You're wasting your most valuable asset

Hey {{first_name|creator}},

👋 Welcome to Creators In Business, a newsletter where creators learn to think like CEOs, and businesses learn to move like creators.

Your ideas are worthless; execution is everything.

For years, this was the game for founders, creators, and entrepreneurs who put their effort into signalling their value through output.

This was the key differentiator: how fast and how many times could you ship something into reality, despite how hard it is.

But AI has completely flipped the script.

Execution is so cheap and easy that we're noticing a pattern of sameness because of how much we're shipping.

As a result, the competitive advantage has shifted from execution to the idea.

What people care about now is how you got to the point of execution. It's so easy to swipe past an average idea because our feeds are so saturated with a lack of variety and original thought.

So, average ideas can't hide behind the execution anymore. They have to stand on their own.

At the same time, we're losing our ability to sit with a thought long enough to make it original. Higher quality ideas are hard to come by, but this is what makes them so valuable.

For today’s Creators In Business, I’m going to share what goes into making an idea worth having, how to build a system around it, and how to make it your competitive advantage as AI makes everything else easier.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

A good idea is that it’s a specific point of view that only you could hold. It comes from your experience, your observations, the way your mind connects things other people walked past.

This is also a process AI can’t replicate; it can only remix what already exists, and it can’t give you the insight that comes from being you.

The ideas that compound are the ones that challenge what the audience already believes. They come from lived experience, not borrowed frameworks. They make the reader see something they thought they already understood in a completely different way. That's what earns the save, the share, the long-term trust.

Before you execute anything, ask yourself: could someone else say this? If yes, push yourself further because the idea isn't sharp enough yet.

Sitting with a thought looks like nothing from the outside. When we live in a world that rewards visible effort, thinking without producing feels like falling behind.

No doubt AI exacerbates this. When a tool can generate something in seconds, spending an hour just thinking feels almost indulgent and, well, lazy.

What AI hasn't changed is how we actually think.

Good thinking is non-linear and will rarely strike on demand. Instead, it comes to us in the shower, in the middle of the night or six months after you thought you'd moved on from a problem. Unfortunately, you can't schedule a good idea.

The pressure to open the AI tool before you’ve done the thinking yourself is at our fingertips.

Except you’re not doing yourself any favours by outsourcing your ideas, your competitive advantage, to AI. You’re minimising the chances of generating something novel for the moment. Meanwhile, your ideation muscle also loses out, and so do your chances of staying in the long game.

Like you, I get a lot of my inspiration from social media. We bookmark posts, save reels, and like tweets, only to sit in a folder no one ever opens again. It's quite literally a data graveyard that I refuse to visit.

Until recently, when I decided to change my habits and systemise my bookmarks into a spreadsheet. Because of this, the depth of my ideas has deepened, bringing me closer to novel content and further away from sounding like most people in my field.

Your ideas need to live somewhere you can easily access and, most importantly, search, like in Notion or a spreadsheet.

How to systemise and remix your bookmarks:

The goal is to move away from being an idea hoarder and to retrieve them more easily. The trick is to tag it well enough to find it when you need it.

I realised the problem isn’t that you don’t have good ideas, you just need a system for protecting them.

I’m not going to be one of those people who say that AI has no place in the creative process. But I do think it’s the very last thing that you consider, if at all, until after the idea is formed and not before.

Use it as a sparring partner and let it push back on your ideas. When you outsource our ideas to AI, you’re likely giving it a surface-level input that makes it hard to stand out from others. The output loses your unique perspective and taste that people value.

The creators who win from here will not be the ones with the best tools. Everyone has the tools. They will be the ones who spent time in the slow, uncomfortable work of forming an idea worth having.

Start there.

Jess Smalley 🔑

^{Jess Smalley, creator of Creators In Business}

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