and have to survive with ten items they brought from home. The one who stays the longest wins a million bucks. The strategy is kinda startuppy. You need to think about differentiation - what you can do that no one else can. If you just try to do the normal things better than other people - fish with a gil net, snare rabbits, build a normal shelter, not get scared by bears - you probably won’t win. You need to do something that meaningfully distances you from the others to win. And you need to be comfortable with the fact that it might not work and if it doesn’t, you’re toast. One year a guy spent all his time making a boat. His thinking was that no one else would or could build a boat, and if he was able to build one he’d be able to go fishing in the winter and have a source of food no one else could get. It was a startup type risk - if it worked, you’d be set. If it didn’t, fine, you wouldn’t win with an obvious strategy anyway.

His boat sank and he lost, but I loved the strategy and it was the right one.

Ok, next question.

This person didn’t say their name, so we’ll pretend it’s from five time world series champion Derek Jeter, because we aren’t sure it wasn’t him.

Here’s Derek:

“I try to tell people about my idea a lot, because I don’t want to have a Whisper Idea (note - he said the thing!), but, every time I tell people they always respond by saying “oh, so you’re like X company,” or days later they’ll send me an article about some company with founders who are like ex apple and ex google who raised money to do the same thing. I know I shouldn’t be discouraged, but it is so freaking discouraging. I feel like everything’s been done or is being done by someone with a head start on me.”

Great one, Derek. And thanks for being vulnerable - most people would assume that the universally beloved Derek Jeter wouldn’t have these sorts of insecurities.

Anyway, this is one of the most common things I hear from early stage entrepreneurs and it is endlessly frustrating for me to hear because it does the absolute worst thing in the world - it discourages you from starting. And starting is the whole thing - every bit of it. Because while you think you show up with an idea and then the work is to build that idea, the reality is you show up with nothing and work for a while and then realize what you’re doing a few months in. Always. With zero exceptions. So, stopping before you get started is so heartbreaking, because you’re stopping because you think the thing you’re doing won’t work but you don’t even know what you’re doing because that comes after work.

Anyway. A few more points on this.

Of all the ten thousand things that could sink your company, I am 100% sure it won’t be competition. Because competition is actually pretty easy to deal with. In most cases, it’s the best thing you could possibly have. And sure, it validates the market, which is why most people say competition is good. But I think it’s good for a different reason - competition is a forcing function for good strategy.

Let’s take an example.

Let’s say you’re building an AI driven e-learning app. You think you can feed an AI a crap ton of info and have it duolingo lessons for kindergarten through 5th graders. This will even the playing fields for the kids in worse schools, and it’ll learn how people best learn and present information that way, and on and on. Great.

But, then people start sending you all the dozens of similar apps that are being funded because AI for helping kids learn stuff is a fantastic opportunity.

One way to think about this is to get insecure and quit. This will validate the little voice inside you that was telling you the whole time that this was stupid and you should just go work at Deloitte and you shouldn’t have broken up with your fourth grade boyfriend and maybe you should just move back in with your parents.

The other way is to take a deep breath, remind yourself that comparing your beginning to someone else’s middle is a horrible use of time, and to think about the word “disproportionate.”

Your job, now, is to find the people who feel the pain you’re going to help with disproportionately. And, the people who will get disproportionate value from the thing you’ll build. The thing you do best. In our Alone example, your version of the boat.

So, maybe you got into the AI for learning stuff in the first place because you grew in a rural town that didn’t have access to tutors, so the math scores tended to lag behind national averages. And you know that these towns tend to have a teacher or two trying to go the extra mile to build out math clubs. And that there are initiatives in these states to help support new edtech from grants and donors. So, you zoom in on finding those champions - the teachers that try to spearhead the math clubs, and you build a tool that helps them amplify their effort. And you get them to help you position yourself for the grants. And this helps you decide all the things you won’t do, which are basically a list of things competitors do do.

Here's what actually happens when you focus like this:

1. Your conversations get better because you're talking to specific people about specific problems

2. Your product gets better because you're optimizing for real constraints

3. Your marketing gets easier because you can speak directly to your audience's pain

4. Competition becomes irrelevant because you're not really competing anymore - you're serving an overlooked and underserved customer

With this sort of strategy, every step you take moves you forward and your competitors further away. And competition forces you to do this, because you won’t be able to compete with better funded teams with a broad product.

One last thing on the friends telling you about competitors.

This is usually because they don’t know how else to react. People get insecure when their friends do something different and ambitious. So, they try to pull them back to the normal path. Telling you about competition isn’t about you, it’s about them trying to not feel like they’re left behind on a subconscious level. It isn’t vicious or jealous - it’s just human. We’re comfortable in herds.

The end - the last question

We’ll end with a super quick one from Jean-Louis in England.

“What’s a way to support the pod if I’m never going to join Tacklebox or pay for any of the one-off workshops use any of the stuff you advertise?”

I actually get this one a lot. So, while I feel like a jackass posting it, people do ask this and it always means a lot. I know for my favorite podcasts, like how did this get made, I will buy tickets to their virtual shows or buy a tee shirt every once in a while to say thank you.

So, you can do one of three things if you feel that way about this pod. First, rate us on spotify or itunes. Always helps.

Second, if we’re in your top 5 in your spotify rewind or whatever, share that or tell someone the pod is good.

And third, I think we’re going to make some merch. High quality coffee mugs with some reminders on them for folks working on ideas. Email [email protected] and just say coffee if this is something you’d buy. If enough people email, we’ll make em.

But, really, the best thing you can do is to start working on the thing you’ve got in your head.

I alluded to it in the competition question, but, you just don’t know where something can go before you start. And, you don’t need, like, anything to start. If the elearning app sounded good, start researching and speaking with people. If a meal prep idea sounds good, chat with people about that. Seek out problems and ask real people questions about them.

Trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback as quickly as possible.

And, thanks for listening. Hopefully this made the thanksgiving commute a bit better and wherever you end up puts sausage in the stuffing. Nothing better than sausage in the stuffing.

Enjoy it.

This was the idea to startup podcast and if you got this far, code muchadoaboutstuffing or turkey day will get you 20 or 30% off the self-paced 6 month and year long plans. Go build something.