Get Found in AI: Why I Changed My Position on Content

Confession time, Misfit. I'm reversing a position I've held publicly for a long time.

Even eight months ago, I was telling experts not to worry about publishing. Don't stress about content. Don't feel bad that your expertise isn't scattered across the web. You can grow a real business without any of it.

I believed that. I had evidence for it. And I'm changing my answer.

What I got right, and I'm keeping

The reason I said it was the Golden Rings.

That's our signature framework inside Band of Misfits, and it's the one members reach for most. It's built on a simple observation: for most independent experts, growth does not come from volume. It comes from the quality and the depth of a small number of relationships. Current clients. Past clients. Referral sources. Door openers. The people who know your work well enough to put their own credibility behind it when your name comes up in a room you're not in.

The Golden Rings is the method for identifying those people, mapping where they actually sit around you, and building the relationships deliberately instead of hoping.

I'm not walking any of it back. Dozens of our members have built their book of business on it. It is more efficient than any funnel I've ever built, more effective than any funnel I've ever built, and I'll say the quiet part too: it is enormously more fun. Nobody ever finished a great conversation with a client they respect and thought, I wish I'd spent that hour optimizing a landing page.

So the framework holds. What's changed is that the framework alone is no longer the whole kit.

We need more tools now. Uninvisible is one of those tools.

Because if you are indexed on exactly one path for people to discover you exist, you are leaving money on the table. Not a rounding error. Real money, from real buyers who were actively looking for someone exactly like you and never found you.

What changed

Two things, and they compound.

One: the search moved.

Ask yourself where people are actually looking for someone like you right now. Not in 2019. Today. If you're a fractional leader, a consultant, an executive coach selling into organizations, a specialist of any kind, your buyer is increasingly typing their problem into an AI tool and asking what to do about it.

That's the front door now. And an AI system can only recommend an expert it can actually see. If you exist as a great reputation inside forty people's heads and nowhere else, you're not losing that comparison. You're not in it.

Two: the buyer's journey got longer.

This is the part I don't hear enough people talking about, and it's showing up over and over in my conversations with Misfit members.

Your prospects are using AI to build interim solutions. They've got a real problem. Instead of calling an expert, they go work the problem with a chatbot, get something that's maybe sixty percent right, and run with it for a while. Not because they're cheap. Because it's there and it's instant.

So the window between "I have a problem" and "I need to hire a human" is stretching out.

Layer that on top of an economy that has stayed genuinely uncertain, and you get buyers who freeze. Sitting on wallets. “Maybe I don't invest in this yet, because I don't know which way the wind blows.” I wrote about this recently: fear does not produce action, it produces paralysis, and most of the deals you lose aren't lost to a competitor.

Now here's the good news buried in that.

Interim solutions run out of road. If your client has a real problem that a human expert can actually solve, they will eventually hit the wall and come looking for a person. That day is coming for a lot of them.

The only question that matters is whether they can find you when it does.

The book

Which brings me to why I'm writing this now.

One of our crew members, Jimi Gibson, wrote a book called Uninvisible. Jimi is a former professional magician, a marketing rock star, and a coach for people getting on TED stages. He is also, conveniently, one of the outside experts we bring in to coach inside Misfits.

What he did in this book is what I wish more people did. He studied it.

He looked at 400 companies across five industries and interrogated AI systems about each one. The finding was not ambiguous. Companies where the owner was visible to AI were growing. Companies where the owner was invisible were declining, often by close to 30 percent.

Read that again, because it's not a marketing claim. It's a pattern in the data, and it points at something structural.

Two other things I appreciate about the book.

He says up front that this is not a tactics book. No templates to copy. No funnels to build. That matters to me, because I find most done-for-you tactical solutions to be garbage with a shelf life measured in weeks. Frameworks, best practices, and first principles are where the durable stuff lives, and that's what Jimi lays out.

And it's thin. I know what you're about to say, because I can hear it. “Stephen, I don't have time to read.” Look, the thing is tiny. You can finish it in a couple of hours and start applying it the same afternoon.

What to do

Get the book. Read the book. Then implement the book, which is the part everybody skips.

And if you want to go deeper, we're bringing Jimi back into Band of Misfits this fall to work through it in detail and give real recommendations to real member situations. You don't have to wait for that to start.

I don't enjoy changing my position in public. Nobody does. But I'd rather be useful than consistent, and the honest read of the market right now is that relationship-led growth plus findability beats either one alone.

Be visible to your customers, Misfit.

Profits + Peace ✌️

— Stephen