Finding Your Starting Point

Before you pitch anybody, before you pick a niche, before you touch a single AI tool — you're going to write down what you already use. That's the whole first assignment, and it's deliberately the lowest-friction thing in this guide.

1. Why we're not starting with pitching

Most UGC advice opens with outreach. Find brands, write a pitch, send fifty emails. That advice isn't wrong, it's just badly ordered — it asks for the hardest rep first, from the person with the least conviction about what they're selling.

Module 0A already gave you the mechanics: how rates work, what a deliverable is, what a pitch contains. This module gives you the thing that has to come before a pitch, which is a specific, defensible answer to "why you, about this?"

You don't need to invent that answer. You've been generating it for years by buying things.

2. The daily brand list

For the next seven days, at the end of each day, write down every brand you actually used. Not brands you admire. Not brands you follow. Brands that were physically or digitally in your hands.

The rules, which matter more than they look

• Only things you touched today. If you didn't use it, it doesn't go on the list, however much you like the company.
• Be specific. Not "coffee" — the actual grinder, the actual beans, the actual oat milk. Specificity is the entire value of this exercise.
• Include the boring ones. Dish soap. Socks. The notes app. Boring categories have the least competition and the most repeat purchase.
• Write down the ones you'd replace. A product you resent is a stronger content idea than one you love, because you already know exactly what's wrong with it.
• Don't pitch anyone. Not this week. If you catch yourself drafting an email, you've skipped ahead.

Seven days is the minimum because fewer than that gives you a mood, not a pattern. A Tuesday is not a life.

3. Do the exercise

Use a notes app, or paper, or the daily brand list builder in the module — the tool is genuinely irrelevant to whether this works.

The read-back

Once you have five or more entries, the exercise counts them back at you: your most-used category, how many brands appear more than once, and how many things you marked would replace.

It is worth being precise about what that is doing, because it is much less clever than it looks and the honesty matters:

This is arithmetic, not analysis. It counted what you typed and nothing else — no AI has read your list, and there's nothing clever happening. The judgement is still yours; the point of the count is that you can't argue with your own week.

That is the whole mechanism. Nobody is telling you what your niche is. You are being shown your own seven days with the repetitions made visible, which is a thing you cannot do by remembering.

The sentence

The exercise also gives you somewhere to write one sentence naming your starting niche, and keeps it. It does not write the sentence for you, and that is deliberate — §5 is about why the leap from a counted list to a named niche is judgement rather than arithmetic.

It's saved alongside the list, and it reappears in §6 where you're asked to carry it into Module 1. A bad first sentence beats an empty one.

4. What a finished list looks like

CONSTRUCTED — not a real reader.

Here's one. It is constructed for this module — we don't have a real reader's list yet, and inventing an attribution for one would break the standard set out in Module 4. What it does do is show the shape: seven days, specific products, and a missing Wednesday.

DAILY BRAND LIST — 7 days · worked example

MON  Oatly barista        oat milk, coffee        keep
     Hario V60            pourover                keep
     Uniqlo AIRism        t-shirt, gym            keep

TUE  Oatly barista        again                   keep
     Bombas               socks                   keep
     TJ's chili crisp     eggs                    keep
     Notion               planning, on and off    meh

WED  — nothing. forgot entirely. —

THU  Oatly barista        again                   keep
     Hario V60            again                   keep
     Lululemon Align      leggings                keep
     Aesop hand wash      guest coming over       keep

FRI  Oatly barista        again                   keep
     TJ's chili crisp     noodles                 keep
     Uniqlo AIRism        again                   keep

SAT  Hario V60            slower, made two        keep
     Le Creuset           soup    would replace — too heavy

SUN  Oatly barista        again                   keep
     Bombas               again                   keep
     Aesop hand wash      again                   keep

Written as a demonstration, not collected from anyone — said plainly here rather than dressed up as a testimonial. Wednesday stays in. A list with a missing day is a real list, and the version where every day is full is the version nobody believes.

5. Your niche isn't invented, it's noticed

Read that list the way a stranger would. Don't look for what you like — look for what repeats, and at what price.

Six of seven days open with coffee made at home, with the same two objects. Everything on the list is mid-price: not luxury, not cheapest-available. And almost every item was bought to replace a worse version of itself — the pan that stuck, the socks that slipped, the oat milk that split in coffee.

So the niche isn't "coffee." It isn't "lifestyle," which means nothing to a brand and less to a buyer. It's narrower and much more sellable than either:

That sentence does real work. It tells you which brands to approach (mid-price replacements, not aspirational luxury), what your hook is (you owned the annoying one first), and why a brand should believe you (you can describe the specific failure their product fixes, because you lived with it).

Note what didn't happen: nobody asked you to be passionate about anything, and nobody asked you to pick a niche from a list of trending niches. The list did the work.

If you can't see a pattern yet

That's a normal seven-day outcome, not a failure. Two options, in this order: run it another seven days, or look at the would replace column on its own. Complaints cluster faster than preferences do.

6. What to carry into Module 1

Take three things forward, and leave the rest of the list where it is:

• One sentence naming your starting niche, in the shape of the pull quote above. It will change. Write it anyway.
• Five to ten specific brands from your own list that fit that sentence. These are your first outreach targets in Module 0A's pitch framework — real companies whose products are already in your house.
• One product you'd replace. That's your first script in Module 2, because you already know the failure it fixes.

Module 1 picks up from there and makes the case for why you're going to make that content yourself — with AI doing the jobs a crew used to — instead of hiring it out. You don't need to be convinced of that yet. You need a list. And if you have never opened one of these tools, Module 1.5 sits between the two and starts from exactly there.