Subscribe here | Unsubscribe here | Sept 11, 2025 | FIV #93

✅ Today’s Checklist:

• How to keep AI from hallucinating

• 7 ways to stand out with AI—when everyone’s doing it

• Why you should keep showing up when quitting looks reasonable

QUICK LINKS

🌱 Personal development. Reject the tyranny of being picked: Pick yourself.

🤖 AI tools. Google Nano Banana has changed the game. 10 wild things people are doing with it.

💭 Thought-provoker. The 4 quadrants of conformism. An essay.

✍️ Prompting. The rumored anti-hallucination prompt. Applicable across GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude.

📈 Growth. How to be more disagreeable and create a reality distortion field.

7 Ways to Stand Out with AI—When Everyone’s Using It

AI isn’t your edge anymore. It’s everyone’s edge.

Ninety-two percent of startups are already using AI to draft, automate, and generate at scale.

That means if you’re just cranking out auto-written posts, cookie-cutter outreach, and stock-looking images, you will drown in a sea of sameness.

The real edge comes when you bend the tools to your vision.

So let’s talk about where to aim your energy if you want AI to actually set you apart in a world where most of your competitors are still stuck on AI level one.

1. Go Deep, Not Wide

Most people are using AI at the surface level—blog drafts, email subject lines, ad copy. That’s fine. But surface-level use = surface-level results.

Instead, train models on your company’s unique data. Feed it your customer conversations, product knowledge, and processes. Suddenly, AI is giving you actionable insights and output no competitor can replicate.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Export the last 50 customer support chats or sales calls. Drop them into an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT and prompt: “Summarize the top 5 objections, pain points, and buying triggers.” That analysis can change your product roadmap, messaging, or sales strategy in ways your competitors will never see.

2. Pair AI With Human Insight

AI is great at scale. But scale without soul is forgettable.

I’ve found the best results come when I let AI do the heavy lifting—research, first drafts, data crunching—then I inject my unique point of view.

That combination is powerful: the efficiency of AI plus the clarity of a founder’s conviction.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Next time you use an AI tool like Perplexity for research or ChatGPT for drafting, ask yourself: What’s the bold thing only I would say here? Add that line. That’s what makes it memorable.

3. Move Faster Than the Pack

Everyone can use AI. But few use it well at speed.

I know founders who spend weeks perfecting messaging while their competitor is running 20 AI-aided experiments in the same time frame. Guess who wins?

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Build a “fast lane” in your company. Give your team permission to test things with AI in 24-hour cycles: run the experiment, gather results, and decide if it’s a go/no-go. Most tests won’t work—and that’s fine. You only need a few that do. Use Zapier to automate test workflows.

4. Find AI’s Blind Spots

Here’s the paradox: the more people use AI, the more the output starts to look the same.

Your edge? Observe the sameness. Make note of it. And go the other way.

If every competitor is auto-generating long LinkedIn posts, experiment with 7-second video snippets.

If everyone’s pushing text-heavy emails, test meme-style graphics.

If three competitors all publish 2,000-word SEO blogs on the same topic, try a punchy 90-second explainer video instead.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: This week, audit your top 3 competitors. Look for where their AI fingerprints are showing (generic blog posts, templated emails, and bland images). Then commit to zig where they zag.

5. Build AI Into Your Product, Not Just Your Ops

Many founders treat AI as an internal tool. Something to help the team move faster. Smart. But the next level is making AI part of your customer experience.

Examples:

• Grammarly didn’t just use AI for ops; they made AI the product.

• E-commerce brands are embedding AI stylists and fit advisors.

• SaaS companies are layering AI copilots on top of existing features.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Ask: Where could AI make our product feel smarter, more personal, or more intuitive for users? Even a simple personalization feature can be a game-changer.

6. Treat AI Like a Teammate, Not a Tool

The founders who win are integrating AI into their workflow like a team member.

That means giving it context, responsibilities, and feedback loops. Just like you would with a junior hire.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Pick one recurring task (weekly reporting, content repurposing, customer onboarding emails). Treat AI as the “owner” of that task. Build a repeatable workflow around it, improve prompts week over week, and track results.

The key is consistency—when AI is trained and iterated on, it compounds.

7. Stay Human at the Edges

This may sound counterintuitive in a pro-AI newsletter, but I believe it: your human touch will matter more as AI gets better.

Because here’s what happens when everyone automates: people crave the rare, human moments. The handwritten thank-you note. The unscripted founder video. The personal email that clearly wasn’t AI-generated.

👉 Founder-to-founder tip: Decide on one place in your funnel where the founder (that’s you) shows up personally. Keep it light, authentic, and human. That’s a signal competitors can’t fake.

The Bottom Line

Sean’s Pick of The Week

The YouTube founders almost quit when they had just 40 uploads. Forty.

Today it’s a billion videos a day. Every empire starts out looking small, fragile, and even laughable.

If you’re feeling stuck, remember: momentum compounds.

Keep shipping, keep showing up, keep stacking uploads.

What feels tiny now is just the trailer for the scale you’ll unlock if you don’t tap out too early.

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