Subscribe for startup ideas & tutorials on how to use AI to build & grow your startup. Hey, I’m Greg - CEO of Late Checkout and ex-advisor to Reddit, TikTok, and more. I post videos here from my podcast top 0.1% tech podcast called The Startup Ideas Podcast. You can also listen to The Startup Ideas Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I keep it practical and never gatekeep the sauce. I share what I'm learning in real-time. Happy building
People instantly grasp the value of acquiring a bankrupt company's database. But the same logic applies to language, writing, and libraries of content. When you buy a catalog of writing, you are buying groupings of words, ideas, and crystal
People often assume that fear of writing is an everyday-person problem, and that highly successful founders or executives must find it easier. That's not the reality. Having ghostwritten for some of the most accomplished figures in business
MembersAfter ghostwriting for over 300 founders, executives, and investors, the vast majority of the time the ghostwriter used essentially the same voice: authoritative, concise, with maybe a few vocabulary choices specific to the individual. Nine
When someone says they don't like their own voice but admires how someone like Greg Isenberg writes, the reality is that 99% of the time they can't articulate what makes their voice their voice, what they dislike about it, or even what spec
MembersIn ghostwriting, getting the voice wrong doesn't always mean rewriting the whole piece. One client sent back a draft furious, saying it didn't sound like him. Listening back to the original call revealed the issue: the draft leaned too hard
MembersWhen people say someone 'has a voice,' they treat it like some mysterious, unreplicable quality. In reality, voice is a bundled term made up of a handful of concrete data points. Word choice is one of the biggest levers: saying something is
MembersEverything you create is, in some way, adding something to your digital brain — your accumulated knowledge, your personal language model of how you see the world. The question is how much it actually adds. If you spend 20 minutes repeating
MembersEverything you create sits on a spectrum between timely and timeless. Timely content has very high short-term value and very low long-term value — think a viral meme about a trending tech product that capitalizes for 24 hours, then falls of
MembersConsider two versions of the same short-form video opener. Version one: 'Here's how to start a newsletter on Substack.' That is commodity content. It's not worthless, but it's fundamentally interchangeable because many people can and probab
Video is no different from writing. Everyone uses teleprompters now. Short-form video content is increasingly scripted, and a script is writing — it's the same fundamental idea. Whether it's cutouts of long-form content or animation explain
One of the most common questions people ask is which is better: writing or video, podcast or long-form YouTube. The reality is the answer is yes — it's all of them, they all work. As an example, Greg Isenberg's business partner Dickie and h
There's a real irony when people say they want to write about everything. In doing that, you deprive yourself of ever going deep enough to arrive at something original. All you end up doing is typing and repeating commodity ideas all day lo
Original thinking doesn't mean writing a hundred-thousand-word book. A great example is Pythagoras saying 'the earth is round, not flat.' That's six words — fundamentally six words — that completely changed the course of humanity and that w
There's a faulty belief that if you were the one who wrote something, you own it and created something original. But writing a sentence like 'I woke up today and made coffee' isn't original — that's just an open-source grouping of words. No
There's a faulty belief that if your fingers touched the keys and typed a grouping of words, those words are yours. That's simply not true. If you write the sentence 'I woke up today and made coffee,' that is not attributable to you. It's a
Every piece here is something Greg Isenberg can talk you through, in their own words.