Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Nora’s channel that looks like all the others
Nora is a UX designer who runs a YouTube channel on the side, teaching design to people who aren’t designers.
Her channel covers the same topic as a thousand other channels,
and she is trying to win by covering more of it.
Every week she adds a little more, because being thorough feels like the safe way to stand out.
🧩 Her struggle:
She competes on how much she covers, so she never finds the one thing only her channel offers.
On her lunch break, she’s reading a newsletter a coworker forwarded,
and it tells the real story of a man whose company was also doing the same thing as nearly everyone else in his field,
and who still sold it for $17.6 million.
And it started with a business that was losing money.
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📊 The man who named the gap
Joe Pulizzi ran a startup called Junta42 that matched brands with agencies to write their content for them.
The agencies he was matching brands with couldn’t even afford what it cost to join.
Junta42 was losing money.
In 2010 he looked at what marketers actually kept asking him for.
They didn’t want more agencies to hire.
They wanted training, so they could learn to do it themselves.
Nearly every other company in his field was competing to write content for brands.
So Joe changed the whole company to teach marketers instead, and called it the Content Marketing Institute.
He sold it to UBM, a media and events company, in 2016 for $17.6 million.
Turns out he has a name for why that change worked, and he defines it precisely.
“The content tilt is that area of little to no competition on the web that actually gives you a chance to break through the noise and be relevant.”
Then he adds a second line: “It’s what makes you so different that your audience notices you and rewards you with its attention.”
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Content Tilt
Joe stopped competing with everyone who made content for brands,
and started teaching marketers to make it themselves.
He sold that company for $17.6 million.
Joe’s strategy is called The Content Tilt, and you can use his definition as a test.
It’s the area where almost nobody else is competing, and it’s what makes you different enough that your audience notices.
So you stop competing with every other channel in your niche on how much of the topic you cover.
Find the one angle your readers can’t get anywhere else, and put all your work into it.
Readers remember the one angle nobody else has.
They don’t remember the most complete guide.
Your reader can get the complete guide from an AI for free.
The angle only you have is the part it can’t give them.
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🛠️ Nora’s turn
Let’s check in on Nora, who keeps adding more to her design videos,
and whose channel still looks like a thousand others.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it who else teaches design on YouTube, and how.
Her AI sidekick says:
Every other channel teaches people how to become designers,
so your angle is teaching people who never want to be designers how to fix their own slides.
She stops editing the forty-minute video she was working on.
That weekend, she records a ten-minute video that fixes one messy slide deck, start to finish.
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🌅 Four months later
Nora’s videos are shorter now, and every one fixes something a non-designer made.
Viewers post their own slides in the comments and ask her to fix them next.
Two thousand people subscribe to her channel.
Your topic is probably crowded, just like hers.
You don’t have to cover more of it than everyone else.
Find the one angle on your topic that nobody else is filling, and build everything around it.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving one person with an AI sidekick can build something amazingly big’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the angle on your topic that nobody is currently filling.
🧰 What you’ll need
Your topic, and who already covers it and how
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. design for people who aren’t designers, covered by big channels on design theory and software tutorials, all made for people who want to become designersWhat they all agree on without saying it, and something you believe that would annoy them
- e.g. they assume every viewer wants to become a designer, and I think most viewers just want their slides to stop looking messyWhat people ask you that the existing videos don’t answer
- e.g. how to fix a slide deck the night before a meeting, and which two fonts to use so I never have to choose again
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my video list, my analytics, or my notes, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people who aren't designers but have to make their own slides, flyers and social posts.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Do not suggest narrowing the topic. A tilt is a different angle on the same topic, not a smaller version of it.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My topic, plainly, and who already covers it and how:
{e.g. design for people who aren't designers, covered by big channels on design theory and software tutorials, all made for people who want to become designers}
What they all agree on without ever saying it out loud, and something I believe that would annoy them:
{e.g. they assume every viewer wants to become a designer, and I think most viewers just want their slides to stop looking messy}
What people ask me that the existing coverage does not answer:
{e.g. how to fix a slide deck the night before a meeting, and which two fonts to use so I never have to choose again}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The shared assumption — what everyone covering this topic takes for granted, stated as a sentence they would all nod at.
2. Three tilts — three angles on the same topic that nobody is filling, each with why the gap exists.
3. The strongest one — which tilt I can hold honestly, given what I actually know and believe.
4. What it costs — who I lose by taking that angle, named rather than dismissed.
5. Five pieces — five specific things to publish that only make sense from that angle.
Then tell me the one sentence that says what I am against, in plain words.