Dan Koe's idea museum: collect ideas, then find the angle only you have

The influencer, the brand and the artisan

Dan Koe writes about self-development and one-person businesses to an audience of millions. In October 2026 he published a long essay on X arguing that the creator worth being has changed. He sorts people who post online into three kinds, by what drives them:

The influencer

Posts for attention itself. Content is made to be consumed and forgotten.

The personal brand

Posts to sell. Every post is a step toward a course, a template or a program.

The artisan

Uses social media to pay for a body of work, such as a book, research or a philosophy, that will outlive the algorithm. Attention and money come as a by-product.

His case for the artisan is that writing has become cheap. An AI can produce fluent text on any topic, so information alone no longer sets anyone apart. What it cannot produce is the perspective that years of your own reading, arguments and experiences have formed.

“People don’t follow information, they follow perspectives.”

Dan Koe, The influencer is dead

The trouble, he says, is that this perspective is invisible, even to you. You cannot point at it, so you cannot build on it, and you post whatever is trending instead. Ideas that are not written down are gone within a day. His method is a set of habits for making that perspective something you can see and use.

The method

• Build an idea museum. Save every idea the moment it comes: a thought in the shower, a post that inspired you, notes from a video. Koe keeps two collections: validated ideas, posts that already did far better than usual, and favorite ideas, the ones you love. A good post is one of each, merged from your own point of view.
• Read dense sources. If your inputs are the same news and trends as everyone else’s, your ideas will be too. Look for sources where almost every sentence is worth keeping: old or little-known books, carefully curated blogs and a short list of creators who always post something worth thinking about.
• Study what already works. Pick three creators who are doing well but are not celebrities, whose numbers say something about the post rather than the name, and work out why their best posts worked. You take the principle, never the idea.
• Find your angle. Nobody owns a topic, only their view of it. Koe writes five angles on every idea he saves: how a thinker he admires would say it, how he would say it to his past self, how to redefine it, what the common view is and where he disagrees, and why it matters to an everyday person.
• Let products follow the content. The topics that keep doing well, combined with a problem you have solved in your own life, are the market research for a first product. His example is a 30-day focus challenge run as a small paid community.

He puts it into a 30-day plan: build the museum and a list of creators in week one, study three of them and post your best angles in week two, watch which posts draw the most replies and questions in week three, and in week four turn one recurring question into a one-page free guide, then a fuller product.

“The habit matters more than the app.”

Dan Koe, The influencer is dead

Koe shows the method in Eden, an app he makes, and says Apple Notes or Notion work just as well. What follows uses notespace and the AI assistant you already talk to.

What an assistant changes

The method lives or dies on two chores: capturing an idea before it fades, and finding it again on the day you have something to say about it. Both get easier when the museum is something your assistant can read and write in any conversation, from your phone or your desk, in Claude, ChatGPT or Grok.

• Capture in one sentence. Paste a post, or say what you just thought of. The assistant files it in the right collection with where it came from, who said it and when.
• Find by meaning. Asking for “everything I saved about focus” finds the post you filed under “deep work” six weeks ago, because search understands meaning as well as exact words.
• Angles from your own thinkers. Koe’s angle prompt has to ask about you first. An assistant that can read your museum already knows which thinkers you save, what you disagree with and which ideas you return to, so its angles start from there.
• A memory of what happened. Tell it which posts drew replies and what people asked. A month later it can list the questions that keep coming back, which is where Koe looks for a first product.

notespace does not read social media for you. It does not search for viral posts or count your replies. You bring the posts and the numbers, and the assistant keeps them organized and findable.

Running it on notespace

There is no built-in methodology for this, so you make your own. Describe the method to your assistant and it drafts the rules for a space, which you read and approve. A layout that follows Koe closely:

inbox/                    quick captures, filed later
museum/favorites/<slug>   ideas you love, in your words
museum/validated/<slug>   posts that did well, and why
sources/<slug>            dense sources: books, essays, talks
creators/<handle>         creators you study, what works for them
angles/<idea>             five angles on one idea
posts/<slug>              drafts, and what happened after posting

• Every saved post keeps its source. The rules can require metadata, such as source and author on everything in museum/validated/, and the server rejects a note that lacks them. A saved post carries its link, author, handle, platform and date, so you can always credit it and filter by it.
• Angles link back. An angles note links to the favorite and validated ideas it merges, and to the thinkers behind each angle, so you can see where every post came from.
• Posts have a status. Requiring status (draft or posted) under posts/ makes “what have I not published yet?” a single search, and the replies you report are written into the same note.
• Nothing is lost. Every change keeps the previous version, and you can export the whole space as Markdown files whenever you want.

Start one

Connect notespace to your AI app, then ask in plain words. Your assistant proposes the change and nothing happens until you confirm it.

The rules are yours. If the layout does not fit how you work, ask your assistant to change it and approve the new version the same way. Notes already saved are not changed.

Source: Dan Koe, The influencer is dead. The Age of Experience is here. (X, October 2026). Quotations are from the essay; the summary of the method is ours.