Welcome back to Unthreaded - weekly tools and lessons for building a brand that lasts.
In this edition, we're talking about why your brand needs to operate like a media company, and I'm giving you a prompt you can paste into Claude or ChatGPT that will build you a 30-day content system based on your business and your goals.
Let’s get into it 👇🏼
Every business, regardless of industry, needs to function like a media company first.
Think about the brands and outlets you keep up with. You go back to them over and over because they've earned your trust by showing up consistently with something useful.
The only way they got there was by publishing content on a regular basis, over a long period of time, with very few breaks in between.
THE REAL REASON BRANDS FADE OUT
There's more content being published every day than any one person can keep up with.
So if you're not in the mix regularly, you're not getting beat out by a competitor.
You're just no longer coming to mind. And it's not that your customers are choosing someone else over you. They're just not thinking about you at all. Which is worse.
Losing a deal is one thing, but not being in the consideration to begin with is much harder to come back from.
People buy from whoever they remember and trust the most and the people who feel like the safest bet are the ones who've been consistently present.
WHAT THE MEDIA MINDSET ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
Now, operating like a media company doesn't mean you're on social all day or hiring a content team you can't afford right now.
It means you build a system around content so that it keeps working for you even when you're not actively producing it.
There are three pieces to this:
You pick two or three content pillars - Topics you can talk about repeatedly without having to dig deep every time. These should be things you already think about, already have opinions on, already get asked about. If a pillar feels like work to come up with, it's probably not yours.
One long-form format - A podcast, a video series, an article you write every week. Something that gives you enough space to fully develop an idea. The long form is where the substance lives. Everything else comes out of it.
An owned destination. A website, a newsletter, a YouTube channel. Somewhere your audience can find you outside the algorithms. This is where you actually build relationships and where the real business gets done.
The reason it works as a system is that the long form does the heavy lifting once.
A single episode or essay can produce ten or twelve smaller pieces across multiple platforms and all of them point back to something you own.
You're not starting from zero every single time, because you're now working from a body of thinking that builds on itself.
The setup takes real effort though. But with the right tools and the right people, the maintenance of this system becomes easier to deal with.
WHY I’M TELLING YOU THIS
This is something we kept seeing. Companies with great products getting passed over for companies that were better understood by the people they were trying to reach. Content and how often they published was the real difference.
And it's why we've been rethinking how Carbon Thread itself shows up.
This newsletter came out of the same thinking. It's something I built into the business on purpose, so I'd be showing up every week with something worth your time.
I wanted a community of founders and operators working through the same problems I'm working through and I knew the only way to do that was to commit to the same system I'm describing here.
So if you want to start building that for your own business, the prompt below is a good place to start.
This week, try this.
Copy the prompt below and paste it into Claude (or ChatGPT, or whatever AI tool you use).
It'll walk you through a conversation about your business, your team, and your resources, and then hand you back a 30-day action plan to get started.👇🏼
You are a brand strategist helping me build a content system for my business. Your job is to interview me through a short conversation and then produce a 30-day action plan for operating my brand like a media company.
Interview me one question at a time. Wait for my response before asking the next question. Keep your questions and responses short and conversational. Ask follow-up questions based on what I tell you — don't just run through a fixed list.
Over the course of 5 to 10 questions, you're trying to understand:
What my business does, who I serve, and where I am in terms of growth
What topics I naturally gravitate toward and could talk about repeatedly without running dry
What content format I'm most likely to actually stick with long-term
Where my audience pays attention and which platforms make sense for me right now
What team and resources I have available (even if it's just me) so the plan is realistic
What I currently own (website, newsletter, YouTube, etc.) that I should be driving people back to, or what I need to build first
Don't ask about all of these upfront. Let the conversation flow naturally and dig deeper where it makes sense based on my answers. If I give you a lot of information in one response, skip ahead. If I'm vague, push me to get specific.
Once you have enough to work with, give me a 30-day action plan that includes:
My content pillars (2-3 topics)
My primary content format and a realistic publishing cadence
Which platforms to focus on and what to post where
How to repurpose long-form content into shorter pieces
A week-by-week breakdown of what to do in the first 30 days
Who on my team handles what (or what to prioritize if I'm solo)
Start with your first question.You're still going to have to do the work. But spend twenty minutes with that prompt and it’ll get you past the part most people get stuck on, which is figuring out where to begin.
We'll build on this next week.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
In my latest YouTube video, we talk through all of these ideas in a lot more depth.
I’d highly recommend watching to anyone tired of the content hamster wheel, the entrepreneurs, creators and brands who want their content to compound instead of disappear.
GET MORE FROM UNTHREADED:
Hear the conversations behind the lessons. Heavy on Brand is the podcast hosted by Brian Fitch where he sits down with founders, operators, and people building incredible brands to talk about what it actually takes to grow a business people remember.
Ready to build a brand that works as hard as you do? Carbon Thread is the agency behind Unthreaded. We help companies in the $1M–$50M range build brands, authority, and growth systems that actually move the needle. If you're tired of guessing and ready for a partner, let's talk.
Until next time,
Brian Fitch
CEO, The Carbon Thread
PS: Subscribe to my YouTube channel for videos on how to scale impact and revenue through strategy, storytelling, and media.