Last week, I gave an overview of the Idea Supply Chain and what it’s all about.
This week, let’s talk about where you can make money with this idea. Everyone likes money, right?
To start, let’s look at idea sourcing.
Sourcing Good Ideas
Let’s be honest, everyone is just throwing their ideas out everywhere right? Just scroll Twitter for a few moments and there are no shortage of ideas.
But how many of them are good ideas? How many are valuable?
It can be hard to tell, which is where you come in to “provide value!” (I’m not a huge fan of that phrase, because it’s overused and most people don’t understand the actual value they are providing, but I digress)
Here’s secret number 1 of the Idea Supply Chain:
Most people get their ideas from the same place, so most of their outputs are the same.
This comes down to the fact that the majority just consume whatever content everyone else is consuming, so they can have something to talk about with the people around them. That’s one of the magic parts of the internet: it opens up all sorts of alternate possibilities. The “people around you” are up to you online, more so than everywhere else in your life.
So who do you surround yourself with?
What ideas do you surround yourself with?
When you figure out this level of curation, that’s a valuable service. More and more people are starting to realize that they need to pay attention to their content diet, so there’s a growing demand for curation.
And curation is easier than creation.
(By the way, if you followed what I started to try with Choose Your Algorithm, it’s a curator’s toolkit, honestly. I’ll be coming back to that piece of things after I build out more of the rest of my supply chain.)
Ok, let’s say you’ve started sourcing your ideas. Now, it’s time to put them together.
Manufacturing
This is where you take the ideas coming in and start putting them together. The last step was curation, now we are talking creation. Start putting those ideas together in all sorts of ways. The trick to getting started with manufacturing is to optimize for speed of iteration. You can push out ideas with zero cost, so start putting them together and dropping them on Twitter, in blogs, on podcasts, on YouTube, etc.
Have fun with it. Figure out where your ideas can hit reality. As you start to see some ideas taking shape, you can work on packing them up into different products. And by products, I don’t necessarily mean something you can sell, although you can. Instead, I’m focusing on discrete, distributable units of ideas.
Could be a blog, could be a course, could be a SaaS, could be a board game. Every product starts with an idea, and you can validate digitally before you validate physically.
Build once, sell twice. Create something that you can distribute easily.
But now, we’ve got to talk Packaging.
Packaging Your Ideas
This is something people don’t usually see as a separate step, but it really is. Especially when it comes to ideas. You can take a single idea and package it up in all sorts of different ways. The packaging can act as a “pre-sorting” of sorts. Instead of sharing your idea with everyone, you can share it with a given sub-set of people. And the larger audience you are speaking to, the less you can assume about the ideas they already own.
Let’s say everyone has a puzzle, but they are missing pieces. They could try to use the pieces everyone else is tossing out everywhere, but if you package your idea in a box that looks like the one for their puzzle, showing the final picture, I’d say it’s more likely for them to come to you for pieces, right?
But like puzzles, there are a lot of common patterns that can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.
Here’s an image of someone taking advantage of the fact that puzzles are cut into the same shape. This describes exactly what I’m talking about.
When you realize you don’t have to get pieces from the same puzzle, you can get closer with the people you want to talk to. It’s harder to combine puzzles to create things like this, but if you show them they actually have all the puzzles needed and can simply re-arrange them in a new way, that’s a powerful thing.
But you’ve got to show them you’ve got the same puzzles as them.
Figure out the packaging, and you can just wrap up other people’s ideas for a new audience.
Distribution
This is one of the pieces that you hear about most often. But how do you think about the distribution of ideas?
Most people think about it as the largest possible audience. And when attention is the product, that makes sense, because more people = more attention = more revenue. But when we package up an idea for a specific audience, if we know how to get it to the people who want it, we’re going to do a lot better. The Value/Person ratio is going to be a lot higher. You can also package up smaller ideas because they have the pieces that your ideas fit with. The larger the audience, the more general the idea that needs to be distributed, because you need to make sure that everyone has the puzzle you are talking about.
So you need to think about the route your ideas are taking. If you can set up a distribution route that takes you to a couple of people, who repackage that idea for a wider audience, and lead them back to you, you end up creating additional value.
Which is why creators love creating for creators.
Metacreators are packaging ideas for other creators to distribute. Moving earlier in the distribution flow means you don’t have to distribute as widely.
There’s also the idea of differentiation. How different are your ideas? Does your audience like ideas that are in line with everyone else? Or are they searching for unique insights to help them with very specific puzzles?
The harder they are having to search for the pieces that fit, the more valuable those ideas become.
This is why it’s better to be early than good. You don’t have the same level of competition around your ideas. Then, when people start looking for them because they are good ideas, you are already there. Then all of the other creators who realize it’s a good idea will also start re-packaging these ideas and distributing them as well.
And who will they be looking to for their idea supply? You guessed it! You.
Organic, Free-range Ideas
A couple of different things today.
First up, learn all about the idea of Category Creation. This is something that I keep seeing pop up, but this was the best discussion of it I’ve heard so far.
Next up, I’m actually still in the middle of listening to it, but it had a quote that blew my mind.
The average person consumes more information each day than the average person did in their lives 700 years ago.
🤯
The Jordan Harbinger Show 902: Michael Easter | Rewiring Your Scarcity Brain in a World of Excess
Idea Factory Outputs
If you want more of what I was talking about, I did throw it all together in video form too:
Also, My AI Co-founder is now live and accepting signups. I’m taking a lot of what I’m talking about and packaging it together in AI agent form, allowing users to pick some of the information sources and building their own custom idea factories without actually realizing it. So sign up, give it a try, and let me know what you think!
Until next week,
Leo