I find it hard to believe that the creator economy or digital products or information products in general will ever go away.
And those are all things that AI can't really touch if the creator is actually unique.
I'm talking about coaching, courses, communities, subscription memberships, cohorts, ebooks, templates, etc. And it makes sense because they have huge profit margins, They can be fulfilled at scale by one person or a small team they provide more freedom than relying on platform revenue or Sponsorships and this is an unpopular opinion.
They are arguably one of the most Transformative products that someone can buy there's never been a time where affordable Interest -based education from people on the cutting edge of skills have been available and since education influences behavior proper education is the only thing that can change your life.
Of course there are bad actors, of course there are scammers, of course most people that go through information products don't get results, because the personality and the information aren't a match for each other, and most people buy it to feel good about themselves rather than to actually implement it and make a change in their life.
Ask anyone who has taken a course in general and has actually gone through with it and stuck with it even if they didn't get results from that one specific thing they will say i got a few golden nuggets from that and overall courses have changed my life when you buy a physical product or you have someone do something for you you're not learning anything you're not increasing your value or your skill set you're not developing as a human being so having a product that can help you do that is extremely transformative now i have a prediction For how digital products and information products will evolve
So if you understand this and you are a creator or you're looking to get into this kind of stuff Then you're gonna be on What I think is the cutting edge of this and you can leverage that and take advantage of that opportunity now I'm basing this on a few beliefs The first is that information will never be free so you can read this quote from Stewart Brand interviewing Apple Steve Wozniak But in a nutshell I want to highlight that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable the right information in the right place just changes your life and on the other hand information almost
wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time so you have these two things fighting against each other now the thing here is that information doesn't want to be free because it doesn't want but I get the point people want information to be free because they don't understand that information is labor and it may sound cliche at this point, but if people don't pay, they don't pay attention.
Only those with a poor relationship with money have a problem with paying for critical information.
And, of course, information becomes less valuable the longer that it's been around.
It either becomes common knowledge, so it's not that valuable if it's common knowledge, or AI gets trained on it, so now it can answer questions in an instant based on those things.
But there is still another category of information that will retain its value going into the future.
That's where creators come in, because creators deal with personal information.
The problem with information products, or digital products in general, in terms of them not getting results or people thinking that they're scam for some reason, is that you need to get the right information in the right place, at the right time, to the right other person.
The second belief here, and why I think digital products won't go away, they'll just evolve, is that AI will never give you the best answer out of the box.
Because it's not that AI isn't as good as you, it's that you aren't good enough to make AI better than you.
If you ask ChatGBT to write a book, it will, but it won't be worth reading.
Now, if you are both skilled at writing a book and prompt engineering, or giving clear instructions to the AI, Then you can probably write an incredible book much faster than you were able to before But it's still your book with your knowledge in the way you wanted it to be written AI is only effective in highly relative domains like marketing writing design or anything non -mechanical when it has a sufficient amount of Context so much so that it is no longer the AI Providing the knowledge as it is doing the busy work now this will all make sense But that leads to the third belief and why I think
digital products will evolve is that courses are static So to go over the basics of online business, there are three types of offers There's do -it -yourself, which is like courses there's done for you Which is like freelancing or agency work and then there's done with you, which is like coaching or consulting Those are the three things that creators have sold since the dawn of the creator economy But each of those have their downsides like courses being static information someone buys it, the the course may not be made for them, at their level of development, at their level of mind, what they can understand,
what they can comprehend, what they need, at that certain point in time, how to tailor it to themselves.
It's like a book that you're reading and there's a lot of good things that can come from reading a book or taking a course and learning how to figure it out or connect the pieces yourselves and to actually take action while being confident in not knowing what to do to the point of reaching that point of understanding so you know what the course or the book meant.
And something like freelancing is usually unfulfilling for a good amount of people.
I'm speaking from experience here when I say that I like working on my own projects.
I don't like working on other people's projects, either in a job or freelancing, client work.
And then something like coaching, if you want to scale that business model either requires a lot of your time spent on calls or it requires you to build a team and train a team to do those things.
Now what if AI could collapse all of those things into one?
All of those offers.
Do -it -yourself done with you done for you.
What if a digital product provided both the education and the execution based on your own unique knowledge.
So the future of digital products what is it personally and to I guess help create an analogy here think of it as the new notion template notion templates are like the easiest way to start building a digital product and they're not even a digital product platform right you build out habit trackers you write your ebook in there you do whatever you can build like an entire dashboard but that's still static information that you have to go into and do yourself What if there was such a thing as an AI or an agent based notion template where you can literally download a piece of someone's mind so that not only
do you have the operating manual, so to say, the knowledge and education, but you also have the AI or the agent that can do those things for you after taking your own context into account.
Now, I've personally created a few digital products in my time, quite a few, actually, and my latest one is a challenge called build a profitable personal brand in 30 days because I want to test this theory and I wish that I could sell you on a software that does this whole future of digital product thing right now.
But I want to see if I can catch the wave and we can build this into Cortex so that we can become the go to for it.
I'm just kind of giving you my prediction here so you can get ahead of the curve if it does happen.
Now, let's run through a scenario with this.
Imagine that I have two pieces of the digital product.
I have the education.
So the curriculum or knowledge laid out in an easy -to -digest way, and then I have the execution.
So AI prompts built from that specific knowledge to allow you to execute faster.
Neither of those are as valuable alone as they are together, because just having AI do the task for you doesn't teach you how to do the task yourself.
So when AI inevitably gives you the first draft, you don't know how to create a final draft that works.
AI doesn't solve for iteration or a lack of results.
Right now, at this point in time, it's usually a prototyping tool.
And I don't mean just prototyping for software, I mean prototyping drafts for your writing, prototyping designs, images, whatever it may be.
This is why vibe coders are kind of in this weird position right now, where they go in, they try to do something but they can't build anything that's too complex because they don't have the the coding knowledge that would allow them to restructure their code base or Solve specific bugs or do other things that would allow for larger scale apps Another thing here.
Is that even when people can code completely in natural language That doesn't mean that the software is useful and it doesn't mean that people are going to use it So you can build whatever you want.
That doesn't mean that you're gonna make any money from it That's the world that we've lived in for the past However, many years now when you only have the education So when you only have the execution, you don't know what to do with that You don't know how to continue coding.
You don't know how to continue writing.
You don't know how to get results But if you only have the education it's difficult to apply that knowledge to your own situation Many people struggle with courses because they try to copy the teacher one to one but don't understand that their unique situation changes how the education is applied.
So, this is where the combination of both thrive.
AI is great at collecting your personal context, especially when prompted to, so that it can perform the task with that taken into account.
So, if you were learning from me, to start something like a personal brand, there are a lot of moving variables to that.
A lot of it has to come from your mind.
You can't just tell AI to build a personal brand for you.
It doesn't work like that.
You have to extract your beliefs, your opinions, your interests, your ideas, all of that stuff.
AI can't pull that out of your mind but it can help guide you to doing so.
This is why courses have such a low success or completion rate.
Now let me make this more clear because that's all like jumbled up, right.
That was just a lot of information.
I want to make this very tangible so you understand what's going on here.
So imagine a YouTube course, it teaches how to generate ideas that have viral potential, how to design and iterate on thumbnail ideas, how to outline the YouTube script and key points, how to format the hook and introduction to reduce drop -off, how to storyboard the video for pacing, b -roll, main shots and visuals.
Now what you need to understand is that there is no best way to do this.
If you ask AI to do these things without context it will give you general information that it can find on the internet but the thing about YouTube and most relative domains or non -mechanical domains is that things change quite often.
The things that get results change and they're in flux.
No YouTuber is the same as another yet they all seem to reach some form of success.
Right, you have the mountaintop which is like, let's say, a million subscribers and then you have hundreds of thousands of people that have gone up different paths along the mountain to get there and AI is going to like try to pull things together and then create a specific path, and that may help you, that may work and it may do some of the things for you, but it's only gonna get you up so far before you reach a point where you don't know which path to take, and since you're outsourcing your agency to AI, you don't get to choose which path you take and you usually end up going back down.
And this means that if you use an AI YouTube software that helps you generate hooks or generates titles or generates whatever it may be, it's using one system, the system prompt.
And sure, there may be some leeway there, but once everyone starts using that, then the people who don't use that are gonna be the ones who get the most results.
This is why education from creators is so important for getting specific results and is arguably a lot more valuable than any software that you could use.
So for this YouTube course, as an example, the creator built it out with their own mind, their own model for getting results and their own methods.
Then when they turn each of the bullet points from before into prompts or into some kind of an agent, like the idea generation, the outline, the scripting, something magical happens there.
Not only do you have education, you have execution.
And that's insane. A YouTube course is no longer a course, it's a piece of the creator's mind that can act on its own.
You, as an individual can purchase this piece of their mind, study the operating manual, give it your own context, and then it does the work for you.
It gives you ideas, you choose one, it guides you through the outline, you edit it, it spits out a script, according to your own voice, and at some point it will be able to create the entire video while sounding like you, and looking like your style.
It's still you, creating the video, you're just doing less work.
This isn't AI slop, because it has context.
Now if you want to see this in action, go over to the Cortex channel.
I have a video that illustrates how I create a prompt that creates a YouTube script according to your own ideas, and it's pretty powerful, especially if you don't know where to start on YouTube.
Now this isn't only going to affect individuals, it's going to change the entire landscape, because what about the content team for a company?
You don't need to hire the person as a freelancer, because they can do the work without being there, right?
you're hiring these little specialist courses that has the operating manual and the execution.
Another example of this is like if Alex Hormozi created a workspace with all of Alex Hormozi stuff inside of it, and they have their specific AI prompts that helps them create their style of YouTube video or content, whatever it may be, and then if they wanted to sell that they could, but they can also use it internally to create better content.
This is one big reason we're trying to build cortex the way we are is because with chatgpt and other things it's like yeah sure you can do something kind of like that you can string a bunch of things together but you don't have a dedicated workspace similar to notion that allows you to act on all of these things now what about something like fitness coaching because technically AI can't lift the weights for you but they can have prompts that create customized training programs nutrition protocols daily check -ins to track your progress weight loss or Whatever it may be.
So it's like an on demand coach that takes in your context and tailors what would be a course for you.
So, you're no longer selling a course, you're selling a complete solution, a personal and specific system that AI will never give you out of the box because it needs to be trained to do so that is much more likely to get results.
The value of information isn't going down, it's increasing sharply.
So now let's learn how to build one of these things, right?
Let's learn how to build an AI first product.
If you're a creator, or you want to be a creator, the best thing you can do is learn how to turn your knowledge into a prompt.
And if you're a beginner and do this well, congratulations, you now have your first product that you can start selling immediately.
Think of how many notion templates are out there, right?
Little habit trackers or little dashboards that people slap $10 on and they make a lot of money from.
Or think of people who have little eBooks that they give away or little templates.
these are small scale digital products right?
That's what I'm saying here, is you can create a prompt library with what you are going to learn right now you can slap ten to twenty bucks on it and you can do extremely well.
So the first step to doing this is to just document your process, so here you want to open a note or a document to write this down.
I personally recommend doing this in my own software cortex because it is a notes or documents based platform, you take notes you write documents you can write your newsletters content whatever it may be in there But you can also reference those with AI so what you write down in the document itself can technically turn into a prompt that you can feed the AI and the AI has All of the models so you're not restricted to only chat GPT while using chat GPT or Claude You have all of them there now from there act as if you are giving detailed instructions to someone else so they can do what You do So if you're
a YouTuber, then you need to create a document for each step of your process.
Look at the bullet points from before and expand on each of those.
So for creating something like a YouTube intro, it could look like this.
And I'll link this in the description if you want to try it out and just follow along, but you can see that it has very detailed steps.
So nail your title and thumbnail, perfect your first five seconds, structure the rest of your intro, optimize your production approach, final tips, etc. etc. And of course you can do this with any task.
I'm not telling you to do it for YouTube or content creation.
Literally any task.
What do you do in the gym?
How do you track your nutrition?
What's your mindset or meditation protocol or your breath work protocol?
What are your interests?
What do you talk about?
What do you do? What are you good at?
Document that now if you've never done this before it can be difficult to get all of those things Everything you need to know written out and you're actively learning how to kind of manage an employee here and the employee here is AI.
But the good thing is is that you just spend time on this once and then you can reuse it forever.
It's a very high leverage activity to do.
And bonus points it acts as an outline for your curriculum as well.
So when we're creating this digital product or information product what we're doing right now is somewhat the outline or the starting point of that.
Now step 1 .5 is kind of in between step 1 and step 2 which is using someone else's process.
The reason I'm including this is to just show you another thing that you can do with AI.
So I'd recommend that you document your process manually, you write it all out, but for the sake of value and education here's something else you can do.
You choose a task you want to accomplish, you find an expert on YouTube who teaches it in a video, or find a PDF of a book that teaches it, then you feed that to AI, you can link to a YouTube video or upload a PDF to Cortex or whatever other AI software allows that and then ask AI to break down the detailed instructions and save that as a document to reference in step two.
That's what I did for the YouTube intro document that I showed on screen just previously, I asked it to pull from a YouTube video that teaches how to create good introductions and AI spat out the documentation.
I also have a free mini course with multiple examples on this called How I Systemize My Life with AI, so link in the description if you want to understand this process deeper.
Now step 2 is to turn each part into a prompt.
So remember the example of before, we're talking about a YouTube course here.
Where you have ok, idea generation, YouTube introduction, title, hook, outline, script, draft. Whatever the steps are in your process.
Now it's worth spending 30 to 40 hours studying prompt engineering on your own.
Because I can't, I clearly can't explain it all here.
It would take 30 to 40 hours.
So for that reason I want to give you a shortcut that I personally use all the time I like to structure my prompts in two phases depending on what the task is.
Phase one is a context gathering phase that interviews the user to acquire the relevant information needed to perform the task well.
Phase two is the execution phase where it takes the user's information and performs the task So if the task is something like creating a YouTube intro then you obviously need user context You need the idea they want you turn into a video and a voice analysis to reference So it sounds like them and preferably you would have an idea generation prompt come before that That way you can feed the output of the idea generation prompt into the YouTube intro prompt So each one of these tasks builds on the other in some way first you have the idea generation prompt that gathers context about your interests
and spits out high -performing topics Then you feed one of those topics as context to the YouTube intro prompt that also gathers context about the key points You want to use then you feed that as context to an outline prompt then you feed that as context to a script prompt So in a nutshell you're gonna be creating quite a few prompts and testing and refining them to encapsulate the entire Process of what you do So with this example alone I could slap 10 20 50 bucks on this prompt library for how to create a YouTube video with AI That's a pretty cool digital product.
So now here's the shortcut.
I have a prompt that helps me create prompts So you tell it what task you want to complete you give it the instructions for that task and you have it Structure the prompt in the two phases we talked about so I have this prompt that you can duplicate to your workspace Or you can copy and paste it into chatgpt or Clod or whatever.
It may be I personally like using Gemini 2 .5 pro for this so you can either use that in Gemini or cortex or we also have this built in to Cortex so if you go to chat then write incredible AI prompts then you can just start typing and it'll do the same thing.
So here is what the prompt looks like to create the prompt right this is what I typed in in order to create the prompt so you can pause this read through it but you can see that I linked the document from the previous example of having the steps to create a YouTube intro and then I say structure the prompt into phases where it's context gathering so interviewing me for information and then phase 2 the intro draft but you can see here that the output of this prompt is very detailed it will give you a good YouTube introduction if you give it the right context so you can either duplicate this or copy
paste it just to see how it does now step 3 is to use it yourself and iterate because you may think that you're done here but you're not I know that you want AI to be this all -magical thing that just does all the work for But that's not how it works.
If you want it to be good.
Think of this as a first draft It's the same with creating any kind of system for your life You create a routine you try it for a week you notice what didn't work Well, then you try new things until it gets great results.
This goes for health writing content, etc This is the same thing with notion templates, right?
If you're selling a system like me selling a writing system or a content system I need to test that I need to refine it I can't just build something out and then start selling it because I don't know if it's gonna get results I need to test it on myself first. So that's what you're doing here It's like you're building out a workflow in notion, but you're doing it with an AI prompt instead Now the fourth step is to create documentation because congrats you now have a library of prompts that you can now use for your own work or to give as a product to someone else But now you need the curriculum
portion because you need to teach people not not only how to use these But everything that goes into understanding the process you need to teach both how to use the prompts and what they need to Know about the task.
Thankfully, you already have your process outlined You just need to expand on and structure those in the form of a product that takes someone from point A to point B Now if you don't know what to include in a digital product I actually wrote a mega guide on how to create your first hyper profitable digital product on my sub stack So you can go look at that subscribe to that now without going on for another hour here's what I would do to create the digital product, purchase someone else's that seems to do well, save all of it as separate documents and cortex, ask AI to break down the structure
and patterns of the product.
So why it works well, how it's structured.
Then turn that into a prompt with what you've learned above, feed it the details about your own product, and have it guide you through creating your own product.
So what you learned here isn't just for creating prompts or creating a product but that's kind of crazy, right, is you can take someone else's product that you want to structure yours like you can ask AI to break it down.
What's the structure of it?
Why does it work? Then you say okay guide me through this.
I want to create my own product on this on this on this.
Here's the ideas I want to put in.
Give me an outline for it.
Start writing some of the sections, so on and so forth.
So this is a way of thinking with AI as your partner.
It's how you teach AI to do any tasks that you'd like to achieve.
We're going to go into this deeper in the next video which is like how to start an AI first business, which will be pretty cool.
But I'll leave you with that.
Thank you for watching.
Like, subscribe, join the new Substack, future -proof two free articles a week.
And you can join the challenge.
Build a profitable personal brand in 30 days.
That starts on June 16th so enroll before that date.
It's going to be 30 days of actual lessons dripped out every single day.
It's a different structure of course, it will have AI prompts in it.
It will be a lot more digestible and easy to act on.
It just takes 30 to 60 minutes a day of your time so consider that.
Thank you again for watching.
Bye.
