This is a 🏴☠️ Founding Members–Only 🏴☠️ post. Founding Members get access to the Pirate Eddie Bot to ask category design questions, weekly actionable insights, the full library with 20+ audiobooks 150+ mini-books, and more. See the Founders Deck here.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
This is a special edition Founder Post.
Normally, what happens inside the Category Design Academy stays inside the Category Design Academy.
But this time, we’re breaking our own rule.
Because the best way to understand the power of category design is seeing a legendary Category Designer in real time, using AI to turn a raw idea into a Lightning Strike that doubles outcomes.
In this private Academy workshop, Pablo Gonzalez shared how he launched a Lightning Strike by:
Naming a clear enemy his Superconsumers couldn’t ignore
Creating a POV that cut through the “status quo” noise
Planning an in-person strike designed to draw people in
AI wasn’t just a sidekick.
It was the lightning rod helping Pablo name the problem, frame the fight, and design a strike the market couldn’t ignore.
When AI meets a Lightning Strike, outcomes double.
Every great Lightning Strike starts with clarity.
Clarity on the problem.
Clarity on the enemy.
Clarity on the moment to strike.
AI can’t invent those for you. But it can sharpen your thinking until the answers are undeniable. That’s why the right AI prompts matter—they force you to see what you’d otherwise miss.
If you want to go deeper on Lightning Strikes, we’ve recently released a full series of mini-books breaking down the types, budgets, and playbooks behind legendary strikes. Start here:
To help you practice on your own, here’s a set of prompts you can run through AI.
You can use any LLM for this—but if you want sharper, category-first answers, Pirate Eddie Bot is the accelerator.
As pirate Jake put it:
So if you want to jam on your Lightning Strike, drop the following prompts into the Pirate Eddie Bot and start planning:
