Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Wes’s About page that sounds like everyone else’s
Wes is a data analyst who writes a newsletter on the side, explaining money numbers in plain words.
Right now, the About page of his newsletter says it is useful, practical, and well researched.
So does the About page of every other money newsletter, and every one of them means it.
🧩 His struggle:
He only says what his newsletter is, never what it stands against,
so strangers pick the biggest one instead.
One evening, he’s watching a talk on YouTube that tells the real story of a student
who also picked a crowded topic, business news, full of much bigger names,
and later sold most of his company for around $75 million.
He was competing with Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.
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☕ The newsletter that made fun of the news
Alex Lieberman watched his classmates skip the business news they were supposed to be reading.
He was a student at the University of Michigan in 2015, and they were all going into finance.
They were expected to have opinions about business news.
And they weren’t reading any, because the writing was miserable.
Business news is one of the most crowded categories that exists.
Bloomberg covers it.
The Wall Street Journal covers it.
The Wall Street Journal had been doing it for over a century, and both had newsrooms he could never match.
So he didn’t try to cover business news better.
He and a friend started a daily email called Morning Brew.
It stood against the way the big papers wrote.
They used jargon like basis points and EBITDA, and never explained it.
They wrote whole articles in the passive voice.
They assumed that if you didn’t already know the jargon, you weren’t their reader.
Morning Brew explained the same stories the way you’d explain them to a friend at a bar, with jokes in.
Turns out that was worth a lot.
In 2020, Business Insider bought most of the company in a deal reported at around $75 million.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Common Enemy
Alex started Morning Brew in business news,one of the most crowded topics there is,
and stood against the way the giants wrote it.
Five years later, Business Insider bought most of the company for around $75 million.
This strategy is called The Common Enemy.
Most experts tell you to prove you’re better than the competition.
He never claimed to be better.
He named something his readers already resented, and then stood on the reader’s side.
So you stop describing yourself, which tells the reader nothing.
Name the enemy instead.
When you and your readers are against the same thing, they take your side.
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🛠️ Wes’s turn
Back to Wes, and the About page that sounds like every other money newsletter.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what annoys his readers most about money writing.
His AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Stop calling your newsletter useful,
and say you’re against money articles that give you numbers and never show the math.
That night, he rewrites his About page around that one line.
He puts the same line at the top of his next issue.
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🌅 Six weeks later
Wes’s About page doesn’t say “useful” anymore.
It says what he’s against, and new readers write in to say they’re tired of numbers with no math behind them, too.
Two hundred new readers have signed up since he changed it.
Your readers are probably tired of something in your topic already.
Name the thing your readers already resent, and stand on their side.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you gain years of experience without putting in the years’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the enemy your readers already resent, and writes the line that puts
you on their side of it.
🧰 What you’ll need
Your topic, and how you currently describe what you do
- e.g. money numbers explained in plain words, for people who never studied finance, described as useful, practical, and well researchedWhat the big accounts in your topic all do or say
- e.g. market forecasts, charts with no explanation, and a lot of talk about “diversified portfolios”What annoys your readers most, and what you believe is wrong with how this is normally done
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. being handed a percentage with no math behind it, and it is all written for people who already work in finance
🚀 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 people who want to understand money numbers but never studied finance.
- 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.
- The enemy must be a PRACTICE or an IDEA, never a person, a company, or a group of people. If a suggestion names people, replace it.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My topic, and how I currently describe what I do:
{e.g. money numbers explained in plain words, for people who never studied finance, described as useful, practical, and well researched}
What the big accounts in my topic all do or say:
{e.g. market forecasts, charts with no explanation, and a lot of talk about "diversified portfolios"}
What makes my readers roll their eyes, and what I believe is wrong with how this is normally done:
{e.g. being handed a percentage with no math behind it, and it is all written for people who already work in finance}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The candidate enemies — three practices or ideas my readers already resent, ranked by how strongly they would nod.
2. The one to pick — which is most specific to me rather than generic complaining, and why.
3. My line — one sentence that names it, in my voice, short enough for a bio.
4. The rewrite — my current description, replaced with the enemy version, side by side.
5. Who I lose — who stops reading because of this, and why that is the point.
Then tell me the one sentence to put in the next issue that makes my position obvious.