Last month a client showed me her Claude project. Four custom skills. A content calendar automated to the hour. Prompt chains for hooks, bodies, CTAs, sign-offs. She had watched every YouTube tutorial, read the documentation, built the whole thing properly.

Her last 10 posts averaged 180 impressions.

I scrolled through them on her screen while she sat there, quiet. Each post was clean. Grammatically tight. Well structured. Completely interchangeable. If you swapped her name for someone else’s, nothing would break.

She looked at me and said, “I don’t understand. I did everything right.”

She followed every step. That was the problem.

I hear some version of this every week. Someone smart, with real expertise, builds a solid AI system, feeds it a topic, gets output, publishes. The output reads fine. It reads like everyone else’s content.

Because the audience does not care about your setup. They care whether there is a human behind the words. AI, left alone, removes the human faster than most people realize.

AI is a big piece of how I work. I’ve built voice profiles, anti-AI filters, content workflows, and Claude projects my clients use every day. A serious chunk of my business comes from helping people use these tools well.

But I still never let AI write my first draft.

Your first draft is ugly (and that’s the point)

The first draft is where the personality lives. The weird phrasing. The opinion you are not sure you should share. The sentence that makes your stomach drop a bit. The detail nobody else would have picked.

That stuff comes from you sitting with a blank page and writing what you think. Not from a model predicting what sounds good.

AI has no access to the real wiring. It does not know why you phrase things the way you do. It does not know which failure changed your entire view on pricing, and it has zero interest in your humor. It mirrors language. That is a different thing from knowing you, and the difference shows up in every post.

I spent ten years hiding my personality in corporate meetings, softening opinions and removing anything that made people uncomfortable.

Then I stopped. The right people showed up faster than they ever had before.

That change had nothing to do with better prompts.

It had everything to do with saying what I thought, out loud, in rooms where it cost me something.

You have to earn the right to automate

I wrote about this before in The Quiet Death of Knowing How. The short version is simple. AI made production faster. The bottleneck was never production. It was thinking.

And yet I keep watching creators skip straight to the tools.

They build prompt chains before they’ve written 50 posts by hand. They automate funnels they have never run manually and build voice files before they know what their voice sounds like.

The output looks clean and structured. But it is hollow as f*ck.

Because they automated a skill they never built. Sorry guys, you can’t shortcut your way to a voice.

You build one by writing badly, often, for months. By publishing something you thought was sharp and watching it get 40 impressions, then staying with a half-formed idea long enough to figure out what you actually believe.

Every craft works like this.

A chef does not start with a Thermomix. You learn the feel of the material first, and only then does the machine become useful.

Once you’ve done that work, AI becomes a multiplier. Before that, it becomes a crutch that hides the gap between what you know and what you think you know.

If you’re early, do the reps first. Write manually and post without Claude. Build the muscle, then bring in the tools.

But 90% of the people reading this won’t do that. They want the output, even if it’s generic. They don’t want to learn the craft. And that is exactly why the 10% who do the work stand out so fast.

One raw paragraph beats 10 curated posts

The client I mentioned earlier? I asked her to do something she hated.

Close Claude. Open a blank doc. Write one paragraph about something that happened that week that pissed her off.

She stared at the screen for maybe 90 seconds.

Then she wrote about a call with a prospect who told her, “We already have someone who does what you do, but cheaper.” She wrote about hanging up, sitting in her car for 10 minutes, and Googling the cheaper person. She wrote about how that person’s LinkedIn was full of AI-generated carousels, stock photos, and “5 tips for better leadership” energy. She wrote about wanting to scream and quit on the same afternoon.

That paragraph had more personality than her last 10 posts combined.

So I pasted it into Claude with her voice files loaded and asked for five angles she could turn into a LinkedIn post. Claude came back with angles rooted in her experience, her frustration, her specific read on the market.

One of them was: “The person undercutting you on price is outposting you too. Here’s why that doesn’t matter.”

That worked because it came from something that happened to her, on a Tuesday, in her car. Not from a prompt asking Claude to “write a post about differentiation.”

That is where AI earns its place. It helps you find connections between lived material and positioning you would miss on your own.

But the moment you ask it to manufacture the lived material too, the whole thing collapses.

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The order of operations is backward

This is the mistake I see most, and it is everywhere.

People open Claude first. They type a topic, get output, tweak two words, and publish. Then they wonder why it sounds like a polite stranger who memorized their résumé.

I do it backward.

Here’s what that looks like on a real Saturday morning.

Step 1: Mine your week (10 minutes, no Claude)

Open a blank doc. Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write down 2 to 4 things that happened this week.

A conversation that stuck with you. A moment that annoyed you. Something a client said that is still rattling around in your head. Something you noticed that other people seemed to miss.

No structure, no cleanup. Write it the way you would text a friend:

That is enough raw material with your fingerprints on it.

Step 2: Ask Claude for angles (5 minutes)

Paste your raw notes into Claude along with your positioning doc. That doc should explain who you help, what you believe, what you sell, and what makes you different.

Then use this prompt:

Based on these notes and my positioning, give me 5 to 7 angles I could turn into a LinkedIn post. 

Each angle should connect a specific moment from my notes to a broader point about my work.

Claude is good at this. It spots connections between your lived material and your positioning that you miss when you are still too close to the experience.

Pick the angle that gives you a gut reaction. That is usually the right one.

Don’t have a positioning doc yet? Build one first. Without it, Claude has nothing meaningful to work with.

Use this prompt:

AskUserQuestion: "Let's build your positioning statement. Answer these questions, one by one or all at once, whatever feels natural.

1. Who do you help? Be specific.
2. What do you help them do or get?
3. What's the thing they're afraid of or hate about how it's usually done?
4. What's one opinion you have about your field that most people in it wouldn't say out loud?
5. What's something you do or believe that makes you different from others who offer something similar?"

Take the answers above and write a personality-first positioning statement in this structure:
"I help [specific who] [do/get what] without [fear or frustration]. I believe [contrarian or specific opinion]. What makes me different is [specific differentiator]."

Then write 2 to 3 alternative versions that play with tone: one more direct, one with more edge, one that leads with the belief instead of the who.

Flag any answer that feels vague or generic and tell me what a more specific version could look like.

Answer every question as specifically as you can:

Step 3: Write the draft yourself (15 to 20 minutes, no Claude)

This is the step most people try to skip. Do not skip it.

Start with the hook. One line that drops the reader into a scene. Who was there. Where it happened. What was at stake.

Then write like you are explaining to a smart friend what happened and why it matters. Set the scene, give context, make the point, close it.

Do not worry about formatting yet. Forget about length. Get the thinking down first.

Hand the whole thing back to Claude too early and the voice disappears. Your observations, your reactions, your sentence rhythm, your specific details.

That is the one thing AI cannot invent, and no prompt on earth will fix that gap once you’ve outsourced it.

Step 4: Let it ripen (2 to 4 hours minimum)

Walk away and do something else. Let your brain stop performing.

When you come back, the lines that felt sharp in the moment often feel forced. You will spot the sentence trying too hard. The point that does not land. Cut those without mercy.

You do not need distance because you are a bad writer. You need it because judgment gets better when ego calms down.

Step 5: Let Claude edit, not generate (5 minutes)

Once the draft exists, then Claude can help. This prompt works like a charm:

I want you to edit this LinkedIn post for skimmability and clear story flow.

Rules:
- Tighten language. Cut filler words, weak openers, and overwritten phrases.
- Remove redundancy. If the same idea appears twice, keep the sharper version.
- Improve formatting for LinkedIn skimmability: max 2 sentences per paragraph, single line breaks between them, no walls of text.
- Do not change my voice, sentence rhythm, or opinions.
- Do not add transitions, connective phrases, or sentences I didn't write.
- Do not replace specific names, dates, numbers, or examples with generic alternatives.
- Do not reorder sections unless the logic is broken. If you think it is, flag it.
- If a sentence feels unclear or awkward but you're unsure how to fix it without changing my voice, mark it [FLAG: reason].

Return:
1. The edited post
2. A bullet list of what you changed and why (be specific, not vague like "improved clarity")

Claude edits what I write. I write what I think. That line has never moved, and it never will. But I also never hit publish on what Claude hands back without reworking it myself. I add bullets, reorder things, and make sure the list reads evenly.

Because I know how writing works, and Claude does not.

The filter that changed everything

There is one more layer, and it changed my content more than anything else I built.

I keep an anti-AI writing filter. It lists the words, expression patterns, and structural tells that make a reader’s brain register “a machine wrote this” before they even finish the first paragraph.

I run it as a final pass on everything I publish. My clients do too.

The full skill lives inside my community. For a single post, the version below works well.

Clean up the text below. Apply every rule silently.

[PASTE TEXT HERE]

---

VOICE RULES

Write directly, specifically, and naturally.
Short paragraphs. Vary rhythm. Fragments allowed when natural.
Use contractions. Use I and you. Active voice.
Be specific: numbers, names, details, tradeoffs, real examples.
If the point is made, stop.

---

BANNED WORDS

Delete or replace: delve, realm, harness, unlock, tapestry, paradigm, cutting-edge, revolutionize, intricate, showcasing, crucial, pivotal, surpass, meticulously, vibrant, unparalleled, underscore, leverage, synergy, innovative, game-changer, testament, commendable, highlight, emphasize, boast, groundbreaking, align, foster, enhance, holistic, garner, pioneering, trailblazing, unleash, transformative, redefine, seamless, optimize, scalable, robust, empower, streamline, elevate, adaptive, effortless, data-driven, proactive, visionary, disruptive, reimagine, unprecedented, intuitive, synergize, democratize, accelerate, dynamic, immersive, supercharge, enduring, captivate, the ones, the part

---

BANNED VERB CONSTRUCTIONS

Replace with plain verbs (is, has, uses, gives, shows, causes, changes):
serves as, stands as, marks a, represents a, boasts a, features a, offers a, plays a role in, helps to, aims to, seeks to

---

BANNED OPENINGS AND PHRASES

Delete: In today's / It is important to note / It is worth noting / In order to / Let's dive in / Let's explore / Let's unpack / At the end of the day / Moving forward / To put this in perspective / What makes this particularly interesting / The implications here are / It goes without saying / Nobody is talking about / Most people don't realize / In this article I will / Despite its strengths / Challenges and future prospects / What this means is / The reality is

---

BANNED TRANSITIONS

Replace with a real transition or nothing: Furthermore / Additionally / Moreover / That said / That being said / With that in mind / It is also worth mentioning / On top of that

---

BANNED ENGAGEMENT BAIT

Delete: Let that sink in / Read that again / Full stop / This changes everything / Are you paying attention / You are not ready for this

---

NEGATIVE PARALLELISM BAN

Delete any construction that rejects one idea and replaces it with another.

Banned patterns: This isn't X. This is Y. / Not X. Y. / Forget X. Focus on Y. / Less X, more Y. / You don't need X. You need Y. / The problem is not X. It is Y. / It was never about X. It was always about Y.

Also banned when softened: While X may seem / Although X appears / Sure, X / Most people think X / At first glance / On the surface / Conventional wisdom says X.

Fix: delete the rejected frame. State the positive claim directly.

---

RULE OF THREE

If any claim is structured as exactly 3 parallel items, cut to 2 or expand to 4.

---

FALSE INTIMACY

Delete: Here is the truth / I will be honest with you / Can I be real / Between us / I am going to say something most people won't.

---

ANALOGY AND METAPHOR

No analogies unless the subject is technical or abstract and the analogy is shorter and more precise than the literal explanation.

Delete metaphor verbs used for abstract work: sanded down, bolted on, stitched together, layered, carved out, baked in, sparked, anchored, distilled, unpacked, crystallized, sharpened, surfaced, amplified, sculpted, cemented, bridged.

Use literal verbs: cut, added, removed, changed, joined, caused, showed, explained, fixed, named, listed, chose, rejected.

---

LINKEDIN-SPECIFIC PATTERNS

Delete hook shapes: I [did thing]. Here's what I learned / Unpopular opinion / Hot take / This might upset some people / Nobody talks about this / Steal this / Save this post / I used to think X. I was wrong / [Year] taught me [lesson].

Delete closing moves: What do you think / Drop your thoughts below / Tag someone who needs this / Which one resonates / Follow me for more / A moral spelled out in the final line.

Delete fake vulnerability: vague struggle without a specific date, number, name, or consequence.

---

FINAL CHECK

1. Cut the first sentence if it is throat-clearing
2. Replace vague claims with specific ones
3. Remove fake importance (pivotal, key turning point, major shift)
4. Remove repeated sentence shapes
5. Remove assistant chatter
6. Cut the ending if it only repeats the point
7. Ask: does this sound useful, or overworked?

---

OUTPUT

Return the cleaned version.
Then: one line per change, what you changed and why. No elaboration.

Once you start spotting these patterns, your own feed looks different fast. You see the fingerprints everywhere. And you understand why audiences scroll past content that looks clean but feels dead.

Your value is in the deviation

AI produces the average of its training data. That is useful for speed. It is terrible for distinction. And distinction is the only thing that makes a personal brand worth following.

Your value lives in how far you deviate from that average.

That deviation cannot be prompted into existence. It has to already exist in what you feed the model, which means it has to already exist in you. In the texture of your week, in the call that made you angry, in the client sentence you cannot stop thinking about, in the opinion you are still scared to publish.

AI makes me faster. The voice is still mine. And that order will never change.

Write the first draft yourself and let it be rough. AI cleans it up after. The rough is where the voice is.

If you want to stop sounding like everyone else and start sounding like you, Content to Gigs is where that happens. Personality-first positioning, voice files, anti-AI filter, the full system. We build it together.

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Every year, Richard Van Der Blom publishes a report that makes LinkedIn creators lose their minds. New numbers. New reasons to panic about reach.

This year’s edition landed TODAY. 217 pages. Over a million data points. And I sat down with it the way I sit down with everything: skeptical and caffeinated.

I didn’t disagree.

The 2026 Algorithm Insights Report reads like someone took my entire philosophy, ran it through a data engine, and said “yep, she’s right.” Interest Graph over network. Topic Authority over content volume. Personality over curated. Anti-slop over AI-generated filler.

I’m not saying this to pat myself on the back. I’m saying it because the data gives you a reason to stop second-guessing the approach and start executing it.

Here’s what the report says, where it backs what I teach, where it pushes me to tighten my own system, and what you do with all of it.

Your connections don’t decide your reach anymore. Your topic does.

This is the biggest number in the report, and I need you to sit with it.

In 2024, your connections made up 72 percent of who saw your content. Your network. The safe bubble.

In 2026, that number dropped to 31 percent.

Let me say that differently. Two years ago, LinkedIn showed your posts mostly to people who already knew you. Today, almost 70 percent of your feed comes from outside your direct network. Second and third-degree connections. Suggested Posts. People who have never heard of you but share your topic interests.

LinkedIn stopped being a network platform. It became a topic platform. The algorithm no longer asks “who do you know?” It asks “what are you known for?”

If you’ve been building your LinkedIn strategy around growing your connection count, this is the data telling you that strategy expired. The people seeing your content in 2026 are strangers who care about your subject, not contacts who accepted your request three years ago.

This is the Interest Graph. And it rewards one thing above all: a clear, specific, recognizable point of view in a defined topic lane.

That’s personality-first positioning. Not “who you know.” What you’re known for. Your expertise is what gets you in the room.

Your personality, your hot takes, your tone, your lived experience, is what makes people stay.

I call that combination your uncopyable core.

Expertise plus personality plus identity. The algorithm is now built to find it and reward it.

It literally caught up to what I’ve been building my business around.

Topic Authority is personality-first positioning in algorithm language.

The report introduces a concept called Topic Authority. LinkedIn’s internal measurement of whether you’re a credible, consistent voice in a specific subject area.

Three factors determine your Topic Authority score:

1. Topic consistency (do you stay in your lane?)

2. Engagement quality (are people having real conversations on your posts, or are they dropping fire emojis?)

3. Semantic coherence (does your content make sense as a body of work, or does it look like you threw spaghetti at a wall?).

Read those again: topic consistency, engagement quality, and semantic coherence.

That’s my entire methodology translated into algorithm metrics. One recognizable voice, repeating recognizable ideas, for a recognizable audience. That’s how I define personality-first positioning. LinkedIn gave it a technical name and a scoring system.

I’ve been telling clients for two years: pick your lane, build a recognizable voice, say the same things in different ways until your audience repeats your ideas back to you. One clear premise. One proof of relevance. A framework people remember and repeat back to you. Over and over and over.

The report puts numbers behind it. Creators who post within 2 to 3 consistent topics outperform creators who scatter across 6 or more, even if the scatterers post more frequently. Three posts a week on two themes outperforms five posts a week on six different topics.

The algorithm is measuring what I’ve been coaching. Whether a stranger landing on your profile for the first time could tell you, in one sentence, what you’re about.

If they can’t, your Topic Authority is low. Your content gets shown to fewer people. Your reach shrinks no matter how good your individual posts are.

If they can, the Interest Graph does the distribution work for you. It finds the people who care about your topic and puts you in front of them. Even if they’ve never heard your name.

The four content pillars. And how I translate them into three.

The report defines four content pillars for personal profiles:

• Authority (40-50%). Your expertise. Your frameworks, your teardowns, your “here’s how this works” and “here’s why this fails” content.

• Affinity (15-25%). What makes people like you, not respect you. Personal, professionally relevant stories. Behind-the-scenes of your work. The neurodivergent perspective. The “on paper, I’m the problem, in reality, the paper is correct” moments. The stuff that makes someone think “I want to work with THIS person.” The report calls this the top driver of emotional engagement and follower conversion.

• Proof (15-20%). Your receipts. Client results. Before-and-after profiles. Screenshots of DMs (sanitized). Revenue numbers with context.

• Demand (5-10%). Your direct asks. Audits, cohorts, offers, “3 spots open for X.” The report is blunt: skip this and you leave money on the table.

That’s what the data says. Four pillars, each with a percentage. I translate this into three buckets for my clients, because Authority and Affinity don’t work apart.

Your expertise gives you credibility. Your stories, your hot takes, your weird specific only-you observations, give you a worldview. Expertise alone makes you interchangeable. A worldview makes you the only option. The flaw is the feature = the mess is the material.

• Perspective (55%). Authority and Affinity merged into one bucket. Your frameworks and the personal stories that prove you earned them. The reason someone follows you instead of the other person teaching the same topic. When I say personality-first, perspective is usually where it lives.

• Proof (30%). Your receipts. Client results, revenue numbers, before-and-after profiles, DM screenshots. The evidence that your Perspective works in the real world.

• Promo (15%). The report calls it Demand. Same thing, clearer name. Your direct asks. A cohort. An audit. “3 spots for X.” If you never ask, nobody buys.

Three buckets. Perspective, Proof, Promo. You build Topic Authority by rotating through all three in a rhythm that keeps you visible, credible, and paid, without turning you into a content robot.

The algorithm is hunting AI slop. And your unedited Claude posts are the prey.

This is where I got loud reading the report (as one does).

LinkedIn is now tracking and de-weighting structurally generic, AI-generated content. Specifically: semantic duplication (saying the same thing in slightly different words across posts), synthetic tone (that smooth, helpful, vaguely inspiring voice that sounds like a customer service bot with a creativity upgrade), repetitive hooks, lazy polls, and templated structures.

The report says fully AI-generated, unedited content underperforms human-written content. The best results come from what they call “AI for prep, human voice for publication.”

Using AI to research, brainstorm, and structure, then writing the final version yourself. Or using voice-trained systems that capture your patterns, not generic output.

I want to frame this and hang it on my wall.

This is my entire stance on AI in content. I use Claude. I use Notebook LLM. I use Perplexity. I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-slop. AI is a brain extender, not a ghostwriter. The moment it stops sounding like you, it stops working for you.

The algorithm agrees.

LinkedIn is getting better at detecting content that no human touched on the way out.

And it’s burying it.

So if you’re pasting your topic into Claude, hitting generate, copying the output, and posting it with a stock photo, the data says you’re wasting your time. The reach is declining. The engagement is hollow. And your audience is starting to notice.

Your voice is the unfair advantage. Your personality is the thing AI cannot replicate.

It shows up on a call and sounds like the person who wrote the post. No dissonance or some bait-and-switch bullsh*t. The algorithm is now enforcing that.

Where the report pushed me to tighten up.

I’d be dishonest if I only shared the validation. The report also flagged areas where my approach needs sharpening. Not changing. Sharpening.

• Stricter topic boundaries. I write about personality-first positioning, speaker monetization, anti-AI content, neurodivergence, and sometimes meta-observations about LinkedIn itself. The data says: 2 to 3 lanes. Not 5 or 6. Everything I post needs to anchor back to my core topics. The neurodivergence stuff, the personal stories, the ADHD moments, they all still fit. But they need to be tied to positioning, speaking, or content strategy every time. A “life update” post that doesn’t connect back to my expertise? The algorithm treats it like a tourist in someone else’s neighborhood.

• Specific vulnerability over vague vulnerability. The report says “vague vulnerability is invisible.” Audiences scroll past generic “I failed and learned” stories. They stop for specific, concrete moments tied to a real client, a real number, a real decision. This tracks with how I write at my best. The €20K I’m still owed. The startup disaster. The group chat where speakers trashed me. Those posts perform because they have receipts. Posts where I write something softer and less specific? They don’t hit the same way. The data confirms it.

• Depth over variety. The report cut the profile pillar model from five categories to four. I cut it to three. Fewer, broader pillars produce better behavior. Creators who chase variety dilute their topic signal. If I’m tempted to be “the everything person” for ADHD, autism, branding, speaking, AI, and content design, the data says: pick 2 to 3 and wrap the rest around those. The personal flavor stays. The scattering stops.

What you do with this.

I’m not going to pretend reading a report changes your business. Reports don’t do the work. You do. But here are the moves this data supports.

1) Audit your last 30 posts.

Pull them up. Read them as a stranger. Could someone landing on your profile for the first time tell you what your 2 to 3 core topics are? If the answer is no, your Topic Authority is leaking. Fix the signal before you worry about reach. Use this prompt to figure out what you actually talk about on LinkedIn and where your Topic Authority is leaking.

You are my LinkedIn Topic Authority auditor.  
Goal: Audit my last 30 posts and show me where my Topic Authority is leaking.

Input:
- Here are my last 30 LinkedIn posts:

###PASTE 30 POSTS###

Tasks:
- Group my posts into topics and tell me what my 2–3 strongest lanes are, in plain language.
- Flag any posts that fall completely outside those lanes.
- Write the one sentence a stranger would use to describe “what I’m about” based on these posts.
- Tell me which posts are confusing the algorithm (off-topic, mixed signals).
- Give me 3 concrete recommendations to tighten my Topic Authority over the next 30 days.

Output:
- A short summary of my 2–3 core topics.
- A list of “off-lane” posts with a one‑line fix for each.
- One sentence that describes what I am currently known for.
- 3 clear action points to fix my signal before I worry about reach.

2) Map your content to the three pillars.

Take the last month of posts and tag each one: Perspective, Proof, or Promo. Count the ratios. If you’re all Perspective and zero Promo, you’re educating people for free and wondering why nobody buys. If you’re heavy on Perspective but light on Proof, you’re likable but not credible. Balance it.

This Claude Cowork prompt will help you tag a month of posts, expose where you’re over‑teaching or under‑selling, and generate ideas to rebalance.

You are my LinkedIn content architect.  
Goal: Map my recent posts to the three pillars (Perspective, Proof, Promo) and fix the imbalance.

Pillars:
- Perspective = my point of view, frameworks, breakdowns, and lived‑experience stories that support my core ideas.
- Proof = evidence that my work works: client stories, my own journey, experiments, case studies, before/after, screenshots.
- Promo = clear invitations to work with me or buy something: audits, cohorts, 1:1, “3 spots for X”, launches.

Input:
- Here are my last 20–30 LinkedIn posts:
<<<PASTE POSTS>>>

Tasks:
- Tag each post as exactly one main pillar: Perspective, Proof, or Promo.
- Give me a simple count and percentage for each pillar.
- Tell me, in 1 short paragraph, what this mix implies:
  - What am I over‑doing?
  - What am I under‑doing?
  - How would this feel to a stranger who finds me today?
- Recommend a healthier mix for the next 4 weeks so:
  - I’m not “all Perspective, no Promo” (teaching for free, not selling).
  - I’m not “all Perspective, no Proof” (likable but not credible).
- Suggest 2 post ideas for each pillar, tailored to my existing topics and offers.

Output:
- A list or table of posts with their assigned pillar (Perspective / Proof / Promo).
- A short analysis of my current imbalance and how it lands with my ICP.
- A recommended 4‑week pillar ratio across Perspective, Proof, and Promo.
- 6 post ideas (2 per pillar) I can write next.

3) Check every draft for your uncopyable core

Read it out loud. Does it sound like you talking to a friend, or does it sound like a well-structured article written by nobody in particular?

If you could swap your name for anyone else’s and it still works, you didn’t add enough of yourself. Go back in. Add the five-second moment. Add the opinion that might cost you a follower. That’s personality-first in practice: your scars and your stance, baked into every piece.

Use this prompt to inject your ICP, personality, and CUE triggers into each post so your uncopyable core is obvious.

You are my Uncopyable Core checker.  
Goal: Make sure every LinkedIn draft reflects my Why Them (ICP), Why Me (personality), and Why Now (CUE).

Input:
1) My Uncopyable Core (Why them / Why me / Why now), if available:
<<<PASTE UNCOPYABLE CORE SUMMARY>>>

2) Draft LinkedIn post:
<<<PASTE DRAFT>>>

Tasks:
- Check the draft against my Uncopyable Core:
  - Does it clearly speak to my ICP (why them)?
  - Does it show my specific personality and lived experience (why me)?
  - Does it tap into a real trigger or moment that makes this urgent (why now)?
- Point out where the draft sounds generic or could be written by anyone.
- Add at least:
  - One five‑second concrete moment (scene, quote, number, DM, decision).
  - One opinion that a generic creator would avoid because it might cost them a follower.
- Rewrite the draft so it:
  - Sounds like me talking to a smart friend.
  - Keeps the original intent.
  - Bakes in my Why them / Why me / Why now.

Output:
- A brief diagnosis of what was missing from the Uncopyable Core perspective.
- A revised version of the post in my voice, with my uncopyable core clearly visible.

4) Post less, but sharper

The report’s sweet spot is 2 to 3 posts per week. Not 5 or daily. Two to three sharp, on-topic, personality-rich posts go further than a content mill schedule ever will. The algorithm rewards depth and consistency within your lane, not volume across random topics.

I post 7 times a week because I have a backlog of stories and LinkedIn is my primary growth and retention engine. But if you have to choose, 2 to 3 strong posts will always outperform 7 forgettable ones.

This prompt helps you create a focused 2–3 posts per week plan instead of a chaotic daily grind.

You are my LinkedIn cadence and sharpness strategist.  
Goal: Design a 2–3 posts per week plan that is sharper, more on‑topic, and sustainable.

Input:
- My 2–3 core topics (how I want to be known):
<<<LIST TOPICS>>>
- My Uncopyable Core summary (optional but ideal):
<<<PASTE UNCOPYABLE CORE>>>
- 3–5 example posts that feel “very me”:
<<<PASTE POSTS OR LINKS>>>

Tasks:
- Propose a 2‑week content plan with 2–3 posts per week (4–6 posts total).
- For each post, specify:
  - Type: Perspective (Authority/Affinity), Proof, or Promo (Demand).
  - Working title.
  - 1–2 sentence angle.
  - Suggested hook (first line under 20 words).
- Make sure:
  - Every post is clearly in one of my core topics.
  - At least one element of my Uncopyable Core shows up in each post.
- Suggest which posts should be carousels/documents vs text‑only, based on what tends to perform best for micro‑content (one clear idea, under ~600 characters).

Output:
- A simple 2‑week calendar with dates and posts.
- For each post: type, title, angle, hook, and format recommendation.

5) Build your Promo muscle.

If you haven’t made a direct ask in your last 20 posts, start. One in every 10 to 15 posts. A cohort. An audit. A “3 spots for X.” You don’t need to be salesy. You need to be clear about what you offer. The report says avoiding Promo posts is leaving revenue on the table. I agree.

Use this prompt in Claude Cowork to audit your last 20 posts for Promo gaps, write clear offer posts, and space them every 10–15 posts without feeling salesy.

You are my Promo‑muscle coach.  
Goal: Help me add clear Promo posts (direct asks) without sounding salesy or corporate.

Input:
- My main offers (who they’re for + outcome):
<<<LIST OFFERS>>>
- My ICP in 2–3 sentences:
<<<PASTE ICP>>>
- A couple of posts where my voice feels strongest:
<<<PASTE POSTS>>>
- (Optional) My last 20 LinkedIn posts, to check if I’ve made any direct asks:
<<<PASTE LAST 20 POSTS>>>

Definitions:
- Promo = posts that clearly invite people to buy, book, or apply (cohort, audit, 1:1, “3 spots for X”, etc.).
- Target = roughly 1 Promo post every 10–15 posts.

Tasks:
1) If I pasted my last 20 posts:
   - Count how many are Promo vs non‑Promo.
   - Tell me in 3–5 lines what this means (am I avoiding asking?).

2) Write 5 Promo posts that:
   - Each focus on one clear offer or next step.
   - Feel like a natural extension of my usual Perspective/Proof content, not a random hard sell.
   - Use my tone: direct, clear, slightly spicy, no fake urgency, no corporate speak.
   - End with one simple CTA (DM, comment, “3 spots for X”, “reply to this email/Substack”, etc.).

3) Suggest how to space these Promo posts:
   - Show me where to plug each one in a 4‑week schedule so I roughly hit 1 Promo post every 10–15 posts.

Output:
- A short diagnosis of my current Promo muscle (based on the last 20 posts, if provided).
- 5 ready‑to‑publish Promo posts in my voice.
- A simple 4‑week schedule showing where to place each Promo post.

I’m not changing the philosophy. I’m adding their language to mine.

I’ve been building around personality-first positioning before the algorithm had a name for it. Now it does: Topic Authority. Interest Graph distribution. Anti-slop detection. The report gave my methodology a measurement system.

The one thing I’m taking from this report that I didn’t have before: sharper language to sell it. Topic Authority built on your uncopyable core. Interest Graph distribution powered by your scars and stripes. Anti-slop by default because you write like a person, not a prompt.

Same method. Now with 177 pages of receipts. You can get yours at a discount here.

Now go do something with it. ✌️

Want help doing this, not reading about it? That’s Content to Gigs Community. Richard Van Der Blom kicks off the guest sessions on May 21st. You also get my full resource library: every positioning guide, posting rhythm, Claude skill file, and voice profile I build.

→ Deets here.

A LinkedIn creator got caught copying someone’s post word for word. But the real question is bigger than one guy.

Last week, Louis Butterfield posted a video on LinkedIn. It went viral, as his posts tend to do. Good engagement, good reach, the usual.

One problem. The content was lifted from Lewis Kemp.

Same structure, same wording. No credit.

Lewis called it out. Louis blocked him. Then deleted the post. Then, after the internet had already made up its mind, posted an apology. His wife doubled down in the comments instead of de-escalating.

The thing that made this sting? Louis runs a business called Video Heroes. He teaches people how to create content. Content creation is the product. And the product turned out to be someone else’s work with a new name on it.

This wasn’t Louis’s first case of plagiarism either (see screenshots).

Now. I’m not here to pile on. Enough people did that already.

I’m here because his story put a question on the table that every creator needs to sit with: where does inspiration end and plagiarism begin?

Because if we’re being honest, every single person posting online is borrowing from someone. The question is whether you’re doing it with integrity or without a spine.

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What plagiarism looks like online

In school, plagiarism was simple. Copy someone’s essay, get caught, get expelled. Clear rules. Clear consequences.

Online, the rules are blurry. There’s no citation format for a LinkedIn post. No peer review process. The “credit economy” runs on attribution, and when you skip it, you’re spending someone else’s intellectual currency like it’s yours.

Here’s where it gets tricky. There are levels.

1. Copying someone’s exact words without credit. That’s plagiarism. Full stop.

2. Copying someone’s structure. Using their framework, their flow, their sequencing. That’s a grey zone. If you add your own thinking and perspective, it’s fair game. If you copy-paste the skeleton and swap in different examples, you’re closer to theft than you think.

3. Copying someone’s idea. Ideas aren’t copyrightable. “Write about imposter syndrome” belongs to no one. But if someone has a specific take on imposter syndrome, a named framework, an original angle, a fresh metaphor, and you repackage it as your own insight? You know what you did.

The test is simple. If you swapped the original creator’s name onto your post and it still made sense, you didn’t add anything. You moved furniture around in someone else’s house and called it interior design. Yikes.

The psychology of why people cheat

Nobody wakes up deciding to be a plagiarist. It happens gradually. And virality is the accelerant.

It usually goes something like this:

You post something original. It does well. Dopamine hit.

You post again. Decent numbers. Another hit.

Then one week, nothing lands. The numbers drop, your brain panics. You start looking at what’s working for other people. You think “I’ll put my spin on it.” But you’re tired, or rushed, or both. So your “spin” is a light rewording and a new profile photo on top.

That’s how it starts. One shortcut. It works. Nobody notices. So you do it again. And again. Until someone does notice, and by then you’ve built a reputation on borrowed material.

The Butterfield situation is textbook. He taught content creation. He bragged about six-figure revenue. He had authority, visibility, gigs. And then the business shut down, and the first piece of content he posted after that turned out to be someone else’s work.

I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes. I don’t need to.

But the pattern speaks for itself. When the pressure to perform outpaces your ability to create, shortcuts start looking rational.

Virality is addictive. And addiction makes people do stupid things.

It happened to me too. In March, I made a dumb Claude-LinkedIn meme and posted it. Got 2K likes. By the next morning, people were sharing it everywhere as if they made it. One guy on X used it to sell his product, just like Louis did with this post. No credit, nothing.

And while I was writing this article, Jenny Stojkovic, a VC and tech creator with 250K+ followers, called out Nicole Lapin for plagiarizing her original work. Nicole Lapin. NYT bestselling author. Course creator. Someone with a whole team behind her. Same pattern. Bigger name.

This isn’t a fringe problem. It’s baked into how content works online right now.

The algorithm doesn’t even care if your post is original. It cares if people engage with it. That creates a perverse incentive: the system rewards output, not originality. And people who optimize for the system eventually lose track of the line between inspiration and theft.

What to do instead

If your content is your product, your integrity is your supply chain. One break and nothing downstream works. Here’s what I think everyone should do:

1/ Credit the source.

Always. Even when it feels unnecessary. “This post by [name] made me think about...” costs you nothing and builds trust. The audience respects a creator who shares where their thinking came from. It signals confidence, not weakness.

2/ Build your own story bank.

The reason you’re tempted to borrow is because you ran out of your own material. Fix the supply problem.

• Keep a journal

• Save voice memos.

• Screenshot things that piss you off

• Write down the weird moment from your Friday afternoon

Your content comes from your life, not from someone else’s feed.

/3 Write from moments, not from formats.

Formats are templates. Templates are replicable. But the specific five-second moment where you sat in your car after a bad client call and stared at your phone for six minutes before hitting send on the invoice? Nobody else has that. That moment is uncopyable. That’s your content.

When you’re inspired by someone, say so. Link their post and tag them. Show your audience the trail. It makes you look more credible, not less. People who hoard their sources look insecure. People who share them look generous and well-read.

How to borrow without being a thief

Everyone’s influenced by someone. Austin Kleon wrote a whole book about it. “Steal Like an Artist.” The title sounds like permission to plagiarize. It’s the opposite.

The core idea: copy to learn, transform to create, credit to respect.

When I see a post that performs well, I don’t copy it. I study why it worked. Was it the hook? The emotional arc? The structure? The specificity?

I reverse-engineer the mechanics, not the words.

That’s the difference between a student and a forger. A student learns technique. A forger reproduces the painting and signs someone else’s name.

You can use AI for this. And I’ll give you the exact prompts.

Step 1: The Analysis Prompt

Paste a post that caught your attention into Claude or ChatGPT and run this:

Analyze this LinkedIn post and break down its structure layer by layer: 

(1) Hook type, what pattern does it use? (contrarian, specific number, personal stakes, identity trigger, etc.) 

(2) Body logic, how does it flow? (list, story arc, problem/solution, rule of three, etc.) 

(3) Proof placement, where does credibility appear and why there? 

(4) Line pacing, what’s the average sentence length and why does it create momentum? (5) CTA type, does it self-identify, spark debate, or invite action? 

Here is the post: [PASTE POST]. 

Be specific. Name the exact techniques. Don’t summarize what the post says. Explain how it’s engineered.”

You’ll get a full breakdown of why that post worked. The mechanics. The engineering. Not the content.

Step 2: The Template Extraction Prompt

Run this right after Step 1. It builds on the analysis the AI gave you.

Now turn that breakdown into a reusable writing template with placeholders. Follow these rules exactly:

1. Keep the same structural order, pacing, and sentence rhythm as the original post
2. Replace every piece of content with a [PLACEHOLDER] in brackets — topic-agnostic, works for any niche
3. Add a one-line instruction in italics under each placeholder explaining what to write there
4. Label the emotional job of each section in parentheses — what it does to the reader

Now you have a structural template. A skeleton. No words from the original post. No ideas from the original creator. A pattern you can fill with your own stories, your own stakes, your own lived experience.

Then you close the tab and write your own post. With your own scars. Your own weird, specific, only-you observations. If you don’t know where to start, use this prompt first.

That’s creative borrowing. The AI deconstructs the mechanics. You supply the humanity. Those are two different jobs and both are necessary.

What you don’t do: paste someone’s post into AI and say “rewrite this in my voice.” That’s plagiarism with extra steps. You laundered someone’s thinking through a language model and called it yours. The AI didn’t make it original. It made it harder to trace.

Back to Louis

I feel bad for Louis, I really do. But I don’t think the copying was his biggest mistake. The response was:

• Blocking the original creator

• Deleting the plagiarized post

• Letting his wife escalate instead of de-escalate.

• Posting an apology that didn’t address the blocking.

Every step after getting caught made it worse.

If he’d said “I messed up, this was Lewis Kemp’s work, I should have credited him, full stop,” this would have been a 48-hour story.

Creators mess up. Audiences forgive fast when the accountability is real.

But when your business is teaching people how to create content, and your content turns out to be borrowed, and your first move is to silence the person you borrowed from?

The business itself becomes a scam.

Personality is the only differentiator you’ve got left. Your lived experience is the only thing AI, competitors, and copycats can’t replicate. The moment you start building on someone else’s material instead of your own, you’ve traded the one thing that made you uncopyable for a shortcut that expires the second someone notices.

So write your own stuff. Credit the people who inspire you. And if you get caught slipping, own it like an adult.

Because internet forgives mistakes. It doesn’t forgive cover-ups.

This article is 100% original. So I’m going to shamelessly use it to promote my Content to Gigs community. Want to learn how to build content that’s yours, sounds like you, and gets you paid? Doors open today.

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Friday afternoon, Claude Design dropped and I opened it before dinner. By Saturday morning I had 14 finished infographics sitting in my exports folder. One or two sat inside my brand system cleanly enough to ship. Others looked like AI slop dressed up in my colors. The range across one weekend was the story.

Around infographic nine, my stomach turned. I’ve been saying this for three years, it’s the thesis behind my work, and I named this newsletter Personality Pays for a reason.

The labor you’ve been paying for was never what made your brand yours.

Claude Design made that uncomfortably obvious over a weekend, and it exposed the ceiling while it was at it. The pattern has been building for years through Midjourney, Canva Magic, Figma AI, and Adobe Firefly. Friday was the moment it stopped being debatable. The floor of “good enough to ship” dropped through, and the ceiling didn’t move an inch.

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How I set up my design system

Quick context before the rest. I’m not a design novice flailing around over here. I’ve got a solid setup already, Figma for client work, Canva when I’m in a hurry, and a full brand token file covering colors, fonts, voice guidelines, and layout rules. The same file my designer used to work from.

I fed the Figma kit straight into Claude Design. Colors, type scale, logo, and reference images of past infographics I’d built, enough for it to work from.

From there Claude walked through my brand sheet step by step, building out templates for infographic, carousel, slide deck, and one-pager. After each one it asked for “looks good / needs work” feedback and kept iterating from there.

The design tab came back clean. Claude pulled my infographic pastels straight from the tokens with every hex code correct, matching the colors I’ve been running across carousels and cheatsheets for the last year. So far, so good.

The slide deck title page came close to what I’d build myself too. Orange hero side panel in my brand orange, logo in the corner, yellow highlight on the key phrase (the exact treatment I use on every headline), and the phone-prop photo that’s become my visual signature.

The mascot (me holding the iphone) was where things got petty. I kept trying to drop it in, and Claude Design kept spitting her back out distorted, cropped wrong, or quietly omitted like it was hoping I wouldn’t notice. Seven iterations in, I gave up. The final slide sat inside my brand without her, which was the compromise Claude forced me into.

The carousel cover was where things really fell apart. Off formatting, and a sans-serif font I’ve never used in my life, despite my font rules sitting right there in the tokens. It drove me nuts.

The cheatsheet came closest to my existing work after a few rounds. Five-step structure, orange pill badges, cream base, my exact orange brand color, and the “Helpful? Share with fellow speakers” button I put on every cheatsheet I publish.

Put this one next to the cheatsheets on my LinkedIn and the scroll test passes.

A designer’s eye catches the spacing drift and the slightly-off weight hierarchy. The audience won’t. That’s the floor dropping, not the ceiling rising.

Hold that thought. Because the next experiment showed what stayed the same.

Designing a Claude infographic from scratch

Two hours in, I tried something different. Brand system still locked in the tokens, so visual identity handled. This time I wanted Claude to build from scratch using an existing infographic as a structural reference. I picked one of Chris Donnelly’s and asked Claude to recreate the layout in my brand.

The prompt I used:

Recreate this exact uploaded infographic in my personal style.

Keep the same radial layout, central orange starburst, all 8 sections, titles, and full text content exactly as shown.

Make it much cleaner with:
- Generous white space
- Stronger visual hierarchy
- Better, modern typography
- High scannability and readability

Use my signature bold energy, but prioritize clarity and readability over density.

An hour of iterations later, it still looked like this (on the right).

When I showed it to a friend, she said “that’s not too bad I think? But it’s hard to read.”

Right there is the problem, and it’s bigger than her reaction. Audiences still clock quality when they see it. Strong hierarchy, generous white space, clear focal points, and readable type beat dense, flat layouts every time. The research on this is settled, and a new tool dropping on a Friday didn’t change it.

What changed is the bar for “good enough to ship” fell through the floor.

A non-designer prompting Claude looks at this radial mess and thinks “fine, ship it.” The audience clocks the crowded layout subconsciously and scrolls past. Engagement tanks. The creator blames the algorithm.

Meanwhile, the Claude logo in the middle of the infographic isn’t even the real Claude logo, and nobody in my test audience consciously noticed. They felt something was off without the language to name it, and they kept scrolling anyway.

That’s the real cost of aesthetic commoditization.

Work that looks fine still loses in the feed. “Fine” passes the shipper’s internal check and gets buried by anything made with real judgment.

Same brand system both times. Colors correct both times. Fonts correct in experiment one, ignored in experiment two.

What broke was judgment: layout choice, weight hierarchy, the willingness to delete, the taste to know what doesn’t belong on the canvas. None of which lives in a token file.

What this tool actually is

Claude Design builds what you describe. It won’t tell you whether what you described is strategically sound, visually sharp, or worth saving. The quality ceiling sits with the brief, meaning with you. Which breaks for anyone without design fundamentals.

• Without language like “headline at 3x body size, one dominant focal point, supporting elements in a clear secondary tier, everything else recedes,” Claude distributes visual weight evenly across every element. You get flat layouts where the eye has nowhere to land.

• Without a vocabulary for weight contrast, letter-spacing, type scale, and line-height, “make it look nice” is all you have to offer. Which is not a brief.

• Without the ability to tell a grid from a modular from a flowing narrative from a radial system, you prompt vaguely and get inconsistent output every time.

• Without the rule for social infographics (each point lands in under two seconds of reading), you overload the canvas. Claude packs it in.

• Without a feel for contrast ratios or white space as a design element, Claude respects your hex codes and still gives you something that fights itself visually.

None of this is Claude’s fault, by the way.

The tool works as advertised, compressing production time for people who already think in design terms. For anyone without that foundation, it produces output that looks fine and communicates poorly. On LinkedIn infographics, where communication is the point, that’s a complete disaster.

One honest caveat: taste isn't genetic, it's built. I didn't come out of the womb knowing weight contrast and focal hierarchy. I studied my niche, watched what landed, copied the right people for the reps, and got critiqued until I could see what I was missing. Any motivated operator will do the same, and Claude Design speeds those reps up if you treat the output as feedback instead of a finished product.

The good news for anyone reading this as a strategist, a consultant, a coach, or an expert selling their thinking: a human with taste stays in the loop even when clients have direct access to the tool themselves.

I wrote about this exact dynamic last week in The Quiet Death of Knowing How, the creators winning with AI right now are the ones who learned the mechanics before they reached for the shortcut. Design is just the latest layer catching up.

So no, your expertise didn’t become obsolete. It became the bottleneck, and that’s the whole point. Everyone has the execution layer now. Your judgment is the only thing still behind a gate.

The break-even math

If you know what you want, Claude Design hands you a client-ready infographic in fifteen minutes flat. That’s the magic screenshot everyone’s posting about.

If you don’t know what you want, welcome to iteration hell. Headline’s wrong on round one. Layout’s off on round two. Spacing’s off on round three. By round four you realize your concept doesn’t work and you’ve been polishing a turd. By round five you rage-quit, open Canva or Figma, and start the whole thing over from scratch.

Round seven arrives and you finally admit it. Opening Canva in the first place, dragging a template in, dropping your copy in the slot would have gotten you better work in less time with less frustration for less money.

So no, the tool doesn’t turn you into a designer. It hands designers and people with design taste a lever. For everyone else, it’s an expensive way to arrive at the same decent-but-forgettable work they’d have produced anyway, just with more existential dread along the way.

With taste and a POV, Claude Design multiplies your time. Without them, it multiplies your frustration. Either way, you’re the variable.

So what does this mean for you?

If your personal brand is carried by clean slides and a designer who charges €120 an hour, you have a problem. If your LinkedIn presence leans on tasteful carousels in your signature colors, you have a problem. If the first impression people get of you is “wow, so professional,” and the second impression is silence, you have a problem.

Clean design stopped being proof. Clean design is the baseline now. Every founder with a prompt box ships work that looks sharp.

One question left. The same one I’ve been asking clients for three years.

What’s uncopyable about you?

The layout is free now. So is the color palette. The logo, the fonts, the grid system, the carousel template, the signature CTA block, all free too.

What’s left is you and your POV, your scars, your weird obsessions, and the way you think about your field specifically enough that no prompt box on earth generates it.

That’s what sets you apart, all of it.

I told a client this six months ago and she cried in her car afterward. I’m not sorry I said it. She pivoted, doubled down on her real story, tripled her booking fee, and stopped apologizing for any of it. The tears were a side effect of realizing she’d been buying cover for five years.

Two moves

So where does this leave you on Monday morning? Two moves, in this order.

1) Use the tool. If you want to ship fast and on-brand with zero headache, grab Nano Banana. Solid infographics and carousels out the door without the iteration spiral.

If you want something unmistakably you that cuts through on LinkedIn, hire a pro. I work with Nick Broekema and Vince Pierri.

They turn good strategy into scroll-stopping personal brand assets no prompt box will match.

2) Redirect those hours into the only thing that matters now. Build what’s uncopyable about you. Write the story you’d never say on a keynote stage. Drop the framework nobody in your niche has named yet. Record the voice note about the client who humiliated you and the lesson that changed everything. Build the point of view that makes someone stop scrolling because this person gets it, not because the layout is clean.

Claude Design or Nano Banana or Nick and Vince will make it look sharp. That’s settled now. One question left. The same one that’s always mattered.

Does anyone care what’s on it?

If yes, these tools are a gift. If no, they’re a faster way to be ignored.

Your designer was never what your brand was selling. The product was always you.

Go build more of that.

PS: Content to Gigs community opens April 28. Built for people who want to earn their own taste instead of renting someone else's templates. Waitlist here.

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Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot belong to our daily stack now. Fastest adoption curve in human history.

I’m no exception to the rule, some of these tools I’m in love with.

But Marshall McLuhan saw this coming sixty years ago.

“We shape our tools. Then our tools shape us.”

Nobody listened in 1964. And nobody is listening now.

They want the finished post. The viral thread. The slick email. All delivered, packaged, and ready to ship.

But what they don’t want is twenty minutes of thinking about where a piece of content lives inside their funnel, who reads it, why they would care, and what happens next.

So. Watch what happens.

AI made production faster. But production was never the bottleneck. Thinking was.

Without thinking, speed becomes a liability. Every extra post becomes more evidence of the gap between what you know and what you believe you know.

Note: I’ll use Claude as shorthand throughout. Swap in whichever AI you’re married to.

The surface lie

The common belief goes like this.

AI lets you scale. AI removes the stress of the how. AI democratises good writing. AI flattens the playing field so beginners compete with experts overnight.

Lovely story. Almost true, which means still untrue.

And you can spot who bought the story by what they ask me for. People keep asking me for the prompt. Some take my stuff and build a skill file from it, a broken one, by the way.

And I’ve watched the same pattern play out on repeat. They hand their content brain to Claude, produce more output, and get worse results:

• Engagement dropped

• Sales stayed flat

• Audience growth stalled

They posted five times more and got five times less.

Sure, they moved faster. But they also moved faster in the wrong direction. And the machine gave them no signal, because the machine is indifferent to direction.

The machine is a typist with infinite stamina and zero stake in the outcome.

The deeper truth: tools shape their users

Every tool humans have ever built reshaped the humans who used them.

The plough changed bodies. The printing press changed minds. The smartphone changed attention.

So AI will reshape creators. Of course AI will. The live question is whether the reshaping improves them or hollows them out.

Right now, the evidence points at hollow.

AI makes the output appear before the thinking finishes. You never sit with the question long enough to understand the answer. You get a draft in seconds and ship a first thought as a final product.

The machine removed your reason to build the skill in the first place.

A funnel is learned the same way any practical skill is learned. Through repetition, failure, and iteration.

You only understand top, middle, and bottom of funnel after you’ve posted content that failed at each level, read the data, felt the sting, and rewritten.

No prompt library teaches the feeling. And no AI skill shortcuts the humiliation of a top-of-funnel post getting 12 likes when you were sure the idea was gold.

The fluency trap

Every era has a class of people who sound fluent and stay illiterate.

Fluent speakers string words together beautifully.

Literate speakers string thoughts together beautifully.

The difference stays invisible until the stakes rise.

AI made everyone fluent overnight. But literacy stayed exactly where it was.

You read AI-written content and notice the fluency first. The grammar is clean. The transitions work. The sentences have rhythm.

Then you finish the piece and ask yourself what you learned, and the answer is nothing.

Because writer never had to develop anything to say in the first place. The writing was produced before the thought existed.

Literacy lives inside the slow work of figuring out what you believe:

• Sitting with a half-formed idea for three weeks

• Testing the idea in three conversations

• Watching how strangers react when you post an early version

• Revising because something felt off and you aren’t sure why yet

Tools like Claude will skip every stage of the process for you. It will also ensure you never build the mental muscles those stages were designed to build.

Four paradoxes nobody wants to admit

The damage shows up in four places. You’ll recognize at least two of them from your own feed. Creators who notice the pattern first stop bleeding. The rest keep posting.

1) More output, less impact.

Creators who scaled to ten posts a week with AI report fewer DMs, fewer sales calls, fewer email replies. Volume killed signal.

Ten mediocre posts teach your audience to scroll past your name.

2) Fluent prose, empty message.

AI writes grammar well. But it writes ideas poorly.

You end up with content so glossy readers notice the gloss before the point. They read two sentences, feel nothing, and leave.

3) Perfect copy, wrong offer.

A gorgeous sales email sent to the wrong audience converts at zero.

Creators brag about AI-generated launches pulling in nothing because the funnel underneath was broken. No warming, no nurture, no offer-audience fit.

The email wasn’t the problem. The strategy was.

4) Faster production, slower growth.

People posting daily with AI grow slower than people posting twice a week with intent. Because algorithms reward dwell time and saves.

AI-slop gets scrolled. Thoughtful content gets saved and shared.

Speed plus strategy buries volume. And the daily posters keep losing to the weekly thinkers.

Three failures I’ve watched in real time

Paradoxes in the abstract look clean. Paradoxes inside someone’s business look like this. Three creators, three flavors of the same mistake.

A coach I know bought a prompt library for 300 dollars. She ran her whole quarter through Claude. Posted every day.

Her best post of the quarter? A note she typed manually on her phone while crying in a parking lot. And her worst performers were the posts Claude wrote with perfect structure.

The lesson she refused to learn is the lesson she needed most. Because the content worked when she was inside the content. And the Claude posts failed because Claude had no stake.

A consultant handed his entire funnel to an agency running AI-first. Three months in, he had roughly 45 new leads and zero sales.

Sure, the leads were real. The content was all top-of-funnel. But nobody built the middle. Not a single soul wrote for people ready to buy.

The agency was producing volume because volume is what AI produces best. And strategy was never on the table because strategy requires someone who understands the business, and nobody in the chain did.

A writer with 40,000 followers switched to AI drafting to save time. Six months later, subscriber growth flatlined.

So he’d become indistinguishable from every other LinkedIn generalist. The voice he’d spent five years building got averaged out in one quarter.

Five years of moat, erased by six months of convenience.

Why smart people skip the basics

Smart creators know the fundamentals matter. But they skip them anyway. The reasons run deeper than time or technique. The real decisions get made in the nervous system:

• Status

• Fatigue

• Ego

• Meaning

Status

Mechanics aren’t sexy. Knowing how a funnel works makes you sound like a 2012 marketing consultant. Just like knowing how to prompt Claude makes you sound like a 2026 operator.

One earns likes on X. The other earns sales. So creators optimize for the wrong signal because the wrong signal shows up on their phone every fifteen seconds.

Fatigue

Learning the boring basics takes months. Buying the shortcut takes minutes.

Brains prefer shortcuts. Full stop. So creators slap the “old school” label on the fundamentals they haven’t bothered to learn, because labelling something outdated is easier than admitting ignorance.

Ego

Admitting you don’t understand where leads come from, or what your audience needs at each stage, feels like admitting you’re not a real business yet.

AI lets you skip the admission. You get to look like a real business without being one. And the costume replaces the character.

Meaning

This one is quieter and more damaging.

Doing the work used to mean something. Writing a post from scratch used to be a small ritual of thinking. Handing the ritual to Claude feels efficient on Tuesday and empty by Friday.

Creators are losing the sense of authorship without noticing the loss, because loss of meaning never announces itself.

Meaning leaks slowly. One day you look at your content and feel nothing, and you don’t remember when the feeling left.

What the machine will never give you

Claude writes well. But Claude thinks no thoughts.

Your audience knows by sentence one. They know who’s lived the problem. They know who asked Claude to guess. Because every piece of writing is an act of presence, outsourced writing reads as an act of absence. And readers register the empty chair before they register the words.

Your audience wants a mind on the other end of the message.

But the machine has no mind. Only a statistical echo of every mind who ever wrote anything on the internet. Which works for a first draft, and fails for a brand.

Sit with the irony for a second. The skill getting devalued fastest right now is the EXACT skill AI will never replicate.

• Real thinking

• Real conviction

• Real voice built from real scars

Creators rushing to automate are automating away their only moat.

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What works instead

So. How do you use AI without becoming a casualty of AI?

You go backwards. You learn what the shortcut-sellers told you was already solved. And you keep the strategy inside your own head before you let Claude anywhere near your keyboard.

The boring bit comes first:

• Top of funnel attracts strangers

• Middle of funnel builds trust with people who already know you exist

• Bottom of funnel converts people ready to buy

Each piece of content has a job. And each job needs a different tone, length, and call to action. So learn which job each piece of content is doing before you write a single prompt.

Once you know the job, hand the typing to Claude. Hand the idea generation to Claude. Hand the first draft to Claude.

Machines are magnificent typists. So let them type.

But keep the strategy to yourself. That bit is yours. That bit is the actual product you’re building. And that bit is what your audience pays for, whether they know the word strategy or not.

The creators winning with AI right now are the most strategic operators in their niche.

Speed is a distant second. Five sharp posts a week pulls more weight than twenty throwaway ones, because they know what each post is doing before they write the prompt.

Speed without strategy is a treadmill. You move a lot. You go nowhere.

And the treadmill keeps running because stopping feels worse than continuing to sweat.

The philosophical cost

There’s a deeper reason to care about any of this beyond the revenue line.

When you hand your thinking to a machine, you don’t only lose the output. You lose the person you would have become by doing the work.

The creator who writes 500 posts manually over three years is not the same human as the creator who prompts Claude 500 times.

Both have 500 posts. Only one of them has 500 posts worth of thinking built into their nervous system.

The machine gives you the result. The machine charges you the growth you would have had if you had done the work yourself.

Nobody bills you for the version of yourself you didn’t become. The invoice arrives quietly, years later, when you realize you built a business on scaffolding someone else assembled.

Old trades knew something modern creators forgot.

There’s a reason every traditional apprenticeship took seven years. The tasks themselves were never the bottleneck. The human learning the tasks had to become a person worthy of shipping them.

The shortcut skips the becoming. And the becoming was the whole point.

Earn the prompt

The bar is on the floor because the shortcut came before the skill.

Creators built businesses without foundations. And the cracks arrive slowly, then suddenly.

Learn the how. Then automate the how.

The order matters more than any prompt.

Which paradox is yours? Drop it below, I read them all.

Leave a comment

PS: Content to Gigs community opens April 28. Built for the people who want to earn the prompt, not download someone else's. Waitlist here.

In January, I torched 200+ hook templates. Three months later, my words reached 3 million readers on LinkedIn. Now I write every opening line the same way. I rip them from real life.

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No swipe files. or “scroll-stopping” lists from X threads. One framework. Five letters. PLACE.

Why your hooks die in three seconds

Your hooks die in the first three seconds. The idea is fine. Your opener sounds like everyone else’s opener.

You wrote “You don’t have a content problem, you have a positioning problem...” and the reader scrolled. You opened with “Most leaders think X, but...” and they kept moving.

Generic openers get skipped on sight.

The reason is simple. Vague openers ask the reader to care. Specific openers make them feel something before they decide whether to care.

The only framework you’ll ever need: PLACE

People have been using hook templates and swipe files for years. Sure, they work. Until everyone opens the same way. Templates give you structure with no skin. Your reader has seen all of them already.

You want hooks with personality. PLACE bakes personality in by design:

• Person. The main character. You, a client, a friend, a stranger in line at the post office.

• Location. Where the moment went down. Your car, your kitchen, a Slack DM, a hospital waiting room.

• Action. What happened. A realization, a win, a loss, a fight, a confession, a refund request.

• Cost. What was at stake. Money, dignity, a relationship, your reputation, your sanity.

• Era. When the moment happened. This year, last week, ten minutes ago, on your 36th birthday.

Three or more elements equals a hook with traction. Five equals a hook people screenshot.

Look at what happens when PLACE fires. Your reader gets dropped into a scene. Something is at stake. Something is about to go down. The vocabulary shifts. Words show up like:

• Destroyed

• Loss

• Killing me

• For a second

• And then

• Almost didn’t make it

• Saying no

• Revenge

Your life is the swipe file. Mine your week.

Why PLACE works

Ever caught yourself stopping mid-scroll on someone’s first sentence with no clue why? Specificity is the answer.

Specific details bypass the brain’s spam filter. Numbers, places, ages, dollar amounts, body sensations. These signal “real human, real moment” to the reader. Vague language signals “AI or content marketer.” Your audience has been trained to scroll past vague openers in under a second.

PLACE makes specificity the only option. Adjectives get cut. Facts stay and drop your reader into a scene. Opinions push your reader into agree-or-disagree mode, and most people don’t care enough to pick a side.

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The 6 steps from blank doc to scroll-stopping hook

Now the workflow. Five steps, thirty minutes, blank doc to finished hook. Run it once and you’ll see the difference. Run it five times and you’ll stop writing the old way for good.

Step 1. Mine your week, not your brain

Sit down with a blank doc (I just use my Notes app). Write the last 7 days as a list of moments. Where you were, who you were with, what shifted. Don’t filter. The “boring” moments are usually the strongest, because they sound like real life.

If you wait for inspiration, you’ll write a metaphor about icebergs. Skip the metaphor. Write the moment your client cried on Google Meet.

Step 2. Pick the moment with the highest emotional voltage

Skip the wins and the lessons you’ve already told 10 times. Pick the moment you’d hesitate to share at a dinner party. Discomfort is the tell. If a moment makes you flinch, your reader will stop scrolling.

The Monday moment stings. A client almost didn’t book me because my website felt too corporate. The thing I built to look “professional” was repelling the people I wanted to attract. Flinch-worthy. Picking this one.

If three moments feel safe and one feels exposing, the exposing moment is your hook.

Step 3. Tag your PLACE elements

Strip your moment down to the five fields. Person, Location, Action, Cost, Era. Write one line for each. If you draw a blank on three or more, the moment isn’t sharp enough yet. Pick another.

• Person: my client, a leadership coach with 15 years of experience

• Location: a Zoom call, her face half-lit by a ring light she clearly bought last week

• Action: she told me she almost didn’t book because my site made me look “too corporate”

• Cost: months of leads I’ll never know about, lost to a homepage I thought was polished

• Era: this Monday, 11 minutes into the call

Five out of five. Strong signal.

This step takes 90 seconds. Skip the step and you’ll write a vague opener every time.

Step 4. Compress to two sentences

Your hook is two sentences max. Sentence one drops the reader into the scene. Sentence two creates tension. No setup. No throat clearing. Start in the middle of the action.

Draft 1: “11 minutes into a Zoom call, a leadership coach told me my website almost stopped her from booking. Six months of ‘looking professional’ had been costing me clients.”

Draft 2: “A leadership coach with 15 years of experience almost didn’t hire me. My website looked too corporate.”

If your hook needs context to make sense, your hook is too soft. Cut until the reader leans in.

Step 5. Read your draft out loud

If your tongue trips, your reader’s eyes will too. Cut adverbs. Cut filler. The shorter your sentences, the harder they hit.

“A leadership coach with 15 years of experience almost didn’t hire me.”

→ Flows clean. No stumble.

“My website looked too corporate.”

→ Lands hard. No filler or adverbs. Done.

Step 6. Write your final hook

After a few rewrites, you land here:

A leadership coach with 15 years of experience almost didn’t hire me. My website looked too corporate.

Two sentences. One face, one tension. No setup, no throat-clearing, no context needed.

Your reader doesn’t know the story yet. They don’t need to. The hook did one job: make them stay for the next line.

Common pitfalls and fixes

• Pitfall 1: You name the lesson before the moment.

  → Fix: cut the lesson. Drop the reader into the scene with zero context. Trust them to follow.

• Pitfall 2. You sanitize the cost.

  → Fix: name the real stakes. Money, embarrassment, fear. Dollar amounts beat “a lot.” “I cried in the bathroom” beats “I felt overwhelmed.”

• Pitfall 3. You blur the location.

  → Fix: pick one specific room. Not “at work.” Your desk. The corner of the conference room. The parking lot at 7 a.m. with the engine still running.

• Pitfall 4. You hide the era.

  → Fix: anchor the timestamp. “Tuesday morning” beats “recently.” “On my 36th birthday” beats “a while back.”

• Pitfall 5. You write about people in general instead of one person in specific.

  → Fix: name a single human. One client, one friend, one version of yourself from one moment. A crowd is forgettable. A face is felt.

Your 7-day PLACE workout

• Day 1. List ten moments from your last seven days.

• Day 2. Tag three of them with PLACE.

• Day 3. Write two or three hooks. Score each one.

• Day 4. Pick the highest scorer. Build the post around the hook.

• Day 5. Publish.

• Day 6. Track which hook pulled the most reach. Look for a pattern.

• Day 7. Repeat with a new batch of moments.

Run the loop for four weeks. By week three, your brain starts tagging moments in real time.

You’ll catch yourself thinking “Person, Location, Cost” while standing in line for coffee.

There’s your rewire. And your rewrite.

Your reader forgets to scroll

Your audience doesn’t owe you their attention. PLACE doesn’t trick anyone into handing attention over. PLACE makes the first sentence so specific your reader forgets to scroll.

Try PLACE on your next note, essay, or subject line. Watch what shifts.

Fun fact: the first line of this newsletter scores 4/5.

Tag the line yourself and see which element is missing.

PS. My community opens at the end of the month. There’s a full PLACE prompt sitting inside, plus the rest of the system I use to write hooks people screenshot. Subscribe to get the waitlist drop in your inbox.

Last Friday, I posted the ugliest selfie of my life.

Justin Welsh co-signed it in the comments.

A 10 million dollar solopreneur didn’t notice the numbers. He noticed the weird.

The 7 months before that comment looked like this:

• 7K to 28K followers

• Over 300K in revenue from LinkedIn alone

• Close to 6.5 million impressions

• Ranked #1 in personal branding on Favikon

I’m not going to pretend I’m not proud of that. I am.

And sure, being a decent writer helps. It wasn’t the reason.

The reason was smaller than talent. And harder.

I realized I couldn’t compete on expertise alone. I refused to fake a persona to sound professional. I kept showing up even on the days I felt too loud or too insecure to post.

I stopped hiding. That was it.

Subscribe free to read this story

A 10M dollar solopreneur reacted to the weird, not the numbers

Justin’s comment proved something without him meaning to prove it.

He’s built a 10M dollar business. He sees metrics every day. My numbers weren’t what made him stop. It was the ugly selfie and the weirdness of the caption next to it.

A sharp operator at his level doesn’t react to “good content.” He reacts to signal. To a fingerprint he can’t mistake for anyone else’s.

That’s what personality does in a saturated feed. It tells people this is a human, not a brand account.

FYI, here’s the post.

Skillset is table stakes now. Personality is the moat.

AI ate expertise in one year. Every framework you teach is a free Claude answer. Your prospect ChatGPT’d the problem you solve before they ever typed your name.

So skillset stopped being the moat. Skillset is table stakes now.

The new equation: expertise + personality = profitable positioning.

Personality is the hot takes, the tone, what you obsess over, the thing you refuse to pretend you don’t care about. It’s the human fingerprint on top of the work.

And the fingerprint is almost always the thing you were told to tone down.

Mine is: loud, direct, autistic, over-honest, too online. Every trait my ex co-founder framed as a liability. Those are the traits Justin noticed.

The flaw is the feature. Always was.

Write about it enough, you become it on purpose

There’s a weird mechanic inside this you don’t see until you’ve done it for a while.

Write about your flaw enough, and you start to become it on purpose. The trait stops being something you apologize for. It becomes a position. Eventually it becomes a business.

I didn’t manifest this brand. I posted my way into it:

• I wrote about the autism until autistic professionals started booking calls.

• I wrote about being too much until too much became the reason clients pay me.

• I wrote about the 20K I never got back until it paid for itself twice over in inbound leads.

The sequence is: scar → skill → post → repeat.

You don’t have to believe me. Just compare my LinkedIn in July to today:

How to find your flaw to feature

This is where AI earns its keep.

People use AI to sound smarter, faster, safer. Wrong job.

The best use of AI is the opposite: as a mirror that pulls your personality out of hiding. The bits you’ve been told to tone down, the trait you’ve been apologizing for since your first performance review.

AI won’t write your personality for you. It will interview you until you can see it yourself.

Paste the prompt below into Claude Cowork. It interviews you about one flaw, mistake, or turning point. Picks the angle. Drafts a LinkedIn post that turns your weakness into the reason clients pick you.

Copy from here:

You are Claude Cowork, my warm, empathetic, and insightful AI collaborator and coach. You help people reframe painful personal experiences into powerful professional strengths with curiosity, support, and zero judgment.

We are going to do the **“From Flaw to Feature” exercise** together.

### Exercise Structure (exactly as designed):
1. **Identify the Flaw**  
   Think of something in your life that once felt like a real flaw or wound (examples: a failure that still stings, a firing you didn’t see coming, a partnership that broke you, a diagnosis that made you feel ashamed, etc.).

2. **Column 1 – What did it cost you along the way?**  
   (Examples: money, confidence, years, peace of mind, opportunities, etc.)

3. **Column 2 – What did you stop or start doing because of it?**  
   (Examples: undercharging, people-pleasing, staying quiet to keep the peace, walking away faster, choosing quality over quantity, etc.)

4. **Column 3 – How do your clients benefit from this now?**  
   (Examples: higher standards, direct feedback, better systems, pattern recognition, etc.)

### Your facilitation rules:
- Guide me **one step at a time**. Never move forward until I’ve fully answered the current step.
- **Always ask me questions first using AskUserQuestion.** Do not ask questions in regular message text — embed every question inside the AskUserQuestion format.
- In your very first response, use **AskUserQuestion** to:
  - Briefly explain the exercise in your own words (1–2 sentences)
  - Ask what my professional role is and who my typical clients are (this will help make Column 3 much more relevant and tailored)
  - Ask me to share a specific flaw or experience I’d like to turn into a feature.
- After I reply, reflect back what you heard with empathy (in normal text), then immediately use AskUserQuestion again to help me dig deeper or move to the next column when ready.
- Keep the tone encouraging and empowering — this is about turning pain into a professional superpower.
- When we finish all columns, show me a clean summary (you can use a simple table) that turns the original “flaw” into the resulting “feature.”

Start right now by using AskUserQuestion exactly as instructed above.

Here’s what that looks like

Your turn

• One scar that shaped you

• One unfair advantage it gave you

• One post about it, especially when it’s uncomfortable

If you want to delete the post five seconds after hitting publish, you picked the right one.

Reply to this email with the flaw you’ve been hiding. I’ll tell you the feature I see in it.

No funnel or upsell bullsh*t. Send me the thing you’ve been trained to tone down, and I’ll tell you what your audience will pay for.

If you want more from me, two options:

1. The community for consultants and speakers done faking it

2. Work with me 1:1 on your personal brand

Boldly yours ✌️

Magali

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A consultant came to me wanting to attract paid workshops. She’d done everything right:

• Picked a single audience: leaders.

• Identified a pain point: too busy putting out fires.

• Offered one solution: workshops on AI automation.

So her headline read: “I help busy leaders with AI workshops.”

Technically correct. Zero inbound leads. Weeks of nothing.

And she couldn’t figure out why. Because on paper? She’d followed every piece of LinkedIn advice out there. Pick your niche. Name your offer. Say who it’s for. Be specific.

She did all of it. And her inbox stayed empty. So I asked her one question:

“What does your ideal client say to themselves at 11 PM when they’re staring at their inbox?”

Because no one wakes up thinking, “I’m a busy leader who needs AI training.” That’s your language. Not theirs. Here’s what they wake up thinking:

• “I’m an exec one bad quarter away from burnout.”

• “I’m drowning in busywork with no time to think.”

• “I want 10 hours back without learning another damn tool.”

• “I’m too senior for some training that goes nowhere.”

Note how none of these mention AI, workshops, or the word “leader.” And none of them sound like a LinkedIn bio.

They sound like a person. A specific person with a specific frustration. And that’s what your headline should sound like too.

Describing what you do makes you blend in. Describing what they feel makes them stop.

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The rewrite

So we rewrote her headline to:

“I give overwhelmed B2B execs 10+ hours back every week without adding more tools | AI automation for leadership teams”

Six leads in seven days. Same person, same offer. Different words.

Why did this work? Four things.

• We named a person, not a category. “Busy leaders” is a demographic. “Overwhelmed B2B execs” is a person with a problem. When someone reads that and their stomach drops a little, that’s recognition. That’s the scroll-stop.

• We used their words, not yours. “AI workshops” is your language. “10+ hours back every week without adding more tools” is theirs. One sounds like a brochure. The other sounds like someone who gets it.

• We killed the objection in the headline. Every exec I’ve worked with has tool fatigue. “Without adding more tools” names that fear before they even think it. That’s what made them go “OK, this person gets me.”

• We snuck the format in last. The pipe separator lets you slide the “what” in after the pain. “AI automation for leadership teams” is there for SEO. But it comes after the pain. Always after.

How to do this yourself

Find their raw language

Go read their Reddit threads. Their Slack rants. Their DM complaints. The language they use when they’re frustrated and not performing for an audience. That raw language? That’s your headline.

If you’re doing discovery calls, pay attention to how people describe their problem in the first 90 seconds. Before they clean it up. Before they make it sound professional. Write that down. Because that unfiltered version is your headline.

I keep a note on my phone labeled “things clients say before they filter themselves.” It’s the most valuable copy resource I own.

Test it out loud

Say your headline at a networking event. If everyone in the room nods, it’s too broad. If one person flinches and says “wait, how do you know that about me,” you’ve nailed it.

→ “Busy professionals” = nobody.
→ “Solo founders drowning in ops with no team to delegate to” = somebody.

You don’t want 10,000 people to read your headline and feel mildly curious. You want 50 to read it and feel called out.

Sell the destination, not the vehicle

When I audit profiles, the most common mistake is the same every time. The headline reads like a menu item instead of a promise. “Executive coach.” “Fractional CFO.” “Leadership trainer.” “Digital strategist.”

OK cool, but what happens when I hire you? What changes for me?

That’s what belongs in the headline.

Nobody wants a workshop or a 6-week program. They want the result.

The formula I keep coming back to

For consultants and coaches:

“I turn {adjective + specific audience} into {measurable outcome} without {the thing they’re scared of}.”

Real example: “I turn overwhelmed B2B execs into leaders with 10+ hours back every week without adding more tools.”

It reads in under five seconds. Your headline gets scanned, not studied. If someone needs 15 seconds to figure out what you do, they’re gone.

A few more examples:

• “I turn burned-out consultants into booked speakers without cold outreach.”

• “Helping invisible experts land paid keynotes, no influencer act required.”

• “From overwhelmed solo founder to ops-free CEO, without hiring a full team.”

• “Your freelance rates are too low. I fix that. $10K/month, fewer clients.”

10 headline frameworks you can steal

I’ve been using these with clients for months. Every time we swap a generic “I help” headline for one of these, inbound leads show up within days.

Pick the one that matches your goal. Fill in the blanks. Test it this week.

1. Outcome-obsessed

• Goal: Show immediate results.

• Example: “Fractional CMO | Turning B2B founders into AI-first marketeers”

• Framework: [Job Title] | Turning [Industry/role] complexity into [desired state]

2. Authority and credibility

• Goal: Borrow instant trust

• Example: “Brand Strategist for Speakers | Featured in Forbes | 200+ speaker brands built”

• Framework: [Role / niche] | Featured in [cred marker] | [Quantity]+ [projects/clients/results]

3. Approachability

• Goal: Make hard topics feel human.

• Example: “People Ops Manager | Making HR feel human again for fast-growing startups”

• Framework: [Role] | Making [hard topic] feel [approachable outcome] for [ICP]

4. Client’s best friend

• Goal: Position yourself as the protector.

• Example: “I keep your churn low and your champions loud | Customer Success Manager”

• Framework: I keep your [big pain] low and your [positive asset] loud | [Role]

5. Hybrid practitioner

• Goal: Show you bring multiple skills together.

• Example: “Strategy, copy and video in one brain | 3x launches | Trusted by 20+ product teams”

• Framework: [Skill A], [Skill B] and [Skill C] | [Result metric] | Trusted by [X clients]

6. Provocative

• Goal: Stop the scroll with boldness

• Example: “Stop faking it | I help speakers get booked + paid through branding and positioning”

• Framework: [Bold statement] | I help [audience] [core outcome] through [method]

7. Transformation story

• Goal: Show you’ve walked the path

• Example: “From perfectionist exec to executive coach | 120% promotion rate | 300+ execs backed”

• Framework: From [old identity] to [new identity] | [Result metric] | [X people] backed

8. Mission-driven

• Goal: Attract people who share your values

• Example: “Protecting companies from AI-powered breaches | Cybersecurity keynote speaker”

• Framework: [Mission verb] with/from/by [risk/opportunity] | [Role/niche]

9. Niche specialist

• Goal: Own a tiny, high-value corner of the market.

• Example: “I work with bootstrapped SaaS founders | 0 paid ads | +25 founders helped”

• Framework: I work with [niche] | [Notable constraint] | [X clients] helped

10. The question hook

• Goal: Make them stop and answer in their head.

• Example: “What if your LinkedIn booked more meetings than your SDRs? | 130% reply rate”

• Framework: What if [asset/channel] beat your [comparison]? | [Result metric] | [Conversion metric]

The mega prompt: generate all 10 in one go

Don’t stare at blanks. Copy the prompt below into Claude, fill in your 5 details, and get 10 headline options back in under 60 seconds. Then pick the one that makes your stomach drop a little. That’s the one.

Copy everything below this line:

You are a LinkedIn headline copywriter. Your job is to write 10 headline options for me, one per framework listed below.
ABOUT ME (fill these in):
Replace the bracketed examples with your actual answers before pasting this prompt.

What I do and for whom: [e.g., “I coach burned-out B2B execs in SaaS companies to think strategically again”]
The result I deliver, in their words: [e.g., “10+ hours back per week, no more drowning in ops”]
The objection or fear that stops them from hiring me: [e.g., “they think coaching is fluffy and won’t move the needle”]
My strongest proof point: [e.g., “Featured in Forbes, 200+ execs coached, 120% avg promotion rate”]
One sentence that captures my bold stance or personal story: [e.g., “I went from burned-out VP to executive coach after my third panic attack in a parking lot”]

THE 10 FRAMEWORKS (write one headline per framework):

Outcome-obsessed — Lead with the result they get. Formula: [Job Title] | Turning [specific audience] into [desired state]
Authority + credibility — Lead with proof. Formula: [Role/niche] | [Cred marker] | [Quantity]+ [results]
Approachability — Make a hard topic feel human. Formula: [Role] | Making [hard topic] feel [approachable outcome] for [specific audience]
Client’s best friend — Position as their protector. Formula: I keep your [big pain] low and your [positive asset] high | [Role]
Hybrid practitioner — Show combined skills. Formula: [Skill A], [Skill B] and [Skill C] | [Result metric] | Trusted by [X]+ [clients/teams]
Provocative — Stop the scroll with a bold claim. Formula: [Bold statement] | I help [audience] [core outcome] through [method]
Transformation story — Show you walked the path. Formula: From [old identity] to [new identity] | [Result metric] | [X people] backed
Mission-driven — Attract people who share your values. Formula: [Mission verb + risk/opportunity] | [Role/niche]
Niche specialist — Own a tiny, high-value corner. Formula: I work with [niche] | [Notable constraint] | [X]+ [clients] helped
Question hook — Make them answer in their head. Formula: What if [their asset/channel] [did something unexpected]? | [Result metric]

STRICT RULES (follow all of these):

Every headline MUST be under 220 characters. Count them. If it’s over 220, rewrite shorter.
Lead with pain or outcome first. Never lead with a format like “I offer workshops” or “I run programs.”
Use their language, not yours. “Overwhelmed B2B execs” = good. “Leaders” = too vague. Write the way they’d describe their own problem at 11 PM.
Use the pipe separator ( | ) to separate the pain/outcome from the credential or method.
Each of the 10 headlines MUST have a different sentence structure. Do NOT start more than 2 headlines with the same word. Vary openings: start some with “I,” some with a bold claim, some with “From,” some with “What if,” some with the audience, some with the outcome. If I see 5 headlines starting with “I,” you failed.
Never use these words: leverage, unlock, elevate, empower, streamline, harness, transform, revolutionize, game-changer, cutting-edge, holistic, seamless, optimize, dynamic, robust.
No hashtags. No emojis. No exclamation marks.
Write like a person talking to a person, not like a marketing brochure.

OUTPUT FORMAT:
Give me all 10 headlines numbered 1-10 with the framework name next to each one. After the list, tell me which 2 you’d A/B test first and why. Then give me a “wildcard” 11th headline that breaks all the frameworks but sounds like something I’d say to a friend at a bar.

Now go do something with this

• Keep your headline under 220 characters. LinkedIn cuts it off in search and connection requests.

• Test 2 or 3 versions this week. You can change your headline anytime. It takes 30 seconds and there’s zero penalty for experimenting.

• Pair it with a strong “Featured” section on your profile so the headline doesn’t carry the full load alone. Because once the headline works, your About section and experience become 10x easier to write. The headline sets the frame. Everything else fills it in.

I’ve rewritten 5 to 6 client headlines a week using these frameworks for months now. The pattern is consistent: every time we replace “I help [generic audience] with [generic offer]” with one of these, inbound leads show up within days.

Your audience doesn’t care about another “I help” statement. They just want to feel seen.

Drop your current LinkedIn headline in the comments and I’ll tell you what’s missing. Or update yours with one of these frameworks and tag me. I’ll repost the best ones.

Want me to review your full LinkedIn profile? Reply “PROFILE” and I’ll send you the link.

Boldly yours

✌️Magali

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Hey. Welcome.

You subscribed to Personality Pays and I’m glad you did.

Chances are you’re pretty f*cking good at what you do. Your experience is real. The people who’ve worked with you know it.

But the people who haven’t worked with you? They want to get to know you BEFORE they hire you. And right now, there’s nothing online that lets them do that.

AI has commoditized everything. It writes content faster than you do (and probably better, if we’re being honest). It automates workflows. It helps anyone become a convincing expert at anything in an afternoon.

So what’s a human like you supposed to do when expertise is no longer the thing that separates you from the next person?

You lead with the one thing AI cannot fake.

Your personality.

(That’s right, not your credentials, methodology, or your 20 years of experience).

• The way you think

• The way you talk.

• What pisses you off.

• What you refuse to water down

• The thing that makes people want to work with YOU, specifically, when there are 98 other qualified options in the inbox.

That’s what this newsletter is about.

Every week, I send you one move. Positioning. AI. LinkedIn. All through the lens of personality-first branding.

“Post 5x a day.” “Become a cringe creator.” None of that.

One move. You do it. It stacks.

Who is this for?

See if you recognize yourself.

You’re the consultant everyone raves about but nobody buys from repeatedly.

15 years of doing the work. Clients love you. Colleagues respect you. But your online presence is like a GPS voice. Helpful. Accurate. Zero soul. Sounds like every other robot on the road. It’s missing you, and that’s the problem. Decision-makers scroll past because nothing signals why you over the 98 other profiles in their inbox.

People keep telling you “you should do more keynotes” or “you should run workshops” and you don’t know where to start.

You present internally. You get invited to panels. People say you’re great in a room. But you don’t have positioning. You don’t have one sentence that makes a decision-maker say “yes” without a follow-up call. And every time you try to build that, it feels cringe.

You want to get paid to speak, train, and advise, but your brand doesn’t reflect the level you operate at.

You’re a senior expert. Director, VP, founder, 20 years in. You know your stuff is worth real money. But your brand has no gravity. There’s no single, sharp sentence that locks a “yes” into place without a follow-up call to explain what you really do. You’re stuck in a loop: you know you need a “thing,” but every time you try to define it, you feel like you’re wearing a cheap suit that’s three sizes too small. It’s cringey, it’s forced, and so you just... don’t.

You’ve done the keynotes and the workshops. Nothing builds on the last thing.

You did a keynote in October. Standing ovation. Two people asked for your card. Nothing came of it. You ran a workshop in January. Great feedback, but no follow-up. Every gig starts from scratch. Every quarter resets to zero. And someone with half your experience and a sharper LinkedIn profile is getting booked three times this WEEK.

FYI: the people getting your gigs aren't better than you. They're just everywhere you're not.

If any of that sounds like your Thursday, keep going.

Stop pretending this is normal

You didn’t land here because you’re bad at your job. You’re here because your job doesn’t translate online the way it does in a room.

What I see over and over:

1. Your bio is a game of buzzword bingo and you’re losing big time. When you sound like everyone else, you’re priced like everyone else. Give them a reason to remember your name, not your category.

2. Your LinkedIn profile is a statue I walked by last week. Prestigious. Artsy. Covered in birdsh*t. You spent 20 years collecting “senior” and “strategic” titles. You’re a well-kept secret in a market that pays visible people. You think your busy silence is humility? It’s obscurity with better PR.

3. You post on LinkedIn and attract your peers. Likes from fellow consultants. Comments from people in your mastermind. Zero DMs from the people who book keynotes, workshops, or advisory work.

4. You don’t know how to talk about yourself without wanting to crawl under the table. So you default to safe corporate language and strip out everything interesting about you.

5. You’ve paid for branding help before. You got a values exercise, a mood board, and a PDF that changed nothing about how you get booked.

6. AI is everywhere and you’re either ignoring it, scared of it, or using it badly. You need to know how to use AI without losing the thing that makes you, you.

7. You have too many topics and no clear lane. You’re afraid to pick one because you think you’ll lose opportunities. So you stay vague. And vague people don’t get referred.

8. Bureaus are not working the way you expected. You signed with one. They sent you a lead in Q3. Then silence.

9. Less experienced people are booking more than you. They have half your years. But they have sharper positioning and a brand that makes them easy to remember. That one stings.

10. You keep explaining yourself from scratch. Every new conversation. Every intro call. You don’t have language that sticks. So you improvise, and it never comes out the way you wanted.

What you get. Every week.

One move. One specific thing you do that week to sharpen your positioning or your visibility.

• Positioning frameworks you copy and fill in. The same ones I use with clients paying 7K for my 12-week accelerator. Bio rewrites. LinkedIn headline formulas. “What I do” scripts. All tested on real humans with real businesses, whether they want to land keynotes, fill workshops, build an advisory practice, or all four at once.

• AI prompts and workflows that protect your personality. I use Claude, Gemini, and NotebookLM daily. With every client. I don’t use AI to replace voice. I use it to extract what’s already there, faster. Every AI move I share has been tested on real brands. Speakers, consultants, senior experts.

• LinkedIn strategies that attract the people who pay you. The difference between a post that gets 200 likes from fellow coaches and a post that gets a DM from someone with a budget is positioning. Not posting frequency.

One move. Every week. Read it in 5 minutes. Do it in 15.

Subscribe now

Who am I?

Magali De Reu. I do personality-first branding and positioning for people who want to get paid to speak, train, and advise. Belgian, but I spend a good chunk of every year abroad because the ambition and directness I find in other cultures matches my wiring better than Belgium does. (Sorry Belgium.)

11+ years of branding and positioning work. 150+ personal brands built. Clients who share stages with Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki. Clients who run workshops for Fortune 500 companies and fill advisory retainers without cold outreach. 5 years ghostwriting for tech startups and Forbes. 2x TEDx speaker. Spoke at the United Nations. Ranked #2 globally for personal branding by Favikon.

None of that is why you should read any of this. This is:

In 2025, I left a startup that owed me EUR 20,000. The co-founder told me “Nah, I don’t feel like paying you now.” I spent EUR 10K on lawyers fueled by spite. Then I realized I was spending EUR 500 energy on a EUR 10 problem. Dropped the lawyers. Called it a freedom tax. Walked away.

And then I applied my own system to myself with scorched-earth intensity.

EUR 0 to EUR 170K+ in 4 months. No investors or corporate backup. The guy who owed me money became a LinkedIn post that helped me close a Netflix exec.

I’m also autistic and ADHD. I masked both for decades. When I stopped, my business took off. The directness, the intensity, the pattern recognition, the refusal to perform a toned-down version of myself. Those weren’t flaws. They were the foundation.

So when I say personality is the differentiator, I’m not quoting someone else’s framework. I bet my livelihood on it. It worked. Same system. Their numbers:

If you want to work with me directly:

→ Stop Faking It 1:1 Accelerator (12 weeks, high-touch). I build your entire personality-first brand with you. Positioning, assets, LinkedIn, content system. You leave with everything.

→ From Content to Gigs (community, details coming). Small group. We turn your LinkedIn into a booking engine. Waitlist here.

✌️

Popular Posts section gets added once there are more issues live. For now, the newsletter is the thing. See you next week.

I learned this the hard way. Last year, a woman at Amazon bought from me. She didn’t ask for case studies. Didn’t check certifications. Didn’t request a single reference. She’d read a rant I posted about getting screwed out of €20K by a guy with more ego than euros. That rant is what made her book the call.

People at Uber and Netflix closed in the same month. Neither asked for my methodology. Both had read the meltdowns.

So I pulled up my analytics. Went through every inbound lead from the last six months. And found a pattern I didn’t want to find: the posts I almost didn’t publish, the ones where I hovered over the button for six minutes wondering if I’d gone too far, those generated the revenue. The ‘professional’ content I spent hours perfecting? Furniture. Nobody asked for it.

In this first edition, we’re stripping away the ‘professional’ mask that’s costing you sales. You will learn:

• The trust equation: why flaws build authority faster than facts

• The boob strategy: how to find (and monetize) your uncopyable core

• The signals that sell: what buyers look for before the call, and it’s not your slide deck

A quick note before we start: If you are tired of guessing how to position yourself, the Content to Gigs Cohort is now open. It’s a 4-week sprint to fix your positioning, dial in your content, and build a pipeline that actually converts.

Check the details here

1. The trust equation

I believed this for years: if I get good enough, they’ll find me.

I got good enough. They did not find me.

‘Good enough’ is the entry fee. It stops you from getting sued. It does not get you hired. It does not get you rebooked. It does not make someone say “I felt like I already knew you” on a discovery call.

I see the same thing with every client. They come in with a content problem.

“My posts aren’t landing.”
“I’m not getting inbound.”
“I sound like everyone else.”

Nine times out of ten, the issue is identical: they’re showing credentials and hiding character.

Their feed reads like a textbook with a headshot attached. Frameworks. Tips. Numbered lists of things the reader already knows. All correct. All forgettable. All interchangeable with 400 other experts posting the same ideas in slightly different fonts. Example below.

I ran my own numbers recently. My tactical posts (clean structures, safe advice) average 3x fewer DMs and 5x less impressions than my confessional posts. The post about spiraling after leaving a toxic startup generated more sales conversations than my entire ‘content strategy’ series combined.

Certifications stop you from being disqualified. Personality is what gets you picked.

I’ve helped 90+ speakers build brands. The ones who break through are never the most credentialed. They’re the most legible. You read their content and you know exactly who you’re getting on the call. No dissonance. No bait-and-switch. No “oh, they’re way more boring in person.”

And here you are, sitting on 15 years of industry expertise, posting like a brochure, wondering why someone less qualified but louder keeps getting the gig you deserve.

The expertise isn’t the problem. The hiding is.

2. The boob strategy

I’ve been thinking about personal branding as a body. And I made a diagram. Look at it. You see what I see.

The left side is where you’ve been living. Textbook tactics. Scripts. Playbooks. Everything you were taught to lead with. Safe, professional, and identical to everyone in your price range.

The right side is everything you’ve been told to leave out. The quirks. The war stories. The way you talk when nobody’s editing you.

Now look at the center:

Battle-tested reality. Felt knowledge. The flaw is the feature. The messy middle.

That’s your uncopyable core. Your nipple.

I call it that because the shape is obvious. But also because the part you instinctively cover up, the sensitive center, is the part that feeds people.

You’ve been competing from the outer rim of the left circle. The commodity zone. Any AI tool produces that content faster and cheaper than you do. Your reader, scrolling at 11 PM after a long day, cannot tell your framework apart from the one three posts above it.

Personality alone, without expertise to back it up, is entertainment. Fun to watch. Nobody hires it.

But the overlap. Where what you know meets who you are when you stop performing. That’s where trust forms. That’s where “I felt like I already knew you” comes from.

Most of my clients haven’t read my methodology. But they did read a post where I was furious about being owed €20K and turned that fury into a lesson about vagueness as a weapon. They saw my AuDHD brain do what it does: strip the situation to its bones and say the thing nobody in the room would say.

All of them bought the boob. The uncopyable nipple. Before the call even started.

What the boob looks like in practice

Here’s the same expertise, with and without the core exposed.

Same credentials. Same expertise. Completely different energy. One gets scrolled past. The other gets remembered.

3. The signals that sell

This is the part of the theory that stings.

The thing you’re hiding. The thing you sanitize before you hit publish. The thing you think will make serious clients run. That’s the thing that makes them buy.

Buyers don’t evaluate you the way you think they do. They’re not comparing your credentials to someone else’s credentials. They’re scanning for three signals before they ever get on a call:

1. Consistency: do you sound the same everywhere? Post, call, delivery. If your content reads like a press release but you’re warm and funny in person, there’s a gap. That gap is where trust leaks out. The highest-paying clients I've closed all said some version of the same thing: "I felt like I already knew you." My posts, my emails, my calls all sound like the same person. No costume changes.

2. Specificity: do you share from the middle, or only from the mountaintop? A curated ‘lessons learned’ post, three years after the pain, reads as marketing. Because it is. You control the narrative. You picked the flattering angle. Your reader feels that, even if they can’t name it. They scroll. But someone writing about a loss they haven’t recovered from yet? That registers different. The brain goes: this is not a performance. This is happening. I trust this.

3. A point of view that costs you something. Performative vulnerability sounds like a TED talk. Real vulnerability sounds like a voice memo at 2 AM. The test I use: does sharing this cost you something? If it doesn’t, it’s not a signal. It’s marketing in a vulnerability costume.

The €20K post went up while I was still owed the money. The “I have nothing lined up” post went up during the week I had nothing lined up. The startup disaster posts went up while my hands were still shaking from the exit.

Within six months: grew from 7K to 21K followers. Over 200K in revenue rebuilt from zero. Ranked number 3 worldwide in personal branding on Favikon.

I didn’t clean up first. I showed up dirty. And the right people trusted me more for it.

The filter (so you don’t confuse “showing up dirty” with “showing up naked”)

Two tests before you hit publish. Every time.

1. The point test. Does this personal detail serve the argument? If the story makes a point, it stays. If it’s confession for confession’s sake, it goes. The €20K post worked because the point wasn’t “feel sorry for me.” The point was: vagueness is a weapon, and here’s how to spot it. My worst month became a lesson someone else could use on a Monday morning.

2. The cringe test. Reread it. If it makes you uncomfortable for the wrong reasons (pity, oversharing, main-character-without-the-plot), cut it. The discomfort of honesty is fine. The discomfort of “why did I tell them that” is not.

The goal is never “look at me.” The goal is “here’s what I learned, and you can take it home.”

4. The audit you’re not going to enjoy

Pull up your last 10 posts. Read them with one question:

Could someone swap their name onto this and nobody would notice?

If yes, you’re competing on expertise. Which means you’re competing on price. Which means you’re one cheaper option away from irrelevant.

Here’s the reckoning:

• Read your content out loud. If it sounds like something you’d say at dinner with a friend, keep it. If it sounds like a press release your company’s comms team approved, burn it. Your reader can smell the committee.

• When was the last time you published something that made your stomach drop? If the answer is “never,” your brand is a shield, not a signal. The posts that feel dangerous to publish build the trust your safe posts never will.

• Are you sharing what you know, or who you are when things go wrong? A framework shows competence. A story about the time your framework failed and what you did next shows character. Competence gets you considered. Character gets you chosen.

The discomfort you feel reading this is the distance between what you know and what you show. It’s the same distance your competitor, the louder, less-qualified one, walked across while you were perfecting your slide deck.

The Amazon client didn’t ask for my case studies.

She read about the worst month of my life. The €20K I was owed. The group chat of speakers trashing me. The panic of starting over with zero.

And she said: “I felt like I already knew you.”

The meltdown was the credential. The mess was the proof. The thing I almost didn’t publish was the thing that closed the deal.

Your ‘professionalism’ is an expensive costume. Underneath it is the person your next big client would hire.

The boob knows. ✌️

Magali

P.S. Content to Gigs is where we strip the mask and build something that sounds like you. Waitlist is open. Spots are capped.

If you want me to find your uncopyable core in one session, 1:1 intensives are available. I’ll tell you what’s broken. Then we fix it.