Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🖼️ The paintings in the drugstore window
Anna Mary Robertson Moses put her paintings in the window of the local drugstore, priced at a few dollars.
She was in her late seventies, and the world would later call her Grandma Moses.
She'd spent her life on farms in upstate New York.
For years she made pictures in embroidery, stitching farm scenes in thread.
Then arthritis got into her hands and she couldn't hold a needle any more.
So she started painting instead, because it hurt less.
Anna had no training whatsoever.
She didn't know the rules about perspective, so her barns and fields sit at angles a trained eye would call wrong.
When she ran short of proper materials she used what was in the house, including fiberboard and grape juice.
Nobody discovered her.
A collector named Louis Caldor drove through her town in 1939 and saw the paintings in that window.
He went straight to her farmhouse and bought fifteen on the spot.
She was seventy-nine, and she'd been painting in public the whole time.
Get this — over the next twenty years she painted more than two thousand pictures.
Her work hung in museums, went onto greeting cards that sold in the millions, and single paintings later sold for more than a million dollars.
Nobody was waiting for her to become qualified.
She was already painting.
⛳️ The problem
Anna put her paintings in a drugstore window before anybody called her a painter.
But right now, our first newsletter issue is unwritten, because we don't believe anyone has a reason to read us yet.
And we're gonna keep waiting for a reason that was never coming.
🏠 The waitress with a thousand dollars
Barbara Corcoran borrowed $1,000 from a boyfriend and started an apartment-rental business with it.
She was waiting tables in New York and had never worked in real estate.
That was the whole preparation.
A loan, and no idea what she was doing.
Turns out Barbara knew less about the business than anybody else selling apartments.
What she had was that she was already selling them.
So she learned in public, on live deals, with real money and real customers watching.
The mistakes weren't rehearsals.
They were the actual business.
That company became The Corcoran Group.
In 2001 she sold it for $66 million.
Sixty-six million.
Her own line for how it worked is the whole framework in two sentences: "You don't have to get it right.
You just have to get it going."
She later said she hired the same way, for hunger rather than résumé.
A hungry beginner beats a bored expert who has stopped trying.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Get-It-Going Rule
Anna picked up a brush in her late seventies with no training.
Barbara started with a $1,000 loan and no idea what she was doing.
Neither of them got ready first.
They both started in front of people, and the getting-good happened out where everyone could see it.
So you start in front of people before you feel ready.
You start this week instead of next year.
Put it in the drugstore window.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'helping you build profitable businesses 12x faster' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes whatever you feel unqualified to start and gives you the smallest
version you could genuinely publish this week.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt, or just run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise, use the audience below.
- Do not suggest a course, a certification, or more research. Those are the delay this is replacing.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I want to start:
{e.g. a newsletter about moving from agency work into in-house design}
Why I feel unqualified, honestly:
{e.g. I have only done it once, and I still have imposter days about it}
What I have actually done that touches this:
{e.g. made the move myself two years ago, and helped four friends do it since}
What I keep telling myself I need first:
{e.g. a portfolio site, and probably a hundred subscribers before it is worth writing}
How much time I really have this week:
{e.g. two evenings}
For Audience: {e.g. agency designers three to eight years in, tired of client churn}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What I already have — the experience in my inputs that is genuinely useful to somebody one step behind me, named plainly.
2. The smallest publishable thing — what I could actually finish in the time I said I have.
3. The honest framing — one or two sentences saying where I really am, so I am not pretending to be further along.
4. What I can skip — everything in my "need first" list that is not needed first, and why.
5. The next four — what I publish in the following four weeks, each one building on what I learn from the last.
Then tell me what to publish this week, in one sentence, with no conditions attached to it.