Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
⠀
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
⠀
🙋♂️ Ethan’s ten thousand subscribers
Ethan is a product manager who writes a newsletter on the side.
The first thing he does each morning is check his subscriber count, hoping to see ten thousand.
He has four hundred.
A few of those four hundred have asked if he sells anything.
🧩 His struggle:
He measures himself against ten thousand subscribers, so he never notices the readers who would already pay him.
At lunch, he watches a video with the true story of a musician
who also measured his work by how many people saw it,
and later co-founded a company valued at around $4 billion.
It all started with $166.
⠀
🎹 The million views that paid for a nice dinner
Jack Conte, one half of the band Pomplamoose, spent seven weeks and $10,000 building an elaborate set for a music video called “Pedals.”
The video passed a million views on YouTube, and the payment for it was $166.
That number shows that more views don’t always mean more money.
A million people had watched, and any view counter would call that a success.
But $166 wouldn’t cover a month’s rent.
That’s less than minimum wage for the seven weeks he spent building the set.
So Jack stopped trying to grow the million-view audience and went after the few who already loved his work instead.
He and a friend, Sam Yam, built a site where fans could pledge a few dollars a month directly to a creator.
At launch, Jack’s own musician page was one of only three creator profiles on the entire site.
He called it Patreon.
Get this — within a few weeks, his fans were pledging more than $5,000 per video.
The same YouTube videos earned him around $100 each from ads.
Turns out Patreon has since been valued at around $4 billion.
⠀
🔥 The recipe
➡️ 1,000 True Fans
Jack stopped counting viewers and let the people who already cared pay him directly,
and his fans paid him more than $5,000 a video.
The idea has an author, and it isn’t Jack.
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, wrote it in 2008,
and he said exactly what he meant by a true fan: “A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.”
Kevin’s strategy is called 1,000 True Fans.
His arithmetic shows why a small number is enough.
A thousand true fans, each spending a hundred dollars a year, is a hundred thousand dollars.
And a thousand people is a number you can actually reach.
So you stop measuring your newsletter against a subscriber count you may never hit,
and start counting the true fans who’d already pay you.
A thousand people who would buy anything beats ten thousand who like the free stuff.
⠀
🛠️ Ethan’s turn
Back to Ethan, who hopes to see ten thousand subscribers every morning and still has four hundred.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it who writes back to him and what they’ve asked for.
His AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Stop counting toward ten thousand, and write back to the readers who asked if you sell anything.
Before bed, he writes back to every reader who asked if he sells anything.
He asks each of them what they’d want him to make for them.
⠀
🌅 Two months later
Ethan doesn’t check his subscriber count every morning anymore.
He reads the replies instead, and he knows most of the people who write back by name.
Four of them are trying out the first thing he made for them, a one-page guide to writing a product plan.
You probably have a few readers like that already.
Stop counting views, and let the fans who already love your work pay you directly.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below works out who your true fans already are and what they would actually buy.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you publish, to how many people, and the number you’ve been aiming at
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a weekly newsletter for first-time product managers, about 400 subscribers, and I have been aiming at 10,000 without knowing whyWho writes back to you without being asked, and what they’ve asked you for
- e.g. maybe fifteen people, four of them every issue, and they have asked for help writing a product plan, and whether I’d look over theirsWhat you sell right now, if anything
- e.g. nothing
🚀 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 drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, 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 first-time product managers.
- 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.
- Do not propose anything whose success depends on reaching more people. Every recommendation must work with the audience I already have.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I publish, to how many people, and the audience number I have been aiming at:
{e.g. a weekly newsletter for first-time product managers, about 400 subscribers, and I have been aiming at 10,000 without knowing why}
Who replies, shares, or writes to me unprompted, and what they have asked me for:
{e.g. maybe fifteen people, four of them every issue, and they have asked for help writing a product plan, and whether I'd look over theirs}
What I currently sell, if anything:
{e.g. nothing}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My true fans — who, out of the people I already have, would buy anything I make, and what tells me so.
2. The arithmetic — what I would need to charge, and how many of them, to reach a number that matters to me.
3. What they would buy — the specific things this group has already asked for, in their words.
4. What to stop doing — the growth work that does not serve these people, named plainly.
5. The first offer — one thing I could make this month for the people already on the list.
Then tell me the four people to email personally this week, and what to ask them.