Nicolas ColeCo-Founder Ship 30 for 30, Premium Ghostwriting Academy

The Trick Behind Making Boring Ideas Sound Genius #entrepreneurship #startup #innovation

20 Jun 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:03

In this concise monologue, Nicolas Cole outlines a two‑step method for turning ordinary, well‑known concepts into seemingly fresh, marketable ideas. First, he advises reorganizing the material—such as converting a set of practices into a checklist or framework—to give it a new structure. Second, he stresses the power of assigning a distinctive, relevant name to the repackaged content, which signals novelty and ownership. Using the example of a "Poor to Profitable Customer Lead Checklist" for startup founder customer interviews, he demonstrates how these tactics make familiar advice appear innovative. Cole concludes that nonfiction writers and entrepreneurs succeed by repeatedly packaging known ideas in new formats and names, thereby creating perceived originality and proprietary value.

Chapters

You can make any commoditized idea seem new by doing two very specific things. One is organizing it differently, and two is giving it a name. So for example, is the information of how to do customer interviews as a startup founder new? Is that like some radically new concept that no one's ever heard of before? No, it's like, go talk to your customers and you'll learn. But that information can be presented as new when you organize it in a different way. So you say, I'm going to take these ideas and I'm going to organize it into a checklist that you can ask customers, and it gets presented as new even more when I name it something new, like this is the Poor to Profitable Customer Lead Checklist, whatever. Just by naming it means it is perceived as different, as long as the name is relevant to the thing. And so that's what's also really funny about nonfiction is like the more that you write inside of an industry, the more that you realize the game is taking ideas that are probably pretty well known, but packaging them differently and naming them differently, and all of a sudden they are different and they are yours. Nicolas Cole.