Why the Best Post-AI Marketing Strategy Hinges on One Unforgettable Idea
We all have one, but it takes somebody to see it in us to pull it out. This is referred to as "Tacit Knowledge to Explicit Knowledge," and it's fascinatingstuff
Hi there!
Writing to you from Round Rock, still recovering from a 56-minute video I recorded last night that was supposed to be 20.
In this edition:
VIDEO: The one idea AI can’t copy — and why ChatGPT only names three companies
The three things YouXAI is actually about — we finally named them: Build, Get Found, Sound Like You
I asked ChatGPT for tacos — and accidentally proved my own point
Worth Your Time: the book two of my summit speakers announced from my own stage
One Idea to Steal: the one-question test that tells you if you have an unforgettable idea
1. VIDEO: The One Unforgettable Idea AI Can’t Copy
2. The three things the YouXAI summit is actually about
For months when people asked me what the YouXAI Summit was about, I’d say something like “putting the human back at the center of AI,” and I’d watch their eyes do that polite thing where they’re still listening but they’ve stopped hearing.
It’s true. It’s also a bumper sticker.
So we sat down and got specific. There are three things a small business owner actually wants from AI right now, and every session at the summit does one of them.
Build. You’ve had an idea for years. An app, a tool, a thing that would make your business run better. And you’re not an engineer and you don’t know any VCs, so it stayed an idea. That’s over. Dariia Isyk and Shakhlo Juraboeva shipped AdmitAI while studying finance and international studies at Baylor. Not computer science. Finance.
Get Found. When somebody asks ChatGPT who solves the problem you solve, it names two or three companies. Not ten. Three. This is the one that keeps me up at night, and it’s what this week’s video is about.
Sound Like You. My sister once told me a piece of my writing had “that awful AI language.” She was right. If you’re going to use AI to make content, it has to sound like you wrote it, which means feeding it your stories, your customers’ stories, your actual voice.
Build. Get Found. Sound Like You.
That’s the whole summit. Twenty-one speakers, one Saturday, September 12th in Waco.
Tickets are $79 through the end of August, then $99 from September 1st. youxai.live
3. I asked ChatGPT for tacos
Wednesday night I gave a talk at my meetup in downtown Austin, and afterward I was starving.
I pulled up Google Maps and searched for tacos. It gave me a cluster of dozens of little dots stacked on top of each other, all of them apparently equally good.
Useless. How do you choose?
So I switched to ChatGPT and asked for the most authentic Mexican tacos in downtown Austin.
It gave me three.
One of them was Tacos De Diez — a Tijuana-style place where you shuffle through a line that spills out onto the sidewalk, and you can watch the guys carving meat off the spit and assembling the tacos and throwing the salsa on right in front of you. Everyone behind the counter is speaking Spanish. For about ninety seconds you’re not in Texas anymore.
Great tacos. But that’s not the story.
The story is that I got three options instead of the ten Google gives you.
Think about what that used to look like. You’d Google something and get ten blue links on the first page. If you didn’t like those, you’d go to page two. You browsed. You had choice.
Now people aren’t even typing search terms. They’re typing whole questions. Narrating their situation. And the machine hands back an answer with three or four companies in it, and that’s the entire shortlist.
So the question changed underneath all of us.
It used to be: can they find me?
Now it’s: am I one of the three?
The part where I have to be fair to my friend Tommy
Right now there are AEO and GEO specialists popping up everywhere, like mushrooms after a rainstorm.
My buddy Tommy Landry is one of them, but he’s the real thing.
He was one of the top SEOs in Austin for years before he went deep on this. He’ll tell you to get your schema markup right so the machines can identify your entities.
Make your site crawlable with good internal linking. Write liftable paragraphs, which means every paragraph has to be a self-contained unit of information that ChatGPT can lift out whole, instead of the old slippery-slide copywriting where each line just teases the next one.
All of that is real. All of it is necessary. I do it for clients.
And it will not get you named.
Because here’s what the schema markup can’t fix: if your company does the same thing, the same way, described in the same words as eleven other companies, there is nothing for the machine to retrieve you for.
A retrieval system can’t cite what it can’t tell apart.
Being findable and being worth naming are two completely different problems, and almost everybody is solving the first one.
So what actually gets you named
Something distinctive. One unforgettable idea.
And here’s the thing that took me years to see: it’s almost always already inside the founder. Unexpressed. Because it feels ordinary to them.
Buc-ee’s is built on clean bathrooms. That’s it. That’s the idea. Everything else - the department store, the beaver, the Dutch tourists filming the beaver - grew out of one founder deciding that people shouldn’t have to dread stopping at a gas station.
I asked my wife in the car once: one word for Apple. She thought for two seconds and said “beauty.” That’s a barefoot 20-year-old Steve Jobs reading about Buddhism and appreciating the beauty of everyday things, still running the company fifteen years after he died.
Neither of those was a marketing campaign. They were the founder’s DNA, infused into the company from the start.
And the reason a competitor can’t just copy it? Because it’s hard.
Keeping every bathroom in every Buc-ee’s spotless, all day, every day, forever - that’s not a secret. Anybody could do it. Almost nobody will. Your average gas station owner just doesn’t want to.
That difficulty is the moat.
I go through the whole thing in the video: where these ideas come from, the twelve questions I use to excavate them out of founders, and the three shapes they take. It’s long. I got carried away. Fast-forward if you need to.
4. Worth Your Time
The Category Creation Formula, by Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse.
Small bit of pride here: these two announced this book from my stage at the Strike Marketing Summit. They presented the premise, live, before it was out.
The formula is three parts. Context + Missing + Innovation = a new category.
Context is what’s happening in the world right now, whether or not you’re selling anything. Missing is what that shift turned from normal into glaring. Innovation is the thing you build to fill it.
My favorite worked example is a company called Qualified. Their founder used to be the CMO of Salesforce, so he’d spent years watching sales development reps work leads. Context: agentic AI arrives. Missing: the SDR function is one of the last unautomated parts of the sales process. Innovation: an AI SDR.
New category. And per the Category Pirates, about 74% of the economics in a new category go to whoever leads it.
Notice how much of that work happens before any marketing exists. That’s the part most people skip.
(Kevin Maney also co-wrote Play Bigger, which is where a lot of us met category design in the first place.)
5. One Idea to Steal
Here’s how you find out whether you have an unforgettable idea, and it takes one text message.
Ask a client - or a friend who knows your business - this: “When you think about my company, what’s the one word that comes to mind?”
Now, the scoring:
If they say your category - “marketing,” “insurance,” “consulting” - you don’t have one yet. You’re findable. You’re not distinctive.
If they say something only you have ever talked about - that’s it. That’s the thing. Write it down before you talk yourself out of it.
And you will try to talk yourself out of it. That’s the part I want you to watch for. The right answer feels obvious and slightly embarrassing, and your first instinct is “well sure, but everybody does that.”
That’s the tell. It feels ordinary to you because you’ve been doing it for twenty years.
It is not ordinary to anybody else.
Ask one client what word comes to mind when they think of your company. Hit reply and tell me what they said. I read every response.
See you next week!
Fernando Labastida
PS: YouXAI is September 12th in Waco. One Saturday on being more human in the age of AI. $79 through August, $99 from September 1st: youxai.live