I can't trust this person.

I love that you say that because I think that a lot of people don't think enough about that.

You need to earn our argument.

Yeah.

And that doesn't mean that you need to pick something small.

It means that you can kind of like you need to think about what is my lens on this and why should people trust me? I love like love him or hate him.

People in your space will probably be aware of him because he's very prolific.

funny so The ownable idea, is that the totality of this? Or is that something else than these five

How would you advise or coach someone to find the idea that they should own?

So it's tricky.

So like the way that we so I've been doing this now with a number of clients because ultimately we had run.

So I've had the unignorable challenge previously.

Back in 2022, I started a personal branding cohort with the team at DemandCurve.

And over 1,900 people went through that.

Many went on to become like dominant voices in their space.

What advice would you give me or what are the steps that you would suggest to someone practically to be known in a year for a concept? Like, or is that too short? Like, is this a five year game? Like in a year, can I get known for paid if I wanted to? And if so, how do I do it?

Mm-hmm

... you can get some great stuff there.

But you get depth in an interview that you won't get anywhere else.

And so the, uh, Job Moesta, who's one of the co-creators of Jobs to Be Done, he teaches this thing called a switch interview, which is essentially you talk to a customer who has recently switched to either your product or maybe a direct competitor's, right? Because then you get to learn about that tension of, like, what was going on in their world that actually led them to making that buying decision.

So rather than just asking them about their opinion or what they think or, like, their problems broadly, you're actually examining in great detail an actual buying journey, and the insights that can come out of this is just incredible.

But the way that I used to do this would be, you know, I did it for a newspaper that was looking at making a big strategic pivot, and had to reach out to 100 of their s- current subscribers.

You know, 20 of them respond back.

If, if you, if you don't know this one, there we go.

business partner.

Neil O'Grady, who was at the time one of the co-founders of DemandCurve, which is this great media and education company for tech startups, primarily for marketing.

He reached out.

He's like, we're working on doing some collaborations with creators to create courses and cohort experiences.

Would you be interested in doing something together? And I was like, yeah, that would be a lot of fun to co-create something.

And so we ended up building the Unignorable Challenge, which was a 30-day personal branding challenge.

We launched that in January 2023.

Do you feel like there are certain signals that identify this as the idea that's working because people might not see it in their audience? Like what would be a signal? Because if you're getting, you know, 20 likes on something, you might not realize that's your lightning idea.

And how do you came out with, um, with this approach? And if you can share us what examples of how do you believe, like, let's say James Clear or, I don't know, uh, Justin Welk came up with their own ownable ideas in order to, to stand out and truly defend them, rather than just being afraid to share them?

them?I love this.

So how did it...

The way that I got to this work, to give your audience a bit of context, is I, uh, I launched a personal branding challenge with my co-founders at Demand Curve back in the end of 2022.

And at the time, personal branding was kind of, like, becoming a bit of a buzz thing.

It wasn't nearly what it is now.

This was four years ago.

What exactly you share, and loops back to the inspiration, right? And, um, once you do that, you do all that work, uh, what's next in order to come up with your ownable idea? Because when you mentioned there are many types.

Can you talk a little bit about that side as well?

Sure.

One of the things that had been really true to me back in 2018 that I had not done is I wanted a business partner.

Neil O'Grady, who was at the time the, uh, one of the co-founders of Demand Curve, which is this great media and education company for tech startups primarily for marketing, um, he reached out and he's like, "We're working on doing some collaborations with creators to create courses c- and cohort experiences.

Would you be interested in doing something together?" And I was like, "Yeah, that would be a lot of fun to cr- like co-create something." And so we ended up building the Unignorable Challenge, which was a 30-day personal branding challenge.

We launched that in January 2023.

It was never supposed to be a business.

... you might not realize that's your lightning idea.

[laughs]

Yeah.

Yeah, it looks so great from the outside.

Inside, like, it's hard.

Uh, but, you know, managed to bootstrap it to the point where we were, you know, featured in Forbes, they were calling us the next LinkedIn for women, got some venture capital, built the team.

I was a non-technical solo founder.

It was real hard.

Yeah

... to influence?

So you have to understand the science of attention and persuasion.

And there's a lot of content people talk about you have to understand how to write a hook, right? What is gonna get that person to hook them and to actually give you their attention? If you understand the science of attention and persuasion, then you're gonna know how to do that more effectively.

And so one of the things that we do in Unignorable is we teach people this concept of there's the seven Fs of attention.

Fs as in the letter F.

And if you understand these things at a high level, you can then audit your own content and your own hooks to see, am I delivering on this thing? But understanding a good source to go to for this would be our newsletter and our archive of our past issues, 'cause we dig into a lot of this stuff.

Negativity bias, it falls under fear, which is one of the Fs of attention, right? And negativity bias is huge.

[laughs]