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GM. This is Needs to Exist (aka NTE), delivering you a startup idea that shows what marketing actually worked.

NTE Pro is a database of ~6,500 startup ideas worth stealing

NTE Zero to One helps you go from idea to first real move.

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Here’s what we’ve got for you today.

• Daily Idea - Marketing That Actually Worked

• Tuesday Survival

Steal What Actually Worked

The One Liner

See what worked. Copy it faster.

The 140 character tweet (or X) version

Stop reading marketing advice. Study marketing that actually worked.

The Longer Story Version

The Problem

Marketing content is everywhere. Proof is not.

You can read a thousand threads about funnels, hooks, and positioning and still have no idea what to actually ship on Monday. Frameworks sound smart, but they’re abstractions. Case studies are polished, biased, and usually written after the fact. Twitter screenshots are fragmented and lack context. Meanwhile, the best ads, emails, landing pages, and referral loops quietly work… then disappear.

Founders and marketers aren’t asking for more theory. They’re asking a simpler question: what actually worked for someone like me?

Right now, answering that requires luck, years of pattern recognition, or being inside the right Slack groups. That’s inefficient. And in a world where speed matters, inefficiency kills momentum.

The Solution

A living library of real-world marketing executions that worked, organized for stealing.

Instead of advice, you browse examples. Instead of opinions, you get receipts.

Ads, landing pages, cold emails, newsletters, onboarding flows, pricing pages, referral loops. Each example captured as-is, with just enough context to understand the setup: audience, channel, goal, constraints. Not “here’s the framework,” but “here’s the thing that shipped and performed.”

The magic isn’t just the archive. It’s the pattern matching. You don’t start with inspiration, you start with intent. You come in saying: “I’m launching a B2B SaaS,” or “I need paid social to convert,” or “I want better onboarding activation.” The library shows you what worked in similar situations, across companies and channels.

Over time, this becomes less like a swipe file and more like an execution map. A place where you learn by seeing, not reading. Where AI helps summarize, cluster, and remix examples, but the raw material is reality.

How We’d Build It

Phase 1: prove demand and signal

• Start with ruthless curation: 100–200 great examples that clearly worked

• Collect via manual sourcing, founder submissions, and teardown threads

• Host the MVP in Notion or Airtable with filters, tags, and screenshots

• Use vibe-coding tools like Lovable or Softr to ship a clean front-end fast

• Add lightweight AI summaries to explain context and what to copy

• Gate with email first, paid later, to validate pull

Phase 2: productize pattern recognition

• Introduce goal-based browsing (“acquisition,” “activation,” “retention”)

• Layer in AI clustering to surface patterns across examples

• Add remix suggestions (“if this worked, try this variant”)

• Expand ingestion via browser capture and creator partnerships

• Begin charging solo marketers and founders

Phase 3: scale distribution and GTM

• Team plans for startups and agencies

• Weekly drops and alerts when new high-signal examples land

• API or plugins for tools founders already use

• Community submissions with quality scoring and editorial review

• Position as infrastructure, not content

Why It Needs To Exist

AI has made copying easy. Knowing what to copy is the bottleneck.

Attention is fragmented. Competition is brutal. Everyone is moving faster, not slower. The advantage no longer comes from originality alone, but from speed, taste, and pattern recognition. The people who win aren’t the ones with the most ideas. They’re the ones who recognize the shape of what works and deploy it quickly.

This is a “show me, don’t tell me” product for a world tired of being told what to do. It compounds quietly. The library gets better every week. The user gets smarter every visit. And once it’s part of someone’s workflow, it’s very hard to replace.

It’s not loud. It’s not flashy.
It’s just useful.

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Would This Survive a Tuesday?

A brutally honest debate about the marketing examples library.

The Optimist
“This is obvious in the best way. Marketing is pattern matching. The fastest people aren’t smarter, they’ve just seen more reps. This turns years of reps into a browseable asset. I don’t need inspiration, I need precedent. Show me what worked for a B2B SaaS pricing page last month and I’ll ship by lunch. That’s leverage.”

The Skeptic
“Or it becomes a very pretty procrastination machine. You open it, scroll, save five things, feel productive, ship nothing. Also, examples age fast. What worked in Q1 might be dead in Q3. And once everyone has access to the same playbook, does it still work? Or do we just create a monoculture of slightly-better mediocre marketing?”

The Operator
“Here’s the real test: would I open this on a random Tuesday at 10:30am? If I’m about to launch an email or ad, yes, if it’s opinionated, fast, and tells me ‘copy this part, ignore that part.’ If it’s just a museum of good marketing, no. The product lives or dies on speed-to-action, not taste.”

The Optimist
“That’s why the unit of value isn’t the asset, it’s the takeaway. The example is just the receipt. The real product is compression: what matters, why it worked, and how to adapt it in five minutes. This isn’t about creativity. It’s about removing excuses.”

The Skeptic
“Still worried about habit formation. Is this daily? Weekly? Or only when I’m stuck? If it’s not clearly tied to a moment of action, it risks being a ‘nice-to-have.’ Founders don’t need more places to learn. They need fewer reasons not to ship.”

The Operator
“Then the positioning matters more than the content. This can’t be ‘study great marketing.’ It has to be ‘pick a goal, steal a move, deploy today.’ If the product makes a decision for me, I’ll come back. If it gives me options, I won’t.”

Why this debate matters
Every founder loves the idea of learning faster. Every founder also knows how easy it is to confuse learning with progress. This idea sits right on that fault line. If it tips toward action, it’s powerful. If it tips toward browsing, it dies quietly in people’s bookmarks.

That’s the Tuesday test.

If You’re Still Reading, You’re the Target

Most people won’t click this.

They’ll skim it.
They’ll think “interesting.”
They’ll keep scrolling.

But if you’re still here, you’re probably not most people.

You’re the kind of person who:

• Can’t help noticing broken systems

• Mentally rewrites products you don’t even use

• Has at least one idea you’ve never said out loud because it feels too obvious or too weird

That’s who NTE Pro is for.

Three ideas from NTE Pro:

• A business hiding inside a behavior millions already do daily

• A “boring” product founders quietly obsess over once they see it

• A tiny-looking idea that becomes uncomfortable once you run the math

These aren’t motivational quotes.
They’re not trend summaries.
They’re not “AI will change everything” takes.

NTE Pro is a living archive of 6,500+ startup ideas built for people who think in systems, patterns, and second-order effects.

If you’ve ever thought:
“I don’t need more inspiration, I need better ideas”

You already know why you’re clicking.

Open NTE Pro

One More Meme