Your Best Ad Idea Is Already Running – Just Not Yours

01 /The Concept

Most AI-generated marketing content is starting to look the same – because most marketers are prompting the same models in the same way. Notebooks is an attempt to break that pattern, with a claim that it helps marketers create "winning" content three times faster than the average approach.

The interface is a board – a digital pinboard onto which users clip existing content that can serve as inspiration for creating new material.

The board accepts multiple content types: videos, documents, and website links. Multiple boards can run in parallel, each dedicated to a different content project.

All content pinned to a board is analyzed by AI – using whichever model the user prefers: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek, or others.

Once the source material is loaded, users can generate any new content they need – emails, blog posts, video scripts, whatever. The key: the AI draws specifically from the source content on the board when generating the output.

For example, a user could pin Y Combinator partner talks to one board and 500 Startups partner talks to another, then ask both to write a pitch email describing their startup. The two emails will come out differently – each one shaped by the frameworks and emphases of its respective source material.

The same works for video scripts, blog posts, or any other format. Assign the same topic to two boards loaded with different source material, and get two meaningfully different pieces of content.

In a standard ChatGPT workflow, achieving this would require manually listing all the reference ideas, prompting the model to analyze each piece of source content separately, assembling the results, and weaving them into a final prompt. With Notebooks, all of that analysis and prompt construction happens automatically under the hood – which is where the 3x speed claim comes from.

Pricing is $39 per month, which includes 2,000 credits for the third-party AI models used to analyze source content and generate new content. When those credits run out, users contact the startup to figure out what comes next.

Notebooks is a recent launch; its Product Hunt debut went up a few days ago.

02 /Why It Matters

Notebooks is a direct evolution of Google's NotebookLM concept – right down to the name. The core workflow is the same: create a notebook, load content into it, ask the platform to summarize, answer questions, or generate something new from that content. NotebookLM's biggest viral moment was its ability to auto-generate podcasts featuring two synthetic voices discussing the uploaded material.

But NotebookLM is positioned as a general-purpose tool suitable for everything: sales, marketing, employee training, education, self-study, customer support, and product development.

That breadth is both NotebookLM's strength and its weakness. Google has to prioritize features that work across all those use cases. But the devil is always in the details – and every domain has specific requirements that make purpose-built tools more useful for specialized work.

Notebooks is positioning itself as the specialized version for marketers who are "tired of AI generating generic marketing fluff." Most marketers have already learned to use ChatGPT – and as a result, most AI-generated marketing content has started to look the same.

As one Notebooks user describes it, the platform helps them create higher-converting marketing materials because those materials are built on a deliberately curated set of source inputs. That framing captures something true: marketing is less about invention than about recognizing what works for your competitors.

MagicBrief ([related review](/review/kreativami-nado-zanimatsja-a-ne-nastrojkami)) works on a similar premise – a platform with boards for collecting competitor ads and using them as creative inspiration. The concept has real overlap with Notebooks.

So does Plot ([related review](/review/50-millionov-chelovek-bez-normalnoj-platformy-dlja-upravlenija-proektami)), which calls its tool a "creative hub" – also built around notebooks that aggregate competitor ads, videos, and other reference material for social content creation.

Both MagicBrief and Plot go beyond the core notebook concept with additional specialist tools. MagicBrief has a large searchable catalog of competitor ads, competitive ad tracking, and creative benchmarking. Plot adds brand mention monitoring, social trend tracking, a content calendar, and a creator relationship platform.

At the moment, Notebooks doesn't yet show much of that kind of specialized functionality beyond its core workflow and marketing positioning. That may be a function of it being early-stage. Still – it's worth arguing that the right time to build the differentiating specialist features is at the very start, even for a narrower slice of users.

03 /Opportunities

The core play Notebooks is making – going after marketers with a tool that generates new content from existing source material – is directionally right.

Most AI marketing platforms still assume the model can generate good ideas in a vacuum, independent of what competitors are already doing and what's demonstrably working in the market. A [recent review](/review/hochesh-imet-samyj-prodajushhij-sajt) of a competitor pricing analysis platform made the same observation: it pulled competitor prices but ignored other equally important signals sitting right there on those competitor pages – product images and descriptions that meaningfully affect purchase intent.

The direction: platforms for marketers that actively use AI to transform others' content into original output.

The engine at the center of such a platform should resemble Notebooks – new content from source material. But even that core can be significantly improved: template-based settings for transformation style, audience targeting, tone, and format are all obvious additions.

Around that core, the platform needs tools for faster and more complete source content collection – both broadly by topic and specifically from competitors – since sourcing raw material is currently its own hassle, consuming significant time and energy. Add testing and validation tools, multi-channel format conversion, and other useful utilities on top.

In short, the components of a genuinely powerful marketing content platform are all known. What's left is assembling them in the most intuitive and effective combination for the user. Which is, arguably, the simplest and most reliable startup strategy available in almost any domain