What up, what up.
People think they can smell AI writing. The em-dash. The "it's not just X, it's Y." The little tells. They run around the internet pointing at sentences like it's a witch hunt.
Here's what they're actually smelling: thin content. A thin opinion with a thousand words sprayed on top. That's the thing people object to. Not the punctuation — the emptiness behind it.
Nobody reads an AI-written guide to repairing an aortic valve and stops to complain about the dashes. They read it for the information. The em-dash disappears the second the content is worth reading.
TL;DR: People hate thin content, and AI made thin content free. The fix isn't better prose. It's information worth reading — data only you have, the judgment to ignore the rest, and a business built so your information gets more valuable with every customer you add. Get that right and nobody audits your punctuation.
Treat AI like a SQL tool
A hundred percent of what I do is mashing data together. I treat the AI more like a query tool than a writer.
Here's why. AI is great at finding the source material. It is bad at understanding why that source material is valuable. That second part — knowing what's worth keeping and what to throw away — is judgment, and it's still yours.
So the question that actually matters isn't "write me a post." It's: what is the source of the value? What data is genuinely useful here? How do I compile it — and, just as important, how do I ignore the noise and keep only the part that moves someone?
The most valuable move is subtraction
In go-to-market, the most underappreciated work is figuring out what not to do.
You've got a hundred thousand accounts in your market. Ninety-five thousand of them you should never talk to at all. Of the five thousand left, maybe a hundred will change the trajectory of your business. Find those hundred and you can spend all your time making them something worth reading.
And you don't rank them by wallet size. You rank them by the size of their problem relative to their wallet. A small company drowning in a problem you solve beats a giant who barely feels it. That ranking is the whole game.
Ask the customer
The one thing nobody does when they write a campaign: go to a real customer and ask, "Would you respond to this? Is this useful to you?"
Someone close to me is a librarian. She gets cold-called by the same rep over and over. "Will you buy my books?" Every time, same answer: "We buy books in December." All that effort, all those calls, completely wasted — because he never once asked the thing that would have told him when, or whether, to call.
That insight was sitting in her head the whole time. He just had to ask. Start from the customer's reality, not your campaign. With perfect information on the whole internet — and your own internal data — what could you hand this person that they'd actually pay to receive?
Your information has to compound
That internal data is the part that's supposed to get better over time.
I've been an advisor to Clay since 2020. One thing I keep telling them: you buy enormous amounts of data, so build a Kirkland-brand version — unbranded, way cheaper — and pass the savings to me. I could never negotiate that on my own. Their network can. That's a moat: value you can hand the next customer precisely because you already served the last one.
This is why I don't give signals-based outbound the time of day. No great product gets worse the more people use it. Signals do. The more people buy the same hiring data, the same intent data, the worse it works for all of them. Clay calls it go-to-market alpha — and the durability of that alpha is halving. It gets shorter every year.
The creative stuff I do is valuable. But it decays the moment it's copied. The stuff that compounds is different: what can you do that competitors can't — and that gets better as your business grows?
Design the message that's 10x better in three years
Here's a strange but useful way to design a business. Ask: what message could I send a future prospect that's better in a year than it is today, and ten times better in three years than it was in that first year? And how am I collecting and storing the information that makes that true?
If your business is built around distribution and around the message getting more valuable over time, everything downstream gets easier. This has been NFX's whole thesis for years — network effects, told over and over.
There's an exception. If you have the single best product in the world — say, the best AI model — you don't have a message problem. You have a collecting-money problem. But for the rest of us on the ground, the work is capturing and structuring information so the next customer finds more value than the last.
Horizontal goes thin, vertical goes deep
This is exactly where horizontal SaaS struggles. Its value is a thin layer smeared across ten verticals nobody fully understands. It doesn't compound, because you only ever go an inch deeper everywhere — and an inch deep is no moat at all.
Serve only plastics companies and your knowledge compounds. Ten plastics companies ask you for the same thing, and now you know it's worth building. Add a plastics company, a plumbing company, and a B2B SaaS company to that list and you can't tell what's worth building anymore. You go an inch deeper across all of them and own nothing.
You can't fix that by committee, either. A data company recently invited me onto a council to give feedback on their direction. Feedback's fine. The real issue is structural: in go-to-market data, the value often doesn't compound — and sometimes, with signals, it actively gets worse the more people use it. Data is becoming a commodity. An opinion helps. A product that compounds helps more.
Aggregate the data nobody else has
Nate Nasralla wrote a great book — Fluint helps companies navigate enterprise deals. He frames a big deal like a choose-your-own-adventure: a hundred decisions, each one branching.
Here's the move. Across his customers, he's sitting on dozens of examples of how deals with Starbucks, Apple, Anthropic were won or lost. Aggregate that, and the next person who walks in selling to Starbucks gets told: you'll generally need four decision-makers, one of them in the C-suite, and that has to happen at this exact point in the funnel. Nobody else can say that, because it's private data — and every new customer makes it sharper.
That's the whole point about AI writing, brought home. In a world where every message is thin, your edge is the depth and quality of the information — not the writing of it. Focus there and everything gets easier.
Distribution-first businesses win
So the businesses that win from here are distribution-first. The questions worth obsessing over are simple to ask and hard to answer:
How does one customer naturally become three? Referral, network, word of mouth baked into the product — not bolted on after.
How does the 400th customer get ten times the value of the 100th? Because every customer before them made the data deeper. That's a multiplying data moat.
What message gets better the longer you're in business? If the answer is "none," that's the thing to go fix first.
My own moat is knowledge. It's why I run a top-50 Substack two months in, why there are 20-plus tools inside Edge Copilot, and why this is the only place I put any of it. As I build for more customers, every customer gets the latest thing I've built. The next one inherits all of it.
So stop auditing other people's punctuation. Go find the one thing you know that your next customer would pay to hear — then build the machine that knows more every time you use it.
Big shout-out to David Austin, Ray Owens, and Alec Schwartz — who got his dad building in Claude Code with Edge Copilot. Thank you for using the tools and telling me what they're worth to you. That's the loop.
Have a beautiful day.
Chapters
00:00 — Why people say they hate AI writing
01:03 — Treat AI like a SQL tool
02:06 — The most valuable move is figuring out what not to do
03:13 — Ask the customer (the librarian and the book rep)
04:18 — Why your information has to compound
05:20 — Signals decay; GTM alpha is halving
06:23 — Design the message that's 10x better in three years
07:24 — Horizontal goes thin, vertical goes deep
09:31 — What Clay got right: enabling imagination
11:34 — Aggregate the data nobody else has
12:36 — Information is the value, not the writing
13:42 — Distribution-first businesses win
What Annual Adds
This one was free. Paid gets the build. Annual gives you the tools that run it.
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All 3 courses: Who to Target and What to Say, Agent 7, AutoClaygent.
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