I’ve been thinking about making a change to the brand of this newsletter and I decided to finally make the leap.
The Internet Factory is now becoming Idea Supply Chain.
I’m setting up my new core around the idea that ideas are what matter, not the execution piece. When AI can execute better than humans, it’s all about what you execute.
Hence, the ideas.
If you want to be successful in the Idea Economy, you need to understand and optimize your idea supply chain.
Let’s take a quick look at what the idea supply chain looks like.
Sourcing the highest quality data, information, and ideas
Let’s start with the raw materials. Ideas are a bit unique in the fact that they can be built off of raw data, information (processed data), or other ideas.
So one of the most basic things you can do is think about where you are sourcing your inputs.
Are you just taking in whatever The Algorithm feeds you? Or are you focused on finding artisanal ideas? Perhaps free-range, organic ideas?
Let’s be honest: most people get their ideas from the same places as everyone else. They go to the McDonalds of ideas. It’s fast, cheap, and easy, but it’s not going to be great for your health long-term.
So if you want to optimize your idea supply chain, the first piece of the puzzle is thinking about what you are putting into your brain in the first place. If you want to have different ideas, have different inputs.
Manufacturing Ideas
Ok, let’s say you’ve got a pile of raw ideas, some data, and a little bit of information. What now?
From here, it’s all about product building. Think about how you can put things together. Hand out free samples. Build prototypes. Put idea A on idea B, sprinkle some data on top, and see what people think. At this stage, it’s all about iteration.
As you figure out what works, you can build up an idea factory. Create production lines that can help assemble intermediate ideas. As you start to build up a collection of ideas that resonate with people, you can produce those at scale and assemble them in different and interesting ways.
The more control you have over the production process, the more control you have over the end product.
Packaging the final product
Now, it’s all about packaging. Once you’ve got an end product that resonates with people, it’s all about packaging it up in ways that people can grasp easily.
I like to think of it this way:
Imagine an idea that you can convey in a tweet. This is a small, self-contained idea that you can open up and watch it unfold into something incredibly profound.
You want to have an idea that’s bigger on the inside.
Distribution
First-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on distribution, right?
It’s all about figuring out how you can get your ideas out into the world. That’s why I’m playing with having a podcast, a YouTube channel, this newsletter, my Twitter account, etc.
It’s all about putting my ideas out there. I’m shipping them as fast as I can and seeing what gains traction. It doesn’t take much to ship them, but it does take a lot of shots on target to find something that works.
That’s why it’s so important to optimize the process. You want to be able to ship ideas as fast as possible. You can ship all of the intermediate pieces while you are assembling the larger products.
This helps you build the distribution while building the product.
What’s next?
I’m also trying to package up the idea supply chain into a chatbot, in a sense. As part of what I am doing with buildinpublic.coach, I’ve been playing around with the idea of “teaching” the AI to get better at certain things by feeding it content from curated sources. I think this is a great mechanism for differentiation, because when anyone can build a chatbot. That means it’s all about the information the chatbot has available.
But the idea of buildinpublic.coach isn’t resonating, so I’m creating some different packaging. Instead of a coach, I’m going to package it up as an AI co-founder. It’s effectively the same code, but with some slight changes to the prompts, but I’ve been happy with how the overall structure has been working. I’ve got an internal memory for “thinking” about the message and then an external memory that holds the details of the specific conversation the bot is having.
I’m going to be launching the alpha version of this soon, so if you are interested in playing with it, just fill out this survey. I’m using the founder and business details to determine the ideal co-founder profile and seeing how much that affects the quality.
Organic, Free-range Ideas
Instead of the “content corner”, I’ll be calling these organic, free-range ideas, because it’s all stuff that I’ve sourced that stands out to me while I’m writing it.
First up, I really enjoyed this podcast from my friend Mechi. Enjoy a conversation covering topics from burnout to ethical marketing and why it’s important.
Next, I loved this interview Arvid Kahl did with Amanda Goetz. I think they covered some really important topics, and I’m a big fan of both of them.
Finally, something a little different. I loved this discussion about Yayoi Kusama, who is an artist I’ve never heard of. But I’m definitely going to do some more research into her work, because she seems like an incredibly fascinating person.
Idea Factory Outputs
And here’s the section I’m going to use to share what I’m creating. A couple of fun videos this week. First up, following the idea of an “idea supply chain”, what if ideas were hot dogs?
And I was asked to react to a video full of Elon’s warnings about AI. I….had some thoughts. Enjoy my 32-minute reaction to an 8-minute video.
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading!
~Leo