CMO of AI company: “[CEO of the same AI company] has a really unique perspective on AI.”

This was going to be harder than I thought.

I had just been hired to develop a “thought leadership” newsletter for the CEO of [AI company]. We had worked through the newsletter’s business objective (see last week’s email). Now it was time to ID the unfair advantage.

“Unique AI perspective” sounded good on paper, but my due diligence told me it wasn’t going to fly.

The CEO’s AI perspective was surface-level. Good enough for a pitch meeting. Not good enough for the real nerds they wanted to read this newsletter.

That’s not a knock against him. It made sense. He wasn’t the technical co-founder. He was the one selling the dream to investors.

So if we made his newsletter about AI, the industry would eat him (and the company) alive.

After 1:1s with him and a handful of his early employees, the newsletter’s unfair advantage started to surface: his connections. He had everyone who’s anyone in AI saved in his contacts.

His unfair advantage was his connections’ unique perspectives (not his). Probably not easy to hear, but I never said creating must-read newsletters wouldn’t ruffle a few feathers.

I’ve been in this game long enough to realize that unique perspectives are a lot like a**holes. Everyone has one, and they usually stink. Oh, and not all of them make for must-read newsletters.

Everyone thinks their perspective is unique, and everyone believes their voice is authentic. The problem? Readers don’t give a damn about your self-assessment or what your mom thinks.

You need something structural. Something your competition can't copy. The one thing only you or your company can provide in a newsletter.

This matters more than ever in the year of our lord 2026…

There’s no shortage of “good enough” newsletters. And the proliferation of AI has made everyone an “expert.”

So, what is it that you can do that (almost) no one else can?

Content isn’t the only advantage in the newsletter game, but I can tell you it’s a lot easier to poke holes in the operational and growth levers you think put you in a category of 1.

“Advantages” like a fat stack of opted-in emails or a huge social following help, but I’d caution against getting overly excited about either.

A handful of brands with huge email lists have approached me looking to build a media asset. And just because someone opted in for a webinar in 2022 doesn’t mean they want your CEO’s take on sustainability today.

It’s something that only you can deliver to a reader’s inbox.

And in the case of pretty much every successful newsletter, that unfair advantage falls into one of the following buckets…

You're in the room where it happens. That access is currency in the newsletter game.

Emily Sundberg knows the people New Yorkers want to know. And she'll be on the phone with them this afternoon if she wants to be. Seriously…

Of course, not all of us are email royalty (yet). Let’s say you're a VP of Sales at a fintech startup. Your weekly schedule includes emails, calls, and drinks with 20+ heads of revenue at other startups.

That means lots of talking shop (and hangovers): comparing notes on the tools and channels that are working (and those that aren’t) in 2026. That's the sort of access every other sales rep would love to eavesdrop on (via your paid weekly newsletter, of course).

Numbers, trends, or insights that literally don't exist anywhere else.

Ramp’s Leading Indicators taps into actual client spend (anonymized, of course) to shed light on trending stories.

“But Tyler, I don’t have the resources of a $32B Silicon Valley darling…”

Ok, let’s make this work for a recruiting firm that's placed a few hundred product managers at Series A-C companies over the last three years. You head up marketing. Launching a newsletter to keep prospective candidates warm is on your to-do list.

You might not have a 5-person data analytics team with degrees from Stanford, but you have salary data, equity data, time-to-hire data, and reasons-they-left sitting in your CRM (ok, maybe it’s an Excel workbook). Nobody else has that exact dataset.

What's in your spreadsheets, CRM, or client work that nobody else can see? And what story can you tell with it?

You've done the thing. At a level the reader hasn't. And you can prove it.

A founder who actually sold a company, writing about exits. A media buyer with $50M in spend writing about ad strategy.

I built Chief Newsletter Officer on receipts…

You can't ChatGPT your way into the learnings from a decade of f*ck-ups.

Operators talk themselves into believing they have a moat when what they actually have is an edge (a slight one at that).

So before you commit your unfair advantage to a strategy deck, ask yourself:

(Be honest.)

I think they call this defensibility in Silicon Valley.

If the answer is “yes,” congrats, you have a head start. Enjoy it while it lasts. It'll be a "newsletter hack" on LinkedIn by Q3.

If the answer is “no,” and you can articulate why not in concrete, operational terms, you might have found something real.

Back to the CEO from NICE TRY.

Once we stopped pretending he was the AI expert and named his real advantage (friendly reminder: access to every operator who actually is one), three things happened:

The CMO told me their boss had a “unique perspective on AI.” Turns out they had something SO MUCH better.

Most operators are sitting on the same kind of advantage.

Next week, we’ll get into the audience of one.

In the meantime, I’d love any and all feedback on the CNO. I promise you won’t hurt my feelings (seriously, I used to be on camera at Barstool Sports).

If you’re still jonesing for newsletter content (delivered via newsletter), go check out some of the best in the business…