Identity At Scale: How We Built The Pirate Eddie Bot, And How To Create Your Own
You’re one of one. But now, you don’t have to do it alone.
Arrrrr! 🏴☠️ Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. For more: Dive into an audiobook or listen to a category design jam session
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
In 2023, product expert, writer, and Substack superstar Lenny Rachitsky launched something different.
A chatbot version of himself.
Trained on his entire content archive, the Lenny Bot answers product questions as if Lenny is writing the replies himself. His thinking (and all his guests' thinking) is searchable. His advice is always on.
It’s his second brain, at scale.
We watched closely and got inspired by Lenny, which led us to create the Pirate Eddie Bot.
Like the Lenny Bot, the Pirate Eddie Bot is trained on our entire archive of Category Pirates mini-books, podcast transcripts, and strategy sessions. It understands category design deeply. And it acts as a co-founder for category design Superconsumers.
Our Founding subscribers are using it to:
Build their category design
Name & frame a problem
Develop their POVs
Get feedback on strategy
Workshop Lightning Strikes
Surface insights from the archive
Ask questions about their Superconsumers
You can use it too if you become a Founding subscriber. 👇
(Some of you may be wondering why not a Pirate Christopher Bot. Creating a cocktail of one part AI hallucination, two parts profanity, and a dash of “deplatform me, I dare you” energy should be the sequel, not the first attempt.)
We didn’t just create a “bot.” We created a new way to scale Intellectual Capital.
In this mini-book, we’ll break down how you can do the same.
Let’s dive in.
Identity At Scale
If you’re an executive, expert, creator, strategist, or consultant, your brain is your business.
People want your insight, your voice, your frameworks, your feedback. But (as far as you know) there’s only one of you.
Historically, you’ve had two options:
Clone yourself the old-fashioned way. Train an apprentice for a decade and hope they stay.
Say no. Turn down clients. Let the queue grow. Burn out trying to keep up.
Neither scales. Neither pays dividends fast.
We Pirates have lived through this. At The Cambridge Group, Pirate Eddie managed nine client projects across three junior partners. His productivity was sky high. His joy, not so much. Clients felt like they weren’t getting enough of him. The teams constantly needed his input, and Eddie felt stretched.
At one point, Eddie was on holiday in New Zealand with his family at 2am Kiwi time, doing a conference call with Paris in the closet of his hotel.
Something snapped.
He decided to leave and start his own business, EddieWouldGrow.
Here, he could serve one to two clients extremely well at higher prices. While Eddie was happier in his work, the demand didn’t stop. And he still felt bad turning away clients.
Everyone wants more access.
But most thought leaders are drowning in requests, emails, and DMs.
So, we wondered:
What if you could clone your thinking, not just your tone?
What if someone could jam with your frameworks, POVs, and weirdness anytime they needed you?
A well-trained AI version of you can vibe create with others, walk them through your strategy, and make them feel what it’s like to work with you. It gives people a direct hit of your Intellectual Capital, so they can decide if they want more of you in their world. And the truth is your AI version of yourself doesn’t need to be perfect.
Sometimes, when you talk to an expert, the a-ha doesn’t come from the expert. It comes from you hearing yourself talking about your problem out loud to the expert. Sparring partners make you stronger.
That’s identity at scale.
And it unlocks new ways to grow without working more.
Want to add more customers? Your AI can prequalify who’s a fit.
Launch more offers? Your AI can de-risk what you build.
Raise your prices? Your AI can role-play as your Superconsumer and help you shape a premium experience they’ll gladly pay for.
Scaling your identity is a growth strategy, but it’s also something deeper.
It forces you to ask:
What happens to your identity when you’re no longer the only source?
A few weeks back, Pirate Christopher was in Austin with the leadership team of a red-hot AI startup.
For two full days, they vibe created. The team brought their raw materials (strategy decks, investor memos, sales calls, customer feedback) and we jammed on it with Lucy, our Category Pirates-trained ChatGPT.
It was their words. Their insights. Their instincts.
But filtered through our category design lens.
By the end of the two-day offsite, the team was stunned. They had a sharpened and clarified category POV, a clear problem to solve for their Superconsumers, and a Lightning Strike plan. All vibe created with AI.
On the ride to the airport, the CEO (a seasoned operator with heavyweight investors) turned to Christopher and said:
“Can I ask you something personal? I’m guessing for most of your career, you’ve been the big idea guy. The one who comes in and blows people’s minds. And I’m guessing that’s worked out well for you.”
Christopher smiled. “Yeah. Let’s just say I don’t have a mortgage because of it.”
Then came the real question.
“So what happens to your identity when you’re not the one behind the curtain anymore? When you show us how you’re doing it with AI. In the open. Is that threatening to your identity?”
The question stopped him.
Because he’d never thought about it that way.
Your identity as a Category Designer is never about being the source of every idea.
That’s just how others see you.
Your real role (and real mission) is not about being the biggest brain in the room. It's about helping people create radically different futures. Sometimes the idea will come from you. Sometimes from another person. Sometimes from the collective swizzling of a room on fire. But your job is never to dazzle.
Your job is to be worthy to be in the band.
Your job is to start, build, or play a twist on a riff.
Your job is to give and receive permission to play.
Your job is to get so lost in the music that you wander in the wonder of discovering something new.
Your job is to create a new and different future.
And your job is to lead the shift from old to new.
With AI, you can do it faster, deeper, and more powerfully than ever before.
That isn’t a threat—it’s an upgrade.
We Pirates have been working with AI since ChatGPT launched in 2022, and we’ve never felt like we’ve lost something. Instead, we’ve been handed a lightsaber. And when you’ve spent your whole career swinging a sword, and someone gives you a lightsaber?
You don’t feel obsolete.
You feel dangerous.
Now, let’s dive into how to create an AI you: