You're the only input that matters. And here's what I mean. If you're a year or two into building something as a creator, you've probably got the output side handled. The funnels exist, the thumbnails are clean, you publish on schedule, you have maybe a small audience, the list is growing, et cetera, et cetera.
And you're waiting for the thing to finally catch, though, that breakthrough that all the effort is supposed to buy, and it's not catching. So you optimize harder, whatever that means, because that's the generic advice. Better tools, tighter funnel, more volume equals a creator business. But every bit of that lives downstream of the one input it all shares.
That's you. And almost nobody works on that one
So AI made it trivial to mass produce content. So the person feeding the machine matters even more than it ever has, not less. And by the end, you'll know what end of the machine you've been overworking and the one that you're ignoring
[00:01:16] 2. Title Payoff
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You're the only input that matters.
Everything that you make, the video, the launch, the number, the funnel is downstream of you
[00:01:25] 3. Show Intro (Drop-In — Do Not Record)
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If you've come from a previously successful career and now you are a year or three or five into your creative career and the breakthroughs are not showing up, this show is for you. Input/Output runs on one idea: You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the output follows.
I'm Shawn Buttner, and let's get into it
[00:01:52] 4. Input — The Creator Is the Ultimate Input
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All right, so each episode we have a section called the input, and the input is everything a creator does that kicks off the system: gathering, evaluating, curating, processing in order to later present. So it's also the character and values of the creator, how you show up when no one's looking, how you show up for other people and the people in your life, how you show up for your audience, how you are showing up for your community.
And it's also a part of who inspires you to share those values. As a coach, I often love to pick apart where people get their influence from because one, it tells you a lot about the person, and it also is a gateway into seeing what they value. So most common people that are inspirations to others are parents, teachers, important mentors, and so often it's one particular relationship that has a very profound influence over people.
So if you can understand that, you can understand the person. If you understand the person, you can understand what they create. If you can understand yourself and that about yourself, you can understand what you create. It's these types of self-reflection and self-discovery that helps you process and refine your ideas or stories and is a big part of your creative DNA.
These are all bits of the person that go into the process and system that creates content, audience, sales, and everything. That DNA flows downstream, and when you have it clearly defined, it's very easy to put that into a workflow or to share it with a team executing for you or to keep the tools that you lead honest.
If you get any of these inputs wrong, nothing you can do downstream can save it, right? It's much more difficult to change a bad premise of a show when you're already 100 episodes in than it is to think through it ahead of it. It's very difficult to go through and find and edit structural things in an article you're writing i- after it's already done and published versus in the brainstorming phase.
[00:04:41] 5. Signal — The Work That Carries It
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Now, each episode also has the signal, and this is the work that carries it. So if you think of the input being like a songwriter, the signal is the other band members, the musical instruments, all of the processing and editing and producing that goes into making a song for the next step, which is the output, which is the song on the radio.
So the signal carries the work, and the work happens after the input. So you get out and put something into the world. So again Signal isn't one fixed thing. It can, again, be a team, your personal standard operating procedures, could be AI workflows or automations you've set up, and this part generally is pretty easy.
You know, as another example, in coding, the actual coding part is the easy part. It's getting the process and steps correct ahead of time so you know what you need to accomplish with the code, that's the hard part. So that's why we talk about the signal, and that's how that shows up. Finally, we have the output.
[00:06:01] 6. Output (+ Where AI Fits) — Amplification, Not Origination
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output is not origination, it's the amplification of the signal and the inputs, and ultimately it's what the world experiences from creators. Uh, a lot of times we talk about AI throughout this process because it amplifies things, and it's making a lot of those busy work tasks easier, and so that's why it's top of mind.
But without a defined creator going into the AI workflows, into teams, into your standard operating procedures, into that clear vision of what you're trying to make, you get generic output, whether it's AI or anything else. But the thing to keep in mind with AI in particular is it's tugging towards its own biases.
The old rule of content is that 80% is good enough, right? You know, to prevent you from perfectionism and from endlessly refining. But here we can produce a lot more scale with tools like Claude or ChatGPT, so that 80% really hurts you. That 80% of not putting yourself into a piece of content or 80% of the quality you think it needs in every piece compounds into a huge drift over time.
So we need to be honest about your vision and how you wanna show up so the AI drift doesn't happen, and that's the timing argument, and that's why this show is existing now
[00:07:41] 7. Mid CTA — Issue #7
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And real quick, if you're enjoying this, I'm gonna let you know that I also have a newsletter called The Output, which is the other half of this episode, which is the story of why I killed a show that was working on purpose.
This episode is the new premise and result of all that work, but that issue is how I got here. If you're interested in that, you can go to shawnbuttner.com/joinus, Let's get back into it
[00:08:06] 8. Why This Show Is Different / Who It's For
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All right, so let's talk about how input/output is different and who it's for. So everything, in my belief, is an information system, especially if you run a creator or content-forward business. Most creators and marketing shows skip the part where you shape yourself, your voice, how you work, how you show up for yourself, others in your community, the goals that you have, and other shows just kinda touch on it.
For example, Creator Science with Jay Clouse has a, an episode titled, uh, I think it's episode 191, "Breaking Down My "$60,723 Product Launch." So Jay's Creator HQ launch was the best he had ever experienced in his business. He had 286 buyers, I think he said at the time, over $60,000 in sales, beat his previous best by day two of the launch.
So by any means, a highly successful thing that he did, and he still felt bad about it because he had a huge expectation of how the launch was gonna go and how much he was gonna make, and so his goal was not met. And the big learning there is he wished he would've celebrated the small wins leading up to it.
If, hitting that milestone of PR for the business was something he had clocked in the input to celebrate, he would've felt a lot different about the launch. And I think this is that inner part of the creator that we can really talk about and focus on to help us get better results, so that when you have the best launch in your business like Jay, you feel excited and stoked and happy about it, and not weirdly like, "It's the best, but I didn't make my goal."
So that's the whole point of Input Output. Uh, if you've ever thought, "If only I had shown up differently for my creative business, if I, I would've gotten a different outcome," that's this show. And again, it's-- this is for creators who have lots of ideas who need to process and a system to sort through them, or people aspiring to greater impact through their work and creative business.
We're not for people who only want hype to only grow sales or grow their audience and not have the heart and humanity and substance underneath it
[00:10:38] 9. Close — Journey With Me
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You know, and to make the work better, we need to grow as creators and as people. And it's not just chasing sales and audience, which are important, but it's that internal growth as part of the process.
[00:10:55] 10. Wrap-Up
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So if this is speaking to you, I'd love for you to subscribe or leave a comment on Apple Podcasts. It helps the show.
And I love to hear from you. I read everything, and I want to cheer you on. So if you're game, please do that. If not, no pressure.
With that, I'm Shawn Buttner. This is Input Output. I'll see you next time