How many original ideas did you have last week?
Not things you read and agreed with or frameworks you borrowed from someone else.
I’m talking about actual ideas that came from your own actual experiences.
Ideas that only you could have.
If the answer is “Not many,” you’ve found your problem.
Most founders I talk to are asking the same thing these days:
“How do I create original content when AI can write anything I can write?”
It feels like the obvious question, but it’s not the one that actually matters.
The one that hits closer to home is:
“Why am I running out of things to say?”
Because you’ve been living the same week on repeat for six months.
Information is everywhere now and basically free. AI can remix it endlessly.
What it can’t do is sit in the sales call where a prospect says something that completely reframes how you think about your offer.
It can’t notice the pattern across five client conversations that suddenly becomes your best piece of content.
It can’t make the pricing decision you agonised over. Or feel the quiet satisfaction when it turns out you were right.
Those personal experiences and the problems you solve are your edge.
That raw material becomes your content.
Meaning, the fastest way out of that “nothing to say” rut is to stop relying on the same old stories and start creating some new ones.
Three questions. Be honest with yourself.
When you’re running low on ideas, these three questions will help you figure out exactly where you’re missing the mark.
1. Are you exposing yourself to enough variance to generate new experiences?
Unique ideas come from exposure to new problems and unfamiliar situations.
But most founders stay in the same bubble:
The same workspace
The same handful of people on Slack
The same weekly cycles
The same decision patterns
Then wonder why they run out of things to say.
If AI has flattened information access, then variance is the new leverage.
Where in your calendar is variance scheduled?
If I looked at your last 30 days, how many new environments, people, and problems did you actually collide with? If the number is low, that explains the content drought.
2. Are you spending time in the room where things are breaking?
I’ve found the clients who struggle the most with new ideas or explain concepts with real depth are often the ones who’ve been removed from hands-on client work for more than two years.
When this happen, I often end up talking to someone on their team who’s still in the trenches. That’s the person with the current, lived context.
You need to keep some proximity to the actual work if you want to speak about it with authority and freshness.
In my experience, two years is roughly the longest you can step away before your insights start to lose their edge. Except for industries that are currently evolving (e.g. SEO → GEO).
The founders with the best ideas are the ones who:
Take sales calls
Occasionally sit in on client delivery
Read unfiltered feedback
Listen to confused or hesitant prospects
See what systems break when scaling
AI cannot get the context that comes from being in those situations yourself.
Most of those moments hurt in the moment. Business tends to be uncomfortable a lot of the time, and many of the pain points you encounter are shared by hundreds or thousands of other founders.
The difficulties you work through become your content moat, something that anyone else (even any AI) can’t replicate authentically.
So ask yourself honestly: are you collecting enough of those real scars right now, or do you avoid most of them?
3. What real bets or experiments did you run in the last 30 days?
Unique ideas follow this path:
Test → Feedback → Synthesis → Insight → Content
If you haven’t tested a hypothesis in the last month, you haven’t generated new experience. You’ve simply recycled the same old lessons you already knew.
Without experiments, your content becomes commentary. But when you experiment, you have evidence-based material that carries more weight.
A lot of founders avoid this because they don’t want to be proven wrong in public (or even privately). That’s why their content starts sounding dated or repetitive.
Real bets bring volatility, something most small businesses are built to keep as low as possible.
To even run a worthwhile experiment, you usually need a few things lined up:
A cash buffer so a failure doesn’t sink the ship
A bit of operational breathing room so the team doesn’t implode
Enough emotional bandwidth to handle uncertainty
Quick-enough decision-making so you can adjust on the fly
Most businesses are running thin on at least two or three of those.
So if you’re feeling stuck right now, don’t open another blank doc.
Instead, ask: “What can I test this week, even if it’s small?”
Every real test gives you more to say than a hundred polished posts ever will.
How To Generate Raw Material
Let me share the process for generating the raw material that you can turn into content.
1. Run more real reps with real humans
You’re already creating content.
The moat gets built by noticing patterns that other people miss.
The best creators write patterns they observed from talking to 200 humans.
So, if you want the tap of ideas to open wider, increase the volume of:
Client audits
Intro calls
Nurture conversations
Customer interviews
Founder-to-founder exchanges
You’ll notice patterns emerge quickly.
Three prospects ask the same question? Write about it.
Five clients hit the same roadblock? Document how you solved it.
Someone objects to your pricing in a way that makes you rethink your positioning? That’s a framework forming in real time.
This is the most reliable source of unique ideas.
2. Solve harder problems than your market
The market listens to whoever is furthest along the path they’re on.
When you take on the problems your audience is terrified of facing, your content automatically becomes more valuable.
Here are some examples:
Scaling output by 5x a month
Building a more effective hiring system
Fixing retention collapse
Restructuring pricing without losing clients
Doubling MRR in 90 days
If YOU are solving harder problems, you automatically create rarer insights.
Your lived pain becomes your audience’s shortcut.
3. Deliberately put yourself in uncomfortable positions
You want to generate a unique context?
Put yourself in situations where you’re uncomfortable:
Take a sales call for a new offer you’ve never sold before
Audit a company doing 10x your revenue
Host a live workshop where people can challenge your thinking
Chat to 5 founders who failed at what you’re trying to do
Join a mastermind where you’re the least experienced person
Hire for a role you don’t fully understand yet
Comfort breeds clichés, so do one of these this month and document what you learn.
That’s your content sorted for the next couple of weeks.
4. Build systems that Break, then rebuild them
Every time a system breaks, it creates:
A story
A lesson
A framework
A “How I solved it” post
A “Never do this” warning
A “Here’s what changed” insight
Those operational problems can then be turned into authentic posts that carry weight because they’re not theoretical.
Other founders read them and think, “That’s exactly what I’m dealing with right now,” or “Okay, at least I know what not to do.”
AI can describe best practices all day, but it can’t tell the story of the actual failure and the fix that followed.
That gap is your advantage.
5. Consume less content, observe more reality
Most people who create content spend way too much time consuming other people’s content.
They scroll feeds, read newsletters, watch videos, then try to remix what they just saw into something “original.”
That’s how you end up sounding the exact same as everyone else.
The better move is to spend less time consuming and far more time observing what’s actually happening around you.
You get more unique ideas from:
One difficult conversation
One broken system
One unhappy client
One hiring mistake
One pricing experiment gone wrong
One sales objection you couldn’t overcome
Than from reading 50 tweets, 10 newsletters, or 3 books.
Because what’s happening in your own business is primary source material.
It’s unfiltered, current, and specific to your context.
You’re in the trenches, and that’s where the best data is.
So, How Do You Beat ChatGPT?
If you want to produce content that AI can’t imitate, increase the stakes in your working life:
Make bigger bets
Scale faster than you know how
Talk to clients you’re scared of
Pitch offers you don’t feel ready for
Hire before you’re comfortable
Break your own systems on purpose
Audit companies bigger than yours
Get in rooms you feel underqualified for
Your lived experience becomes uncopiable.
Become the kind of founder whose everyday work naturally produces material worth sharing.
- Craig