One of my favourite things to do is walk my puppy in the sun.

But I hate typing when I’m walking - I’m much more of a ‘walk and talk’ type of guy (I often have walking meetings with clients).

Problem is, iPhone voice notes are rubbish, and each app has a different ‘mic’ tool (also rubbish).

Much more enjoyable using Wispr Flow. I dictate when my mind is fresh (and it doesn’t ruin my walk).

Wispr Flow runs on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Speak your follow-ups, action items, and replies on the go. Get clean, formatted text in any app. 4x faster than typing with your thumbs. Start flowing free.

I’m rubbish at consistency.

I like to think I have good ideas (which I often then doubt).

But often it’s not just about ‘having good ideas’, it’s about knowing where to look for them.

Which — by the way — is also no easy feat.

(I manually typed those em dashes by the way so don’t come after me with your pitch forks - Option + Shift + ‘-’ on your Mac if you want the shortcut.)

Your life is split between Google Docs, Notion pages, meeting transcripts, e-mails. And - if you still live in the dark ages - hand written notes gasps.

And what’s worse, you know how much good stuff is in there.

Ideas you could monetise. Content you could repurpose online or use in a presentation. The really good analysis you did that’ll help your work. The systems you stole from that really good newsletter by Adam Shilton that you accidentally archived ;).

Ryan Holiday writes books off 10,000+ index cards. James Clear drafted Atomic Habits out of one 600-page Google Doc.

The volume’s not the problem, the search mechanism is.

AI doesn’t help either.

So now, on top of your virtual pile of document garbage.

You have your virtual pile of AI garbage too.

Well, I’ll tell you how you can sort this so you can start dropping those knowledge bombs all day long.

But, before, a quick aside…

I moved into the house I’m typing in right now in November 2021.

My youngest was barely 6 months.

And we had that much stuff, that we had to bribe the removal company to help us pack (50% of the loft was still loose by the time they arrived).

Now, 54 months later — despite last weekends garage cull savagery (oops, did it again, soz) — 50% of the garage is still in black bin bags.

And you know what’s impossible?

Seeing what’s inside a black bin back without having to empty the entire sodding contents of it.

No wonder you give up.

But this is what you do with your digital garage as well.

You create documents, put them in folder where you can’t remember where it is, or why you even created it.

Plus, you’ve a ChatGPT search history that’s so disorganised, searching for that chat where you had ‘those really good ideas’ becomes nigh on impossible.

So how do you fix the black bag problem?

Well. You stop searching them yourself altogether.

My biggest client Nicolas Boucher has 3.4M+ followers globally, and has just passed 200k engaged subscribers (202.9k to be precise).

I should know, part of my work is supporting the newsletter copy and strategy.

But getting to 200k subs doesn’t happen by accident.

You’ll see from the image below, the twice weekly newsletter is only one part of this massive operation.

On top of this there’s 20-30 pieces of content.

Per day!

Coming from someone who struggles to get a LinkedIn post out a day and 1 newsletter out a week, this is incomprehensible.

But, pulling back the curtain, it’s actually not that difficult to understand how.

This is what I refer to as ‘compounding knowledge’

I don’t have Nicolas exact LinkedIn posting date but I’m guessing it’s at least 4 years.

(which is still a short amount of time for such bonkers growth)

It starts as posting on LinkedIn once per day.

It evolves into training workshops with meeting transcripts.

It continues as podcast appearances and brand partnership masterclasses.

Then a community of 2,765 members with articles and even more content.

Jason Lemkin did the same thing for SaaStr. 4,400 answers on Quora, 66M views, all eventually becoming the backbone of the SaaStr blog.

But, it’s one thing for you to have your knowledge to compound.

It’s another thing entirely for you to be able to withdraw from that bank of knowledge.

Especially if it’s all in virtual black bin bags.

So, what did we do?

Turned the bin bags into transparent files.

Got something else to trawl through them.

“NIKI: Nicolas’ Intelligent Knowledge Information”

It started with the hard job of getting all of the files in a central location in Google Drive, segmented by YouTube Scripts, Articles, Masterclass Transcripts etc.

Although, this is probably something you could get Claude Cowork to help you with now.

Then we set an automation specialists on the case.

(you don’t want to manually copy Zoom transcripts to folders every day).

In short:

Now it’s just a case of asking:

“Give me some content ideas on [topics] inspired by masterclass transcripts”

“What YouTube videos have we produced recently on Claude that we can make into shorts”

If you wanted to do a mini-version of this today, I’d just use Claude, and enable connectors to your apps.

Outside of my work with Nicolas I connect Claude to:

This is nowhere near as precise as NIKI.

And it’ll never be able to trawl through the same volume of data as NIKI.

But for a simple:

“What gold nugget insights did I drop on client calls this week” type query it works pretty ok.

Build a knowledge database

Build an automation to keep it up to date

Build a way to search it quickly and accurately

When you make capturing your knowledge effortless.

Your ideas will become effortless too.

That’s all for this week folks,

Until next time

Adam

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P.S - Want us to build you a knowledge management system like NIKI? Reply and let me know.

P.P.S - 3 extra goodies for you:

1. Claude for e-mail subject lines:

How I get 52.98%+ opens on a newsletter to 190k subs here

2. Turn followers into brand partnerships (without relying on agencies)

5 day e-mail course on how I've delivered $500k+ in 6-months for influencers here

3. Resource vault

Everything else I've produced over the past 3 years here.