Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 5-7 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Nate’s listeners who think the show isn’t for them
Nate is a software engineer with a podcast about learning to code after thirty.
Everyone tells him to pick a narrow group, so he says the show is for future web developers in their thirties.
Then emails start arriving from nurses, teachers, and accountants.
They love the show, but they write to ask, “Is this really for people like me?”
🧩 His struggle:
He sorts his listeners by job, so he misses the one thing they all want.
At lunch, a coworker shows him the real story of a man
whose readers also had every kind of job,
and who now emails more than four million people every morning.
He started with seventy-eight people, mostly friends and family.
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📰 The email that went the other way
Tim Huelskamp spent about ten years in finance, buying companies and fixing them up.
In 2017, the company he worked for was sold, and he lost his job.
But he left with a good amount of money, the final payment some companies give when they let people go.
He decided that money was enough to live on for a while,
so he could try starting something of his own.
For years, Tim and a group of friends had been emailing each other back and forth, mostly to argue about college football.
The friends in that email group were a mix of lawyers, professors, and people with government jobs in Washington.
One of them was Drew Steigerwald, a scientist.
Drew’s job was to read long, dense science papers and write short, plain summaries for members of Congress.
Tim and Drew had the same complaint about the news.
Every newsletter covered just one subject, in depth.
If you wanted to keep up with business, science, sports, and politics all at once, you had to read ten of them.
And almost every news story came with somebody’s opinion and anger mixed in.
Tim put it this way: “There was this intellectually curious, busy professional that wants to know a little bit of everything.
It was just too much work.”
Too much work, because keeping up meant reading ten newsletters and reading past everyone’s opinions.
So Tim and Drew asked each other one question.
What if we made a newsletter that just told people what happened, with no opinions and no outrage?
It would give just the facts, and let readers decide for themselves.
They built a short email, first once a week, and later every day.
It covered the main news from every subject in one short read.
And it never told the reader whether any of it was good or bad.
They named it 1440, because there are 1,440 minutes in a day.
The first issue went out in 2017 to seventy-eight people.
Tim’s description of that list: “literally me and Drew’s aunts, groomsmen, college roommates.”
By the second week it was ninety-one people.
They spent that first summer on one question, in Tim’s words: “How do we make this product as kickass as possible?”
Get this — 1440 now goes to more than four million people every morning.
It has a staff of twenty-seven and brings in about $27 million a year.
That is a million dollars for every person on the team.
They never took money from investors.
Recently, a bank worked out what 1440 would sell for.
The answer was $101 million.
Tim and Drew never picked their readers by job, or age, or city.
They picked readers by the way they think, which marketers call a psychographic.
Their readers were curious, busy people who want to keep up with every subject.
Then they made those people one promise: the news, with none of the opinion.
That group turned out to be four million people.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Broad Bet
Tim wrote for anyone who wanted the news without the opinions, and four million people now read his email every morning.
This approach is called The Broad Bet.
Do not pick your audience by who they are: their job, their age, their city.
Tim didn’t write for a job title or an age group.
He wrote for a psychographic, a way of thinking, and made one clear promise to everyone who thinks that way.
So the next time someone tells you to niche down your podcast and pick a smaller audience,
do not shrink it to future web developers in their thirties.
Ask a different question instead: what does my ideal listener want?
Maybe it is “I want to start a side business, but I only have one free hour a day.”
Write that sentence in the show description, and let the nurses, the teachers, and the engineers all find you.
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🛠️ Nate’s turn
Let’s check in on Nate and the nurses and teachers who keep asking if his coding podcast is really for them.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it every one of those emails.
His AI sidekick says:
Your listeners have different jobs, but they all want to learn to code in the one free hour they have each day,
so put that in your show description instead of a job title.
He deletes the line about web developers that night.
In its place, he writes one sentence: “Learn to code in the one free hour you have each day.”
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🌅 Three months later
Nate still gets emails from nurses and teachers.
Now they write to tell him which episode helped them most.
Eight hundred people listen to the show every week.
Someone may have told you to shrink your audience, and you did it.
Pick your readers by what they want, not by their job or age, and make them one clear promise.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below works out whether your edge should come from a narrow audience or a narrow promise.
🧰 What you’ll need
Who your show is for now, and what you promise them
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. people in their thirties who want to become web developers, and I promise practical advice on learning to code with a full-time jobHow many people that could be, and who you would lose by narrowing it
- e.g. millions I suppose, and I would give up most of the people who currently listenOne specific thing you could promise every time
- e.g. one small coding project a week, sized to fit in one free hour a day
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people learning to code after thirty.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Exactly one of the two must be narrow: the audience or the promise. If both are wide, say so plainly. Do not default to "niche down" without testing whether the promise could carry it instead.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Who I currently make it for, and what I promise them:
{e.g. people in their thirties who want to become web developers, and I promise practical advice on learning to code with a full-time job}
How many people that could plausibly be, and what I would have to give up to narrow the audience:
{e.g. millions I suppose, and I would give up most of the people who currently listen}
What I could promise that is unmistakably specific:
{e.g. one small coding project a week, sized to fit in one free hour a day}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The diagnosis — which of my two is narrow right now, if either, said plainly.
2. The narrow-audience version — who exactly, what I gain, and who I lose.
3. The narrow-promise version — the specific, repeatable thing I deliver, and why a wide audience would still recognize it as for them.
4. Which one fits me — the recommendation, with the reasoning based on what I actually know and want.
5. The one-line description — how I would describe it either way, written out for both.
Then tell me whether I have been narrowing out of strategy or out of obedience.