Inside Dan Koe's AI Content Engine

Get the exact blueprint to Build A Content Engine Like Dan Koe (Prompts Included): https://startup-ideas-pod.link/content-engine Join me as I chat with Dan Koe where he shares his content creation system that allows him to efficiently produce high-quality content across multiple platforms. He explains how he uses Twitter as a testing ground for ideas, then repurposes successful content for newsletters, YouTube videos, and other social platforms. Dan demonstrates how he uses AI tools to research topics, generate content ideas, and analyze successful content structures without sacrificing his unique voice and perspective. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:09 - Overview of AI Content Engine 04:45 - How Dan generates newsletter ideas 10:32 - Using Twitter as a litmus test for content ideas 14:19 - Tools Dan uses to find viral content 36:32 - Dan’s AI Workflow and Prompts 21:01 - Daily content creation routine 26:06 - Discussion about visual assets in content 32:20 - Creating Viral Content with AI (Prompt Breakdown) Key Points: • Dan uses a systematic approach to content creation, starting with Twitter posts to validate ideas before expanding to other platforms • He leverages AI tools (primarily Claude and ChatGPT) to research, summarize, and generate content ideas • His weekly workflow includes writing newsletters that become YouTube videos, and creating 2-3 social media posts daily • Dan uses specific AI prompts to analyze high-performing content and create frameworks for replicating successful formats The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - get your free builders toolkit to build cashflowing business - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire-toolkit Become a member - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND DAN ON SOCIAL Dan’s Newsletter: https://letters.thedankoe.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DanKoeTalks X/Twitter: https://x.com/thedankoe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  If you've been on the internet, you've seen Dan Co. He's got millions of followers and I've seen him everywhere. So I reached out to him and I was like, how do you do it? And he told me that his secret is LLMs, AI and prompts. So in this episode, he shows his exact playbook for coming up with ideas, creating the content and most importantly, content that is gonna go viral. Now, why I find this interesting is right now there's an unfair advantage to create X accounts, to create YouTube channels that get distribution. If you can figure out distribution, you can create a bunch of startups for those audiences. So if you stick around to this end of this episode,

• 0:42Greg Isenberg?

  you will understand how to create content like Dan Co. And you know, people generally charge thousands of dollars for this. It's free. All I ask is for a like and a comment on this episode. I can't wait to see what you build. Have a creative day.

• 1:06Greg Isenberg?

  What's up, Dan? Great to have you. By the end of this episode, what are people gonna take out of it?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Glad to be here, dude. Thank you for having me on. I have a few things to share, but the outcome as a whole will be a big picture overview of my content ecosystem. So before we just started, you were mentioning like, you're curious about how my output is so high, when I personally don't think it's that high. It doesn't take too much. So I think it just comes down to having a really smart system and then being able to augment that with AI in a unique way, which we're gonna learn. But the other thing that we have to learn in order to do that well is just how to use LLMs in a way to get them to do exactly what you want. So I'm not a coder.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  I don't use too many of the fancy tools, mostly just Claude, ChatGPT. So how are we gonna use the base tools that most people have access to and understand to create something incredible?

• 2:10Greg Isenberg?

  I love it. I only have one ask from you. You know, I just asked that you don't hold back any sauce. You give the prompts. You show how it's really done. Because what would be success for me is if... Thousands of people consume this episode and understand how to use LLMs to be like you. Because when I see Dan Ko, I see millions of followers. I see you everywhere. I see content here. I see content there. And I'm like, how does this guy do it? Dan, can you commit to it?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yep.

• 2:42Greg Isenberg?

  All right, let's get into it.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Cool. So the first thing there, just to touch on millions of followers, having so much content, so many different platforms. The thing about that is all of my content is the same across all different platforms. So the base of it all comes down to two things. It comes down to my newsletter, which I write every week, sometimes twice a week, but once a week is like baseline. And then two is two to three social media posts a day. And those are usually written. And so I write Twitter first because it's like the 280 character limit. And then since that's like the limiting factor out of all the platforms,

• 3:26Speaker 01

  that can pretty easily transfer over to any other platform. So that gets posted to threads by Instagram. I turn that into an image and post that onto LinkedIn, onto Instagram. Sometimes I use them as a reel script. So I pull up my camera, look at my phone, read my best tweet, recite it to the camera, maybe add a bit on there. And then I have reels, TikToks, shorts, et cetera. And the good thing about that is since the ideas themselves are almost always validated ideas or have the potential to do very well. If I can nail the first idea that goes out on Twitter,

• 4:09Speaker 01

  then I'm practically nailing all the other content that goes out on all other platforms. Because I'm not much of a trend follower. Sometimes I am, but most of the time I believe that the algorithms are based off of human psychology. And if you understand human psychology and can use AI to help you understand that more, your content will see a notable increase in engagement and other things of that nature. So first, I'll just give an overview in this canvas style. So you understand my weekly process. So every week I plan out my newsletter. And the idea for the newsletter.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  It's based on a few different things. It could be a top performing tweet of mine that I had before, because I know that that tweet has already done well. So I'm just going to take on it, take it, expand it into a newsletter. That turns into a YouTube video podcast, good to go. Or it can be based on a video that is already doing well on YouTube. So a good way to generate ideas that help you grow is to go to YouTube, look at the accounts in your niche or the people, the kind of like tribe you want to join online. Go to their account, go to videos, filter by most popular, and then just write down 10 of the videos that you think you could recreate.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Now, the secret there is you're not watching the videos. You're not trying to steal anything from the video itself. You're trying to take the topic, the angle, and write your own perspective on it. Because if other people are watching those videos, since they have a lot of views, then they're going to, just by the nature of YouTube and people binge watching things, they're going to be recommended your video, they're going to watch that. And if they hear you say the same things as the other person, then you're not going to stand out or be unique. So that's what this process is. So that's usually the two ways that I come up with newsletter ideas. And I keep a document where I tend to, I just have a list of ideas that I can pull from.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I pick the one that I think is going to do the best that week. Now, what I do for that is I of course have a place where I write the newsletter, just in a note or document. But I tend to find a few things that I've either talked about before relating to that. So previous newsletters, previous tweets.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Whatever they may be. And then

• 6:46Greg Isenberg?

  Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy, and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so, too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built idea browser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high-quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search, what are people looking for? And what are they screaming for in terms of products

• 7:29Greg Isenberg?

  that you should be building? And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more, almost like a chat GPT for ideas with it. But you can start for free idea browser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  A lot of the times, I like to weave in other concepts from specific books or videos. So this is where AI really comes into play because I'm talking about

• 8:06Speaker 01

  survival and how to reinvent yourself in this newsletter. And when I say survival, I'm talking about psychological survival, something that I find really unique and interesting. And I've previously watched three videos on that. They're each by a channel called actualize.org, and they're like three hours long. So it's a lot of learning when I'm on walks and other things of that nature that allows me to write in-depth newsletters, but

• 8:35Speaker 01

  I'm usually not taking notes during this time. And this is where LLMs can come into play because they can usually pull from YouTube videos or PDFs, allowing you to talk to them and pull up the relevant points that you want to talk about in a newsletter. So the research process there is thinking about the newsletter and the topic I want to write, talking with AI a bit and just getting specific key points and summaries and other unique perspectives and maybe throwing in a few things about the topic that I'm talking about, just so I have a chat that I can refer to that turns six hours of videos

• 9:19Speaker 01

  into a thousand words, right? So then I can write about it myself. Now, the other thing here is if I bake in something I've written previously, so this is on reinventing yourself, it's kind of my thoughts on that. So you can think of this newsletter as like combining these two. So when I take the summary, paste it into another chat or link it to another chat, then I can say, okay, what are the similarities here? Is there anything that I'm missing? I'm kind of just in this process of ideation with the LLM until I feel like I have enough firepower to start piecing together an outline and then to start writing it.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Now, I don't have the LLM write for me, like the actual newsletter, but with what we're going to talk about, you could technically do that. And if we have time, I'll actually show you how to do that specifically. But that's the research process. Nothing special here, just getting information from the, getting the ideas so that I can put them into the newsletter. Otherwise, you just get stuck staring at a blank screen.

• 10:29Greg Isenberg?

  So I have a question on this. So your thesis is basically you use X, Twitter, as a litmus test on ideas.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:41Greg Isenberg?

  And then, once you have an idea that gets validated, then you're like, okay, this might have legs to extend this to other mediums, then you...

• 10:56Greg Isenberg?

  Look to YouTube as an encyclopedia of knowledge. You find popular videos or videos that are just high quality that might be hours long and then you use, it looks like you use Gemini in the first example to summarize it. You can use really anything you want, right?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I tend to go with Gemini 2.5, especially when there's, oh, this one's only nine minutes. But for like the three to six hour videos, I'll use Gemini just because of the large context window.

• 11:34Greg Isenberg?

  Right. So you get smart about the videos and then from that you extend it, right? And you're not using the LM's to, at this point, write it. But I guess my question is, because someone listening to this is gonna be like, okay, but you never talked about the hardest part, which is your great ideas on Twitter. You know what I mean? So how do you think about that?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  So it's kind of circular, right? The ideas for Twitter can come from two different places. It can come from the newsletter itself. So I'll show over here in a second. But they can come from the newsletter itself and that's a good way to generate ideas. But the mistake that people make there is they'll have a really good newsletter and they'll think, okay, I'm supposed to pull ideas from this and they'll read a certain sentence or paragraph and just try to copy paste that directly and post it on Twitter with maybe a few changes. When in reality, what you're looking for is just the idea that you can turn into a high performing tweet. So.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  It's kind of the same thing there where the first step is learning how to write high performing tweets and there's courses on this, there's YouTube videos on this. The best thing I can recommend is actually what I'm going to show you, but you need to kind of immerse yourself in good writing and ideas. I think the best thing you can do to write better social content in general is to just keep a swipe file of really good ideas that you'd like to emulate under your own brand. I think of brand as the ideas that you associate yourself with. And so you're not necessarily copying other people's ideas or taking other people's ideas.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  You're synthesizing a bunch of different ideas that are technically what compose your mind and your worldview and you're bringing them together in a very articulate way under your own brand. And then as people consume those over time, you gain that authority in their head. So that's one way to come up with ideas is just keep a swipe file. You have to become like a ruthless note taker and just consistently save ideas until you've read so many of them and written so many of them that it's become second nature to you on how to just structure an idea. Like you can give me a word and then if you give me a minute to think about it, I could

• 14:16Speaker 01

  probably come up with a really good post about that thing.

• 14:20Greg Isenberg?

  And do you use any tools for that?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  I use, if we go to Twitter.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  So I've used both Tweet Hunter X and Super X. It feels like a lot of people or no company has really mastered this yet, just the Twitter sidebar in general, where when you go to a certain person's profile, this is the Super X extension and it just shows their top performing tweets. So if you write down five to 10 accounts that you really like and you kind of want to

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I think you refine your writing style by reading the writing you aspire to have. And so if you have the accounts that talk like you want to talk, and you consistently visit their highest performing tweets with Super X or Tweet Hunter X, and save all of these down and try to exchange either the structure or the idea, and practice posting. What I mean by that is, right here, there's a clear structure. Go on more walks, walk for no reason, walk to solve a problem, et cetera, et cetera. You can take this structure, or bring another idea into it. So rather than walks, it could be code. Code more, code every day, something of that nature.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And then the more you, or that's

• 15:45Speaker 01

  exchanging the, taking the structure and exchanging the idea from it. But you can also take an idea, like go on more walks, and exchange the structure of it. So then you look at another structure where this is just a single sentence.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  I don't know, platitude of sorts, this one at least. And you can just take the idea of walks, try to write it as a single sentence. Now you have two tweets from one idea. And the more you do that and practice it, then really any idea has the potential to do very well because you can just pop it into a pre-existing structure. Or you can take a structure and plug in one of the ideas that you're trying to include in your brand. So, one thing there that I'll talk on, and then we'll get into actually doing all of that. What, after I write the newsletter, I have three prompts that I like to run it through.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  So this first one is just a YouTube title generator. And I'll show you how this one's structured. And if you do this, Greg, I can

• 16:56Speaker 01

  put all of these into Google Docs so people can copy paste them and read through them and dissect how they're structured. But for this prompt specifically, I

• 17:08Speaker 01

  wrote a prompt, I took my best, like, 15 titles on YouTube, and I

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Whatever I plug into it, the newsletter I plug into it, it pulls out the key points from that newsletter and tries to spin them into 20 to 30 YouTube titles that are similar and follow the same psychological patterns and principles as my best performing titles. And so it spits these out here and then I tend to read through these, cross out ones that I don't think would work, highlight ones that I think would, potentially come up with a better one from my own mind, test that out on YouTube. If it doesn't work after two weeks, I'll try changing the title. Usually that'll get it to a decent place in terms of views. And the reason I create YouTube titles for this is because

• 18:01Speaker 01

  my newsletter is a practically an outline for my YouTube videos, right? I have it pulled up as I'm looking at the screen, I mean, at the camera. I'll look down, read a sentence, recite it to the camera. Sometimes I'll riff, sometimes I'll read straight from it. If I'm looking down and reading at the newsletter, my editor just adds B-roll or text screens over my face. So people can't see me looking down. But that's the general structure of it and people quite like it. The objection there usually is,

• 18:35Speaker 01

  "Well, if you're posting the same thing on two platforms, won't people notice that or won't they get bored?" Right. And most of the time, I've seen the opposite. Like there are people that read it and then when they watch or listen to it, they get something entirely new because it's a different medium. Other people prefer to watch or listen rather than read. And I just feel like my philosophy behind it is I'd rather produce one amazing thing a week and just put all of my attention into that and put it out across all platforms rather than try to create something new for each platform and each of those things not be as good.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  And there's probably marginal difference between the two paths, but I've really gotten into this flow of the weekly flow of newsletter, YouTube video, social posts across all platforms. And it's worked out pretty well. People don't get angry and it's, seems like it's working.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  But the next thing I do is I'll take the newsletter or the YouTube video and I'll plug them into a Deep Post Generator prompt and just a content ideas generator. And these are both kind of the same thing. For the Deep Post Generator, I wrote a prompt that breaks down the newsletter or whatever you feed it, it could be a PDF, a YouTube video, anything. And I came up with this prompt, still kind of fuzzy how I did it because it was like a huge conversation. But I broke down, I asked it to break down a bunch of these social posts

• 20:20Speaker 01

  that I really liked, the way they were structured, the way they were written, and the key things that made them do really well. And after that conversation, it said, okay, well, a lot of these have paradoxes and counterintuitive truths. A lot of them have a transformation arc. A lot of them have core problems. A lot of them have examples, or they handle objections, or they have action steps or aspirational statements. And so I was like, okay, take each one of these and break down the newsletter, whatever you're fed, into like five compelling post ideas, like the most impactful ideas that could be turned into posts.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And then I want you to ideate three core paradoxes, a bunch of key quotes, transformation arc, core problems, key examples. So with this, I'm not asking it to write tweets for me because the LLM isn't going to be too good at doing that unless you guide it to in a very specific way. But instead here is I have it give me the pieces of ideas, like the deconstruction of high performing content and ideas, and just give me a bunch of those. And so I can read through here. And when one thing sparks an idea for me, boom, I can go and start writing a tweet on that. Or I can combine a bunch of these together

• 21:49Speaker 01

  since technically each of these, like all of these paradoxes, quotes, problems, are all related, they're all about one idea. So I just have a bunch of building blocks for good content in here.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  The next prompt that I use is just a general content idea generation. I have it give me 60 ideas. And these are usually based around the tweets that have done really well for me or the social posts in general. I've found that people really like when I give harsh life advice and I like that too. Counterintuitive truths, which is very similar to the paradoxes. Core problems or pain points, again, very similar. Key insights, wisdom, big ideas. So I can just read through here and I'm not technically, I'm not trying to copy paste these as a tweet. I'm just trying to generate a starting point for an idea so that I can have those ideas faster, right?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Because I feel like good ideas are the fuel for content, but usually good ideas come from sifting through hours of YouTube videos on a walk or reading a good book or finding a really good Substack article and having that generate ideas or just sitting and thinking with your thoughts until something emerges. And those are great ways to come up with ideas. But this is just a way to kind of force that to an extent and still maintain the quality without having the LLM actually write it for you. Now, so we just went over like in general, how I go or how I create my newsletters and content each week. That's just the writing ideation process.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  How I actually structure that on a day to day basis is quite simple. Where I wake up, do a little morning routine, shower, walk, whatever it may be, and then I sit down at my computer and the next two hours is just dedicated to writing. So in that writing, I have to finish one section of my newsletter and I have to finish three posts, three social posts. And then within that time, you usually have time within that two hours still to paste those social posts to all platforms or at least schedule them. And so that's kind of my routine every day. It's just two hours of writing and that's the base of all of my social media, all of my newsletter.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  One day out of the week, I record my YouTube video and pass that off to the editor and then boom, my content is done.

• 24:28Greg Isenberg?

  And the rest is history. You got millions, millions of followers, millions of likes.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Well, that was the other thing that I found relatively quick is

• 24:45Speaker 01

  once I had a post that started to generate more followers than other ones did, I knew that I just had to start creating spinoffs of that post because then it's like I almost had a predictable way to increase the follower growth. So it's like the, the key part here is one, you need to experiment until you kind of strike gold and know what brings in followers. Then you need to make that a consistent part of your process and consistently create spinoffs of that. While with your other time and let's say that's 30% of the time, that's like one post a day out of the three. The other two posts are for continuing the experimentation on until you find the next one

• 25:28Speaker 01

  that is like you striking gold, then you make that a part of your process. Now you have two posts a day that are just consistently most like they, they're not all going to bring in a ton of followers, but you're getting closer and closer to just consistently increasing followers over time by doing this. And if you keep that balance of your core ideas that are consistently going to bring in followers with a healthy dose of experimentation until you find more and then you just cycle out the core ideas. That's really the entire growth process on any social platform, in my opinion.

• 26:06Greg Isenberg?

  So there's, there's one thing that's missing from this, which is visual assets like media. So on X, I've noticed that like if I tweet just words versus I tweet words with an image, the words with image, you know, call it performs 40% better.

• 26:29Greg Isenberg?

  And so how do you think about that? How do you think, you know, okay, you do this process to come up with ideas to write the content, but what do you do about the image?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  I don't do anything, but that's just me.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Because I've, ever since I started out, I kind of put the constraint on myself of like, I want to do this with just writing. I didn't start YouTube until I think two years after I was on Twitter. And just by creating that constraint, it made me be more creative. And I think it made me refine my writing a lot more. I've occasionally incorporated visuals in my Instagram posts and newsletters for like, drawing out specific concepts or having certain infographics. Or I even did animations on Instagram at one point. And those things definitely helped, but the animations eventually died down because a lot more people started doing them.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  And then same with the visuals, like I noticed they were a good pattern interrupt when I would post those after not posting them for a while and they would get a lot more engagement. But then if I tried to make that a consistent thing, they would just balance out as most of the posts did. And so then I'm like, I should just stick with writing because the ideas in my head, the thing that I feel built my audience the most, there's no way to know this, but I think it came from my focus on idea density and novel perspectives. So in my YouTube videos especially, I try to bake in at least one thing that I think

• 28:16Speaker 01

  will like blow people's minds as an exaggeration. It's like the thing that I found so interesting that I feel like not too many people know about. If I can find a way to incorporate that into a newsletter that has a pretty broad and validated angle. So people go into the video because it's already validated. They like that topic, they'll just watch it to watch it. And then I have a good hook, a good lead, and then I lead them into like that mind blowing insight that makes them think a bit deeper and learn something new and have something new to explore. That gives them this unique connection with me that.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Not too many other people do.

• 29:01Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Does that make sense?

• 29:03Greg Isenberg?

  It does. I think like if you have really good optimized ideas, you don't need visuals. It's just so hard to come up with good ideas. I mean, you're sharing the sauce around how to come up with good ideas, but it it's, by the way, it's not just good ideas. It's good ideas that are optimized for feeds.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:26Greg Isenberg?

  Because you need people to reshare it to get seen or like it or comment on it. You need them to stop scrolling to, you know. So for a lot of people, the images or the videos are a bit of a crutch. Like you can take a not so good idea, crutch it to a really nice visual and likely you'll get more seen. I think, I do think that if you added images and or videos to your X posts, you would see, not that you need, you know, another 5 million impressions a month,

• 30:06Greg Isenberg?

  but I think the way I would, I mean, I think it's fun to explore like Sora 2 just came out. You know, what are some short films, cinematic films that you can, you know, you could be creating? That's one. The other thing is, you know, Nano Banana, Gemini Flash 2.5. You know, okay, I'll show you something real quick. Actually, go to my, my X. So I had a post that I posted that got like no, like scroll, keep scrolling. It's like, it's a lot, it's a lot down, but I had a post, I'll let you know. That basically didn't go anywhere.

• 30:51Greg Isenberg?

  And then I reposted it with an image. There it is. Stop. It went up, went up. There it is. The Cringe Mountain one.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 31:01Greg Isenberg?

  So I posted this. Everything I ever got in life was because I climbed Cringe Mountain. You sweat, you shake, you look stupid, and then one day it breaks open. And suddenly you're the only one with the view. When nowhere without the, you know, yeah, basically nowhere without the image, but once the image. Combined with, you know, maybe it wasn't a great idea. Maybe it was a pretty good idea with, I think, a really great image. It got 148,000 impressions. And by the way, I hear you listening to this and you're like, yeah, but you have 500,000 followers or whatever. The followers don't really matter anymore, realistically. You know, it's actually easier to get impressions if you have less followers. It's, you know what I mean?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Like, I can post something that is just like a throwaway tweet and it will go nowhere. It'll get like 100 likes compared to a typical 2,000 to 3,000. And yeah, it's just, the, the audience is definitely a force amplifier, but only if you're good at that thing. Like, if, if most people who haven't practiced writing content for a long amount of time were given a million followers, I do not think that that would help them in the slightest.

• 32:17Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, cool.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  But yeah, let's actually show a cool way to do this with Claude or in, in creating a prompt to help you write tweets or to help you, I guess, learn how to write those high performing posts. So, one thing I love to do is, there's a two-step process here. Anything that I like and want to incorporate into my work, I will ask Claude or ChatGPT to break it down, teach me how to do it. I will take that as if it were a, an SOP or just a set of instructions. Then I will take a prompt that helps me create prompts,

• 33:03Speaker 01

  send that, paste the instructions into it and say, I want to turn this into a prompt that interviews me for the exact thing you need in order to execute on this as best as possible. So, as an example here is, I said, break down the structure of this post so that I can recreate it from scratch, break down why it works, the psychological patterns involved, what context is needed from me, and anything else I would need to understand how to recreate it. Then I just pasted, I believe this is one of my tweets that did pretty good.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  How to know you are doing something meaningful? You feel like you don't make any progress for weeks, months, or years. Then the growth hits you all at once. When you create your own path, results are unpredictable. And that keeps many people from sticking with it. So you find a good post. Well, first, you write this, tell it to break it down. You find a good post that you want to understand why it did so well or how it was written. But this can also be applied to something like a landing page. Or if you're trying to write a book and you read someone else's book and you're like, "Damn, that paragraph was good. I want to understand how I can take my own idea and replicate the structure of this so my writing flows the same amount." You can do that for writing YouTube scripts.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  If you're able to break down the transcript, there's just so many different things that you can do. I actually saw when Clouly first launched, they had a landing page that I really liked. And I copy pasted the landing page, wrote exactly this, told it to break down every single part of the landing page copy. And it called it paradigm shift marketing and just taught me exactly how to replicate it. So when I could take that and turn it into a prompt and then plug my own ideas for my own product into it, then it could rewrite that same style of copy, but with my product,

• 35:06Speaker 01

  my features, my problem that I'm solving, unique mechanism, et cetera. So with here, we're breaking down a tweet and it breaks down the core structure, hook statement, pain and struggle, the payoff, the insight and warning, why it works. And just by doing this alone, you can learn so much about writing content. You, like this alone is...

• 35:32Speaker 01

  A masterclass in writing one piece of content and then you can continue conversing with it. And that helps you write better content on your own. Then it gives you a formula, additional elements to make this work. And then what I did here is I did the same thing, do the same thing with this. And I took one of Zach Pograb's tweet and or Instagram posts. It was just the best way to get your spark back is burning everything down. You have to reset your life, very similar to the things I like to read and write. And so I like this, I wanted to break it down.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  I told it to, it has, it broke down the structure, provocative thesis, purge list, the promise, the elite few, the permission. Teaches me why it works. Writing techniques, context needed. What makes it work? And then I did the same thing for one last tweet. So do the same thing with this again. People in third world, people in third world countries spend their days talking, playing, dancing and making love. People in first world countries aspire to spend their days talking, playing, dancing and making love. I think about this often. This was just one I found and I'm like, that's a good idea. I'll throw it in here too.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  So the process of this is pretty much break down three tweets that you really like. And then combine all of these into a singular guide. So now the anatomy of viral philosophical posts, a complete guide, breaks down the three archetypes, which were the tweets. And then core psychological patterns, technical structure, power techniques.

• 37:17Greg Isenberg?

  This is insane. This is absolutely.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Manipulation. It's, it's really cool. And like, well, imagine doing this for more than just tweets, like YouTube scripts and other things like the, this is where it starts to all tie together. Once you use this process, if you, you use this process a few times, you realize that you can use it for almost anything. And then if you rewind this podcast to looking at the canvas that I was showing you, you can now see that each chat in there was one of these prompts that I created. So if I want to turn my newsletter into tweets and I use this there.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Then it like, that's so much better than me pasting my newsletter into an LLM and being like, "Hey, what are 10 of the best ideas from this? Can you write a tweet? Have, write 10 tweets for me?" And then it writes like, "The worst tweets you've ever read and still includes hashtags." So this is like, how you give the specific instructions, so that it can write like you, or write how you want it to. And then you can paste those directly if you'd like, or you can use those as ideas to, like, as a first draft, a starting point.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Now, the last important thing here is I said, "From that guide, what is everything you would need from me in order to start writing tweets? Everything I need to know from you, core identity, audience psychology, philosophical stance, voice parameters, specific insights, transformation narrative, emotional territory, so on and so forth, a lot of stuff." So we're making this very comprehensive

• 39:01Speaker 01

  because the context is king. The more context you give to the AI, the more it can get close to putting out what you actually want it to put out, or putting out things that will blow your mind and that you feel confident in replicating week by week in your content. So now we have two things here. We have a description of the context we need, and we have instructions for how to actually write posts. So what I did next is I took these two things, I personally pasted them into just a separate note, and then start a new chat.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  And what I did here is I have this special, this thing is a lifesaver, I use it all the time. It's just a prompt that helps you create better prompts. So I can share this in some way with you guys after, but it just, it's so good. You just have to try it, makes very comprehensive prompts. Maybe you can pause, read through this if you'd like, but I send that, and then I try to use the most powerful, I know 4.5 just came out, but 4 point, I use 4.1 Extended Thinking on this, because I just like to...

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Be as advanced as I can when I'm creating a specific prompt. And what I did, or said, what is the topic or role of the prompt you want to create? I said, I want to create a prompt that helps me ideate social posts based on the guide from writing posts below. Structure this prompt in two phases. The first is context gathering. So interview me for the ideas that I want to write about. And phase two is post writing. So write three variations of each type of post using the ideas I gave you. Here's the additional context. So inside of here, on this one, I didn't paste the context that it needed from me, but I could have, right? In phase one, I could have said, use the

• 40:57Speaker 01

  guide on what context you need from me in order to create interview questions that you can ask me. And then phase two, use the tweet writing guide to take everything I gave you and turn them and turn them into tweets. And so what it did after that, sometimes this prompt will ask clarifying questions. If it has them to make the prompt better. But then it starts to spit out the prompt. And it has phase one, context gathering interview. Oh, I guess I did paste it in there.

• 41:29Greg Isenberg?

  Right.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  So it's somewhere in the thing, but the, when you send this prompt for writing tweets, it goes through, it asks you what your domain and expertise is, audience pain point, unique observation, transformation vision, personal connection. What tone, specific examples? And then once it has enough information, it'll go into phase two, which is to generate nine posts using

• 41:58Speaker 01

  yeah, three variations of the patient observer posts, which was one of the examples. Three variations of the dramatic profit posts. Three variations of the quiet devastator posts. Post structure requirements, constraints, output format. And then I just had it rewrite. It has marked down without the code block so that I could paste that into my notes because not a coder, don't use cursor, any of that, but I just keep things in notes. But Greg, do you have questions on this?

• 42:33Greg Isenberg?

  What's going through my mind is like, it feels like I've been doing content like a Neanderthal, you know, that's, that's what it feels like. Cause I just, I just brute force my way into it, you know, I just, I have an idea and I, you know, and I, you know, I start typing and then I just throw it out there. Um, it works for me. Um, and sometimes, you know, do what works type thing.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:03Greg Isenberg?

  Um, that being said, what's going through my mind is we, we have a lot of accounts, you know, cause I run a holding company and I find that some of my, you know, I love my team, but some of my team haven't been creating content. Like I've been writing, uh, you know, I started a blog 20 years ago, you know what I mean? I've been writing for so many years that it's just kinda, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's my instincts almost now. Um, so this is really helpful for managing multiple accounts with multiple people. And you really don't have an excuse not to be posting something every single day if you have this.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, another way to think of it too, is if you're a ghostwriter, a social media manager, you're managing clients, you can kind of send them a prompt that gets all of their, you, you send it to them rather than like a, a onboarding questionnaire that pulls all of their details from them, gets examples of their best content, et cetera, et cetera. And then you just create prompts for like tweets, tweet writing for them. You create another prompt for YouTube script writing or landing page generation, all based around their voice, their profile, et cetera. And one last example that I'll share here is you can do a very similar thing for almost

• 44:34Speaker 01

  anything where imagine I know how to create offers. I've like been in the marketing space for so long, but a lot of people just starting, they have this superpower where they can start learning by doing faster. Right? It's not that you're avoiding reading a book like $100 million offers by Alex Hormozi. You're able to get the information you need to act and have AI act for you as a first draft. So you get the first iteration out of the way as well. So you can fail faster on creating your offer so that you can refine faster. And in my eyes, doing things this way isn't like outsourcing your agency or your cognition to AI.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  It's actually getting you closer to being high agency and

• 45:26Speaker 01

  learning through doing, like, right? The best way to learn is by building projects, failing, iterating, et cetera. So the example here and how to turn this into a prompt to create an offer and start selling and failing on whatever product it is, a SaaS startup, a physical product, a digital product, whatever. I can just ask, give me a detailed guide on how to create offers like Alex Hormozi. The reason we do this rather than, hey, here's my product, help me create an offer from it, is because I want to narrow the context from the beginning, right? I don't want AI, I don't want the LLM to pull just general context that it thinks is best

• 46:09Speaker 01

  for creating an offer or writing copy. I want it to pull from the expert that I know has skin in the game here. So it gives me a detailed guide with the value equation, building a grand slam offer, pricing, 10x value test, naming your offer, et cetera, et cetera. And I think when I was doing this, I cut myself off. But what you can do here is then I can say, okay, take this and

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Act as if you are guiding me through creating an offer. What are the exact steps? Make it extremely detailed. And then I can do the same thing I did here. Or, sorry. Then I can ask next, okay, what's all of the context you need for me?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  In order to take my product and turn it into a very good offer? Then it will spit all that out. Now you have two things. You have the set of instructions and you have the context that you need. So the next thing you do is you paste the prompt that helps you create great prompts. It's going to say, what do you want to create? I say, I want to create a two-phase prompt. Here's the information that you need to interview me for. Then phase two, here's exactly how to turn this into an offer. So I want you to create my offer blueprint for me. And then you, it'll output a prompt. You copy paste this, you send it, you answer the questions.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  It spits out an offer blueprint that is probably 10 times better than something you would have done on your own. Just that, right? And it would probably be on par with what you would be able to do after two to three months of actually learning about it. And I believe that is it.

• 48:03Greg Isenberg?

  Well, you delivered, dude. I, you know, that's why I wanted to have you. You actually over-delivered, to be honest. And because, you know, I think my mind is just racing with how much more I can do with content and, and you know, what are other audiences I could be spinning up using this method? If you can, yes, let's include that Google Doc or that doc with some of this in the show notes.

• 48:36Greg Isenberg?

  And I appreciate that generosity. Dan Ko, I hope you come back on the pod. I'll include links to where you can follow Dan on YouTube, on X, his newsletter. What else, Dan?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  That's it. You'll, if you're curious, you'll find stuff that branches off of that.

• 48:58Greg Isenberg?

  Amazing. Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate it. And dude, it takes a lot for me to get, to get my, to get my mind buzzing, but you did, you did it.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Good. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. And I'm glad that it did provide value. That's one thing I'm always like hopeful for because you never really know. I've used this so much that it's like second nature to me. So I'm very glad.

• 49:20Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I've used LLMs with content like how can you make this more clear? Or, you know, that that kind of stuff, but I this, the way you approach content creation is a very methodical way of approaching content creation. It's like very surgical. And

• 49:43Greg Isenberg?

  by the way, I think this is the best way to learn how to create content. You might actually like everyone should set this up. Maybe over time, you you're like, you know what? I'm just gonna, now I understand what works and what doesn't work. I'm just gonna shoot from the hip like Greg.

• 50:01Greg Isenberg?

  And that might be what you what might, you know, end up being great for you. Or you might be like, hey, I'm gonna double down on this and I'm gonna make 20 accounts. And that's what this is gonna look like, you know? And I think I'm really interested in that because I just think that we're in this window where there's a huge arbitrage opportunity to earn attention. So, you know, any any way to help that? You know, I'm looking, I'm looking for ways, looking for ways to optimize.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Yep, agreed.

• 50:36Greg Isenberg?

  Dan Co, Startup Videos Podcast. Thanks for coming on.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Thank you, man.