Big Idea

The argument in one line.

A viral Substack article comes from studying proven structures with AI and then filling them with your own specific proof and point of view, not from copying a template or hoping for a lucky format.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

A creator or coach with an existing audience on Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter who wants to move followers onto an owned email list before a platform ban wipes out their reach.
Someone starting a Substack from zero who wants a repeatable process for finding a topic, structuring an outline, and actually finishing a draft instead of staring at a blank page.
A writer comfortable using an AI research tool as a swipe-file and outlining partner, not as a ghostwriter that produces finished paragraphs.

SKIP IF…

You want AI to write the finished article for you; the method here explicitly refuses to draft prose, only outlines and research.
You're not willing to save and search a personal content library; the workflow depends on having a swipe file and past highlights to pull from.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Short-form content burns attention but doesn't build a lasting brand or an owned audience, so the video argues every creator needs a long-form home, and Substack is the current best option because subscribers are emails, not followers you could lose overnight. The demonstrated process treats going viral as a skill, not luck: save five 'I wish I wrote that' posts into a swipe file, have an AI tool reverse-engineer one into its macro structure, hook, and line-level moves, then run an AI interview that pulls out the writer's own topic, proof, reader, and mechanism to build a matching outline. The AI never writes the article; the writer fills the structure with their own experience, then works in short daily sessions instead of one long sitting.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 03:32

01 · Cold open: why Substack beats short-form

States the case for long-form over short-form content, and for Substack specifically: subscribers are owned emails, not rented followers, and the platform's culture still rewards depth over clickbait.

03:32 – 06:17

02 · The Newsletter Studio AI + creator credibility

Introduces a custom AI research tool built for Substack writing, then establishes credibility with a growth history (337,000 subscribers) and a single article that reportedly hit roughly 210 million views on Twitter.

06:17 – 08:53

03 · Substack as 'YouTube for articles'

Frames Substack growth as depending on the same two levers as YouTube: a title/hook that earns the click, and a structure (headlines, pull quotes) that holds attention once someone is reading.

08:53 – 11:55

04 · Researching creators inside Eden

Demos the reader view, saved library, and Chrome extension for pulling a creator's own top-performing posts and highlights into a searchable second brain.

11:55 – 17:33

05 · Finding ideas: Discover feed, outliers, and the swipe file

Walks the Discover feed's outlier and breakout tabs, then builds a five-post swipe file of ideas worth studying, framed as apprentice-style imitation rather than copying.

17:33 – 23:11

06 · Reverse engineering a viral post

Runs a 'reverse engineer' AI prompt against a saved post to produce a document breaking down its macro structure, hook, line-level moves, and psychological tactics, then saves it to a breakdowns board.

23:11 – 26:39

07 · The outline interview: topic, proof, reader, mechanism

Runs an AI interview live, answering questions about topic, personal proof, target reader, and mechanism, to generate a structured outline for a demo newsletter about learning fast.

26:39 – 30:07

08 · Building the outline and drafting the newsletter

Shows the outline and draft open side by side in panes, plus using the library and 'deep synthesis' search to pull saved highlights and sources into the draft.

30:07 – 33:36

09 · Writing rhythm: cards, cadence, and discomfort

Describes a 30-to-60-minute daily writing cadence, using single-idea 'cards' to capture thoughts between sessions, and treats early writer's block as a normal, temporary part of the process.

33:36 – 34:41

10 · Publishing to Substack and wrap-up

Demos the publish tab scheduling a draft to Substack and X with a cover image, then closes with a link to the AI tool and a subscribe ask.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

Short-form content earns attention in 60-second bursts, but it rarely builds the kind of lasting brand that long-form writing does.
On Substack, followers are actually newsletter subscribers, meaning the creator owns their email and can leave the platform anytime without losing the audience.
Substack's culture skews anti-influencer for now, rewarding deep, critical thinking over the clickbait and cheap dopamine that dominate bigger platforms.
Any social platform trends toward addictive, low-value content as it scales, because that's what keeps its largest possible audience engaged.
One creator's article reportedly became the most-viewed article ever posted to Twitter, with roughly 210 million views, and is used as the case study for the whole video.
Writing a long-form article is really just stringing together a series of short, punchy, tweet-sized ideas in sequence.
Creativity is best understood as pairing two existing ideas together in a way they haven't been combined before, not inventing from nothing.
The historical model for skill acquisition is master and apprentice: emulate proven work until you develop the taste to be original on your own.
A swipe file of five 'I wish I wrote that' posts, ideally from outside your own platform, beats staring at a blank page for inspiration.
Smaller creators just starting to break out are often a better source of fresh ideas to study than the biggest names everyone else is already copying.
An AI interview that asks for your topic, proof, reader, and mechanism produces a usable outline faster than asking AI to write the article outright.
The best outlines still leave blanks for the writer's own specific experience; AI can build the frame, but it can't supply your proof.
Writing 30 to 60 minutes a day spread across a week produces better ideas than trying to write one newsletter in a single sitting.
The first newsletter or article anyone writes is usually one sentence followed by ten minutes of staring at the screen, and that discomfort is normal, not a sign of failure.

Takeaway

Study proven structures, then supply your own proof.

WHAT TO LEARN

A strong long-form article comes from studying five proven examples with AI, borrowing their structure, and then filling that frame with your own specific proof and point of view.

01Cold open: why Substack beats short-form

Short-form content built for 60-second attention spans is a weak foundation for a lasting personal brand, even though it can grow a following fast.
A newsletter subscriber is an email address you own, not a follower you're renting from a platform that can suspend or shut down your account.
Bigger platforms trend toward clickbait and cheap dopamine as they scale, because that's what keeps their largest possible audience engaged and addicted.

02The Newsletter Studio AI + creator credibility

A track record of one article generating roughly 210 million views is used as the credibility for a specific structural claim, not just general writing advice.
A single viral hit is treated as a case study to reverse-engineer later, not proof that any one tactic guarantees the same result again.

03Substack as 'YouTube for articles'

Growth on Substack is framed as depending on the same two levers as YouTube: a hook that earns the click, then a structure that holds attention once someone's reading.
Section headlines inside a newsletter should be written like YouTube titles, built to capture and hold attention rather than just label the content underneath them.
Pull quotes inside an article function the same way a strong visual moment does on video: they interrupt the scroll and re-earn attention mid-piece.

04Researching creators inside Eden

A saved library of highlights and past reading becomes a searchable second brain that gets pulled into an article while writing, instead of researched from scratch each time.
Looking at a single creator's own top-performing posts, filtered by likes, reveals the specific patterns that work for them, not just their average output.

05Finding ideas: Discover feed, outliers, and the swipe file

An 'outlier' is any post that performed meaningfully better than that same creator's typical content, which is a more useful signal than raw view count.
Smaller 'breakout' creators just starting to gain traction are a better place to find fresh ideas than the biggest names everyone else already copies.
A swipe file of five posts becomes genuinely useful once you notice the patterns across all five, not from studying any single one in isolation.
Imitating a structure while it's still unfamiliar is treated as the same apprentice-to-master process every skill is learned through, not a shortcut around originality.

06Reverse engineering a viral post

A structured 'reverse engineer' prompt breaks a chosen post into its macro structure, hook, line-level moves, and psychological tactics as a saved reference document.
Saving each breakdown to a dedicated board turns the exercise into a reusable library of proven structures instead of a one-off analysis read once and forgotten.
Borrowing a proven structure, the way a landing page borrows PAS or AIDA, is presented as the fastest way to learn long-form writing before you're skilled enough to freestyle it.

07The outline interview: topic, proof, reader, mechanism

An AI interview built around four questions, topic, proof, reader, and mechanism, produces a usable outline without ever asking the AI to draft actual sentences.
When you don't have an answer to one of the interview's questions, the fix is to have the AI keep asking follow-up questions rather than skip it.
The finished outline deliberately leaves blanks marked for the writer's own specific experience, because that proof is the one thing AI can't supply.

08Building the outline and drafting the newsletter

Writing works better with the outline open in a side pane next to the draft, so each section gets written against a visible plan instead of from memory.
Once an outline exists, the same AI can research current title structures and generate 10 to 20 headline variations built off the newsletter's actual big ideas.
A 'deep synthesis' search across a saved research library surfaces where different saved sources agree or disagree, which is a faster form of research than manual review.

09Writing rhythm: cards, cadence, and discomfort

Spreading 30 to 60 minutes of writing across several days produces better ideas than finishing one newsletter in a single sitting, because ideas keep arriving between sessions.
A single-idea 'card' captures a thought the moment it appears, on a walk or mid-scroll, so it isn't lost before the next writing session.
Staring at a blank page for ten minutes after one sentence is described as a normal part of every writer's first attempt, not a sign the process isn't working.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Swipe file: A saved collection of other people's high-performing posts or articles, kept for study and inspiration rather than direct copying.
Reverse engineering (content): Using AI or manual analysis to break a successful post down into its structure, hook, and persuasive techniques so the pattern can be studied and reused.
Notes (Substack): Substack's short-form post format, similar in length to a tweet, used to grow an audience toward the long-form newsletter.
MCP (Model Context Protocol): A connection standard that lets an AI assistant like Claude read live data from an outside tool, in this case a creator's saved research library.
Second brain: A personal, searchable archive of saved articles, highlights, and ideas used as an external memory and research source when writing.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

00:08toolEden (content brain / research tool) ↗

00:20productEden creator bootcamp ↗

04:07toolSubstack Newsletter Studio (custom AI) ↗

04:59link"How to Fix Your Entire Life in One Day" (referenced viral article, ~210M views)

15:49toolClaude workflow for Eden (MCP setup) ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

01:05

“If you are not creating long form content, so YouTube videos, podcasts, Substack articles, X, et cetera, you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot.”

blunt, personal-stakes framing of the long-form vs. short-form choice→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

17:33

“Creativity in a simple definition is pairing two things together that shouldn't necessarily be together or haven't been paired together before.”

standalone, quotable definition of creativity→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

32:17

“The people who stick through the suffering and the discomfort of not knowing what to write next are the ones that succeed ultimately.”

aspirational closer that applies to any creative skill, not just writing→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

metaphoranalogy

Welcome back to the Eden channel where we talk about social media growth, branding yourself in an irreplaceable way, and standing out from everyone on social media because everyone just blends in with everyone nowadays. Now I'm very excited to talk about Substack because Substack is one of those platforms that new creators are seeing a lot of success on.

and i work with and teach and help various creators inside of the eden bootcamp discord channel for those that are in the bootcamp and people seem to be having more success on substack and threads than other platforms and so i have been bullish on substack for quite a long time and for good reason first is that long form is just a better form of content short form content where people only spend 60 seconds if that watching you watching brain rock content isn't a great way to build a lasting brand you can definitely build a brand but personally i have a very firm belief that if you are not creating long form content so youtube videos podcasts substack articles xr et cetera, you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot.

Now, other reasons that Substack is a great platform, in my opinion, is that your followers on Substack aren't followers. They are newsletter subscribers. You quite literally get their email, meaning you're not locked into the platform.

You can take your follower or subscriber list and leave anytime you want. You cannot do that on any other platform. This is why everyone tells you to build an email list because your Instagram, your Twitter, your YouTube can get shut down.

any day and then your entire livelihood is gone the other thing about substack that i really like is that it rewards deep and critical thinkers who have multiple interests and the culture on substack is somewhat anti -influencer so all of the bad things that you hate about youtube or instagram all of the clickbait all of the attention hijacking and cheap dopamine kind of sort of exists on every social media platform but at least on substack there are some deep ideas there at least for now because What happens with any social media platform when it gets bigger and bigger and bigger?

It starts to conform to what people want and people want to waste their time and get addicted. And even if they don't say they want that, that's what their actions display. So we can't really be mad at that, but we can try to contribute to the deep thinking by maintaining our own mind and creating content that we want to see in the world.

The last thing I like about Substack is that it is both short form and long form. Of course, you have the newsletter audience, you have the articles that are long form, and then they have short form notes, which are kind of like tweets. or meta threads.

They're just little paragraph long posts. And that gives you an incredible way to grow your email list. And that's how most people are growing on Substack.

So in today's video, I'm going to show you how to write your first viral Substack article. And if you're new here, you need to understand that when I say your first viral Substack article, that doesn't guarantee that you're going to go viral. None of this stuff that anyone teaches or I teach is guaranteed.

But at minimum, it will make you a better article writer and it will teach you something new. And what you're going to learn today can be used for any type of social format. It can be used for writing Instagram Reels scripts, for writing YouTube scripts, for writing tweets, for writing anything.

Because we're about principles here. We're about understanding what makes good content work, not the viral formats that everyone's telling you to try because those don't matter, and not any of the trends or tactics that people just copy but don't learn anything or increase their skills so they can't sustain any of the growth that they had.

Now, before we get into it, there is one thing that I created for you, this Substack Newsletter Studio. And this comes with 11 reference documents in it. So what a custom AI is here is like a custom GPT.

So there is reference documents with guides on how to write the newsletter inside. And there is specific viral Substack newsletters that I have personally curated. So when you chat with this, it's able to access those newsletters and break down their structure and why they worked and tell you how it worked.

you can do is just use the link in the description, load this up, and then you can hit one of these starter prompts and just chat with this. See this as a way of learning how to write Substack newsletters or articles and for asking for guidance when you're actually writing your own, which we're going to go over the entire process.

Now, why should you trust me here? Because I am. Number one in philosophy on Substack for what that's worth.

I've grown to 337 ,000 newsletter subscribers over the lifetime of me being a creator. And for an email list, that's pretty good. Now, as a heads up and for transparency, I had previously built my newsletter to around 150 ,000 before I transferred that over to Substack.

But my newsletter has grown substantially more since I've been on Substack and a lot faster simply because of the nature of the platform and because I've gotten better at actually creating the newsletters. And so as you can see, I've written a few viral articles of my own.

So how to articulate yourself intelligently and how to fix your entire life in one day. And for those that know what this article is, this is the article that I posted to Twitter and it is the most viewed article in Twitter history. It has around 210 million views, I believe.

And we're going to have another video where I break down exactly how I wrote it and not just how have AI break it down, but me actually go through my decision making and how I outlined it and how I went about structuring the newsletter because AI can't give you the little micro decisions I made in my head as I went about writing it.

Now, I personally like to think of Substack as the YouTube for articles and newsletters, right? For written long form because To me, that's how the algorithm kind of feels.

It feels very similar to growing on YouTube when you're posting Substack articles. And if you understand YouTube, you understand that a lot of the growth comes down to the title and then the hook. So the introduction of the newsletter itself and then how the actual newsletter is structured.

So what are the sections? What are the key points? Are the headlines in the newsletters structured like YouTube titles are so that they capture?

and hold attention? And how are you holding attention beyond that? Are you including pull quotes like this?

How are you structuring each part of the newsletter? Are you including? big ideas there as well a little tip is that i like to think of writing the newsletter itself as stringing a bunch of tweets together right i started on twitter and i got very good at writing short and punchy paragraphs or tweets and condensing one big idea into a heavy hitting post so i kind of realized okay well if i consider uh long form article or YouTube video, just me stringing together all of these hard hitting ideas and structuring my sentences in a way that people don't want to stop reading, then I can do really well with long form content.

And of course, that takes a lot of practice, but that's how we're going to go about thinking about this. Now in Eden, if you aren't familiar with this view, this is the reader view. So whether you want to write sub stack articles or not, you can save a link inside of Eden and then open it in the reader view on desktop or on your phone and then you can highlight here click the color or just highlight it and it will show up as a highlight in your library you can also connect your x bookmarks your instagram saves your sub stack saves you can just paste links you can save ideas it's a complete second brain and we auto tag and categorize everything for you which we'll go over the importance of in a bit because that is extremely helpful when you're actually doing research for the article that you're writing how are you going to get your unique ideas in the article itself well great way to do it is while you're writing you ask the chat to look for novel connections and relations in your entire library of content that you've saved that would fit inside of the article.

It's a better way of doing research. Now obviously I can't go over all of the little nuances of writing every single sentence of an article so I want to teach you something better. I want to teach you how to figure that out for yourself and I want to teach you how to structure the newsletter or the article because that's the main thing that matters.

I want to teach you how to come up with some kind of viral topic or headline so the title is really good and people want to click it. And then how to create your first outline that is very effective so you have a starting point.

We're not going to have AI write this for you, obviously. That's not what we're about here and that doesn't really work. But AI is incredible for research and understanding what works.

So the first thing we need to do is find a topic to write about or think of a topic to write about. If you don't have a topic tree already or a brand strategy, or you just don't know what you want to talk about, understand that the videos that we're creating on this Eden channel kind of tie into each other. And this one right here is pretty foundational.

So my entire social media strategy for the next 90 days, and I give you a custom AI that you can run through that spits out a brand strategy and topic tree and short form topics you can write about. And then you can iterate from there. It's not going to be perfect the first time around, but it gives.

you a ton of clarity on what you should actually be posting online. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go to the discover feed and what the discover feed is is it surfaces all outlier content across all different platforms and what an outlier is is just a piece of content that did better than their average content.

So this video from Ali Abdaal did 33 times better than their typical post. So what we can assume from that is that this is a very good idea and a very good structure for the title and it is something worth imitating or emulating and note that i'm not saying copy directly here i am saying imitating or emulating because that is how you learn people get all up in arms about this about oh you should just be original or be authentic and i really want you to take a step back and question that because how do you actually learn effectively it's definitely not from schools it's not from memorization how did they learn in the past there was a master or a mentor like Aristotle, and then there was the apprentice who emulates the master until they develop the skill and taste necessary to be creative and be original on their own.

Because how can you do something effectively without learning it? And I would much rather you study how great content is written and reverse engineer it and break it down than just stick your head in a book or watch endless tutorials all day because that's not going to help you. That's just the What we have here are things that have been proven.

to work so what i want you to do is i want you to create a swipe file board where we're going to save five ideas and the ideas that we're trying to save are five damn i wish i wrote that ideas and it doesn't matter which platform it comes from it's actually ideal if it doesn't come from substack because we're just looking for an idea we're looking for an idea to write about and then after that we can understand and research the title structures or how to pack it the article that we write so that it is more likely to go viral or to do well.

And now one thing here, ignore this. I know this looks ugly. This isn't.

available to you right now but we're creating an ads tab and a brands tab so you won't see these in yours yet but this is more so for marketers who want to study top performing ads rather than top performing content so just ignore this i know that the spacing looks ugly i don't like it either but this isn't the final form this is only on my account so what you're going to do is you're going to play around with the filters here you're going to play around with these tabs and specifically i would recommend you look at the breakouts tab and what the breakout tab is, is it's smaller creators who are going viral right now.

Because frankly, everyone in the creator space tends to just copy the top creators with a ton of followers. That's naturally who people are going to flock towards. So they're going to look at the Ali Abdaal's or the Alex Hormozy's.

But what you're trying to look at are the ideas that are just now picking up so you can have a competitive advantage. And so what you're going to do is you're going to look for five great ideas. And this can come from the discover page or it can come from when you're scrolling on social media and you see a really good idea you're just going to hit save or share on that and then you can find the eden app icon in there if you download the eden mobile app from test flight right now until it's approved for the app store and then that will save to your border library but what you can do is just go like this hit the save button click save post to board and then we're going to create a new board here and you can press command b if you want it to be fast and i'm just going to name this substack swipe file enter and then that shows up here substack swipe file you can see it here and if i go to the board boom the post is right here so you're going to save five of these then they're going to be on the board so you can go here for inspiration and you can continue to save more than five but what we're trying to do here and what people have done throughout time this is just what marketers do is you build an inspiration board of ideas so that you start to develop pattern recognition of what looks good and what works in terms of the title in terms of the thumb

thumbnail in terms of all of that stuff. So then that's when you get creative. You don't just copy or steal one.

You look at them all and then you merge them all together. Right. Creativity in a simple definition is pairing two things together that shouldn't necessarily be together or haven't been paired together before.

Now, there are two other ways that you can find ideas. There is in the discover tab. There's the creators tab.

And then I can search for top creators here. So let's look at my account as an example and I can filter. by top liked creators do not understand what kind of superpower this is.

And this is one of the things that helped me the most at the start of my social media journey. I didn't have something like Eden, but there was like Chrome extensions, like really janky Chrome extensions back then, where on Twitter, I would open it in the sidebar and it would show me the top content of the profile that I'm on.

Our Chrome extension actually does that as well. So if you use the Eden Chrome extension, you can go to a creator's profile on any platform, open the sidebar in the. extension and then see all their top posts while you're on their profile but you can see this is just instant access to all the top one percent posts that have been proven to work so we're going to save one more of these to a board save post to board substack swipe file save and if you don't know what creators you like or what creators are in your niche that leads us to the third way to find ideas to write about of course you can just type in the search bar here a specific niche like productivity or you can click productivity here or self -improvement or business so on and so forth but the next way to find ideas is inside of the chat so the eden chat can search across the entire discover feed and all creators and you can also do this from the mcp and speaking of that i will leave a link to this claude workflow in the description which essentially creates a weekly strategy for you and shows you the top ideas in your niche because when you connect claude to eden

that allows Claude to finally be able to see trending posts and what's performing and access social media data in general. And all you do to set this up is you click copy the setup prompt, paste that into Claude, specifically Claude code. Don't be afraid of Claude code.

Just go into Claude, click the code tab, paste this in. And I know it says code, but I would recommend doing all of your work in there. And once you paste it in, it'll just tell you what to do.

You answer a few questions and then it will research and give you very suited to. you and your niche and your brand strategy. But another thing you can do is just ask the chat, hey, what are top performing ideas based on productivity or health or nutrition?

Or what are the most top performing Substack articles right now? So that's all I want you to do right now is find five ideas that you wish you wrote. And it doesn't even have to be from here.

It can be from a book. It can be something that came to your mind. It can be an experience in your life.

Anything. You just need an idea to start with. And then you save it to the swipe file.

so that you have the idea here. Now this is where we actually start doing something useful right it's of course useful to have inspiration but what you're going to do now is you're going to click this boost in chat icon this lightning bolt icon and what's here are some preset prompts and we're going to reverse engineer why this post worked and actually we're going to do it on this one because we'll break this down in another video but you're going to click reverse engineer now you can just ask the chat you can paste the link to this post in the chat or you can hit chat with this post and then you can ask it to break it down but obviously why wouldn't you use a prompt that is just made for this and breaks it down extremely well so we're going to hit reverse engineer the chat's going to open and then it's going to start analyzing this substack post and break it down for us as a document so as you can see it is breaking it down right now for us as a document and what i want you to do once this is done is you're going to create a new board and you're going to save it to that board and you're going to title the board just

just content breakdowns for now. You can get more specific for like sub stack breakdowns or X posts or Instagram real breakdowns, but we're just going to title it breakdowns for now. So we're going to do that.

We're going to hit plus. we're going to hit new board again and then just name it content breakdowns hit enter and then you can see that that board appeared here now why are we doing this why are we actually saving this document well if i open the document you can see that it is an incredible breakdown of a high performing structure right it has the macro breakdown and i would highly recommend highly recommend doing this with multiple posts and just reading the breakdown because that's like creating your own course for learning how to write content.

And I would argue that it is much better than really any course you could take aside from the Eden bootcamp link in the description, but it goes extremely deep. It breaks down the macro, the structure, each beat. It breaks down the hook, the line level moves, exactly why the newsletter worked.

focused on principles. Here's the psychological tactics, right? So what this does is it creates a layer between what we're creating and what they created in terms of their ideas so that we can take the structure, a high -performing structure.

That's what you do, right? When you're writing a landing page, you use a copywriting structure like PAS or AIDA, which is problem, amplify, solution, or attention, interest, desire, outcome, or action instead of outcome, sorry. But that is the best way to start writing long form is you use a structure or a framework and once you've used enough structures or frameworks you understand how to write content at that point and then you don't need one.

It's like using training wheels to ride a bike and then you take them off when you can ride the bike and then you can do so much more with it. That's skill acquisition in general. So I would recommend that you read through this but the reason that we save this to a board is then we can reuse it.

over and over again if we want to and if it worked for us and the more content breakdowns you have in here the more flexible you can get so now what i'm going to do is just make this chat full screen and we're going to do something interesting next i'm going to type something in here so what i wrote here is i want you to interview me for all the context you need to create an outline with my own topics ideas key points and point of view the goal is to create a bullet outline with the structure and principles from the breakdown we just did I do not want you to write the newsletter for me.

And the reason we're doing this is because I want to show you the entire writing process. So I'm going to hit enter. And then it asks me a few questions.

It asks for the topic. So what's the specific transformation or change you're writing about? What is your proof?

So what's the personal before and after? What's your reader? So who are you writing to?

What's the mechanism? So the two to three things you now believe about this topic that most people get wrong. And then your newsletter.

What's it called? Who subscribes? That's probably because in the breakdown, the person said, hey, welcome to this newsletter or something like that.

But it's also useful to understand your voice here, which is probably what it's trying to do as well. Now, the thing here is that it's asking for a specific topic that aligns with the topic of that newsletter that we just broke down. So you can change your blank in blank months.

And that's great. You can do that if you want to. You can change your body.

in three months whatever your expertise is you can just plug it in here or you don't have to abide by what the ai says if you have an idea that you want to talk about and you just want to use the structure then you can say that you're allowed to say something different so i'm going to fill these out okay so i filled it out and i said the topic i want to write about is how to learn anything fast and i said we can research other title structures later as well and that's a tip here is you don't have to confine yourself to one title just yet after the outline is ready, after you know what's the key points and the ideas that are actually going to go into the outline.

And even once you write the newsletter yourself, then you can take that newsletter outline, put it in the Eden chat or in the MCP inside of Claude and tell it to research substack title structures that are doing well right now and then give you 10 to 20 variations of titles based on the big ideas from your newsletter. And then your newsletter looks completely different.

from the one that we just broke down previously. And it's still much more proven to potentially go viral than anything you were to write just from scratch or not researching. Because researching is a very important part of the writing or social media process.

The second answer is I am a very fast learner. I was able to create After Effects animations in a week for a YouTube video. This allowed me to stand out from other people, creating content and build a unique brand.

I was just coming up with something here, an example. But with these, I was very short. You can be as long as you want.

And I would actually recommend that. short because this is a tutorial. Now number three for my reader I am writing to the ambitious 20 year old who knows they're meant for more but doesn't know what they want to do just yet.

For number four the mechanism it's don't start learning start the project first and then do what you can to make progress and if you get stuck then you go and research that specifically. And then number five my newsletter is called future proof I write in a big brother style and I'm kind of pithy and blunt and I don't really tolerate excuses and so let's see what this spits out and if it's it's out an outline or ask me more questions.

And if you want, if you really want to get into detail here after this, after you say this, you can say, if you have more questions for me, please ask them. All right. And it actually did just that.

It said, let me push on the gaps. So the ultimatum, Kylie, the author of the other newsletter was changed today or be stuck in December. What's the cost of not learning fast for your reader?

The second thing, the principles beyond the mechanism, you said, start the project first, blah, blah, blah. That's one. One, what are the other one to two beliefs about learning that you hold that most people get wrong?

OK, the hard thing. Kylie had her monthly challenge, one deliberately uncomfortable thing. What's the equivalent here?

And then you're before you said you learned After Effects in a week. got it i'll fill these out too okay so i answered these and i said the ultimatum is that everyone passes you up and you are much slower at achieving your goals so you may get demotivated and quit for the second question i feel like anyone can learn enough to be useful in anything in two weeks and i believe that learning is doing not memorization most people get stuck in tutorial hell number three help me come up with one by asking me questions and that's for like the monthly challenge part that it's recommending that i have so When this is asking you questions, if you don't have an answer, just have it ask you more questions to get it out of you, right?

You don't just have to give up. That's the beautiful thing about AI is that you can use it to ask you questions, which makes you think deeper about it. And then for number four, so my before state of the transformation that we're trying to get across in the article.

Yes, I bought almost 30 courses on Udemy and had nothing to show for it at the end. So let's hit send again. All right, so it's asking me questions about the chat.

or the hard thing that we should challenge the readers to do. So it's asking useful questions here. What was the first project that allowed me to break out of tutorial hell?

What was the resistance and what was the container? And just for the sake of time, so we don't have to keep doing this, I'm going to tell it to skip this and just create the newsletter outline with what it has. All right.

And now it is creating the outline for us. And this is where things get pretty fun. This is where the writing process actually comes into play, because what we're doing right now is we're getting a soft.

structure so we have clarity on what to write about but then when it comes to filling it with our own ideas and other things like that That's where the fun stuff comes into play. All right, so it gave us our outline and it saved it in our library.

That's where everything in Eden gets saved. You don't even have to pay attention to things there. It just allows you to find this later if you need it.

But the thing that I like about this is it marked a few spots where I'll need to supply specifics from my own experience, right? It's not just filling in the blanks. It's not just making things up because it understands that I'm still going to write the newsletter itself and that this is just a framework we can follow.

So what we're going to do here is create another book. again, but this is going to be like a project board. What I like to do is I have my newsletters in a folder called newsletter, and then I have months.

I have the folders in months and then I have a board for the newsletter that I write every week. So we're going to create a board but if you want to structure your workspace like this with newsletter and then the month that you're writing in so you can easily find these if you need to then you can do that. But let's save the board and then I like to name the newsletter about whatever the topic is.

So how to learn anything fast. add that and now we have the board here now what you're going to do you have the outline so that's great but we need an actual newsletter draft and we need a few other things so i'm going to right click and hit create document or you can just hit d or you can click the plus button down here and then create a document from here that's going to pop up i'm going to double click into here and i'm going to title it newsletter how to learn anything fast.

And the reason I like to name it something like this is because if I ever want to chat with it or search for it and find it really quick and I know it's a newsletter, then I can just type newsletter colon and then all of my newsletters show in the chat or the search and then how to learn anything fast. I know that's the newsletter, so I can just type in how and find it really quick.

If I name it something that isn't findable, then it's going to be hard to find later. And this is where you're going to actually write the newsletter. So there are a few things you can do here, right?

This is kind of the writing process inside of Eden. So I can open the board in a pane by hitting this open in pane icon. And this is on anything in the sidebar inside of Eden.

And when you click on that, it opens the actual board inside of a pane like this. So if you have other ideas or saved social posts or anything inside of here, I can quickly just open this. And so now I can write with my outline alongside it so I can just click.

I can look at what comes first in my outline. I can write the first sentence, then the next, then the next. And when I have a question, then we can go to the chat button here, open the AI chat, and now I can ask.

the question if i want to test an idea or if i need to research something like i have a question about the renaissance era or leonardo da vinci that i don't know then i can treat this like a google search and i have it open right where i'm writing so i can get the information and then continue writing without writer's block now inside of eden the cool thing is that whatever you open in a pane opens in a little tab here so i can switch between these pretty quick or i can just hit option one or two as i'm writing so that i can switch between them so in my eyes that's a much better writing process or writing workflow than having 10 different tabs open now the other thing that you can do in the writing process and the reason i'm saying this if you don't understand the writing process or haven't done it yet this can serve as inspiration but what you typically do as a writer is when you are writing you tend to look at your past ideas and your notes and your highlights inside of books and everything like

that. So I can open the library. in a pane here and then i can filter by whatever i want i can filter by the highlights and you can save kindle highlights inside of here you can connect to readwise you can save your x bookmarks so if you remember seeing a tweet that related to how to learn anything fast and you want to embed the tweet inside of here or add a block quote of the tweet to increase readability and throw a good idea inside of your newsletter then you can do that or since we auto tag and embed and add connections between anything that you add into the library, then you can just search for it right here.

Another thing is if you know what book or source it came from, you can look for that here and quickly find it. But of course, related to that, one other tip is that inside of the chat, you can ask to find ideas on a specific topic inside of your library or your workspace. Or you can hit this button right here for deep research and hit deep synthesis.

And then that will turn this on. And you can see the little placeholder that says, what have I saved about topic? Find where my sources.

agree or disagree. So if you continuously fill up your library with unique ideas, then you can find and research unique ones to put inside of your newsletter. And that's what makes your newsletter unique.

And that's how you kind of avoid copying one person. Because again, creativity is mashing two things together to create something new. So what if you mash 10 things together in one newsletter, then that's extremely unique.

And of course, cite your sources where you need to. And when I say cite your sources, you can just say, oh, this person said this or have a quote inside of there.

Now, the last tip I'll give is that when I'm personally writing a newsletter, I like to only write for 30 to 60 minutes a day spread throughout the week because I post one newsletter a week and I know that I'm not going to be able to write it all at once. I know that the best ideas come to me when I give myself a week to munch on it and think and have more ideas come to me.

I write one section and just by writing that one section, when I go on a walk or when I'm reading a book, or when I'm scrolling social media, then it just seems like the perfect idea always sticks out. And then I can save that to this board inside of Eden so that I have it here open when it's ready to write, when I'm ready to write the next morning.

So this board with only two documents should ideally turn into a board with maybe eight to 10 social posts, ideas, things like that. Now, one thing inside of Eden is that there's something called a card. So you can press C or hit create card.

So inside of a card, I can just type down the idea here. And what a card is, is it's just a little place for one idea, right? You don't need an entire document or an entire note just to jot down one idea.

You need a card, which is like an atomic note in a sense. So when you have ideas on a walk or just when you're going about your day, then open your phone or run to your computer and just jot down the idea inside of a card in your board. so that you can reference it later.

You can actually see that I did this here in my library today. So down here, after all the stuff that we saved, I have this card here for the newsletter that I'm writing this week. I just turned on the voice transcription and just put my idea inside of here so that I have it ready for tomorrow when I go to write.

Now, as I mentioned, I'm not going to go into the intricacies of how to write every single sentence of the newsletter. You kind of just follow the outline. You use the training wheels when you're writing your first newsletter and you're going to struggle.

You're going to struggle a lot. I promise you that the first time that I wrote a newsletter or an article, I wrote like one sentence. And then I just didn't know what to write.

And I sat there for 10 minutes just staring at the screen. But that's because you don't have the writer's mind yet. Your mind hasn't made the connections that allow you to have ideas continuously flowing to you.

And you kind of have to sit through the discomfort until that comes to you. And as with any skill. What do you expect when you first start out?

Do you expect to be an expert? Do you expect to be really good at it? No, you get good at it over time.

And the people who stick through the suffering and the discomfort of not knowing what to write next are the ones that succeed ultimately. But the structure and the frameworks and the principles that we went over puts you on such a much better foot than just starting from scratch, obviously. So once you actually stick it through.

and you have the full newsletter what you can do at this point is inside of the publish tab you're able to schedule to substack if you want to right you can add the cover image you can add the article title you can also add this from documents so i can add the specific newsletter here how to learn anything fast but that document has no body so obviously We can't really add that because there's nothing inside of it.

But once there's something inside of it, then it will populate here. And then when you add a cover image here, it will be able to crop it for both an X article and the Substack article. And then in the Substack specific view, that's how the editor, that's how the scheduler works here is there's the shared view, which is just the overall post.

And then you can make tweaks for each platform. And then you can open it in Substack to just post it from there. You can add.

the substack settings that or on substack when you post an article and then you can go about it that way and it all works and then inside of here too you can connect your other social accounts to see your analytics and a lot of other fun things that will probably come in a future video so i hope that was helpful again the link to the substack newsletter studio custom ai is in the description and of course all of this was done in eden if you want to use it as a place to research create and schedule or just a place to save ideas inspiration on boards so that is all i have for you today subscribe if you want to see future videos on more tutorials how to grow on certain social media platforms and of course the x article breakdown that i'm going to do on how i wrote that but until then i'll see you in the next video thank you for watching

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

The pitch opens on a blunt claim: short-form content might grow a following, but skipping long-form writing is described as shooting yourself in the foot. What follows is a full screen-capture of the actual research-to-outline process, not just the theory behind it.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

11:55list

The 5-Idea Swipe File

Save 5 posts you wish you'd written
Prefer ideas from outside your own platform
Use Discover, Breakouts, or Creators tabs to find them
Study the pattern across all 5 before writing your own

A small, deliberately curated collection of proven posts used as raw material for pattern recognition rather than direct copying.

Steal forany content research process, not just Substack

23:11model

The Outline Interview

Topic — the transformation you're writing about
Proof — your personal before and after
Reader — who you're writing to
Mechanism — the 2-3 things people get wrong
Newsletter identity — name, subscriber, voice

A four-question AI interview that extracts the writer's own specific material and maps it onto a proven structure, producing an outline instead of finished prose.

Steal forany landing page, script, or article that needs a strong point of view fast

24:00acronym