Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Miles’s blank first issue
Miles is a customer success manager who wants to start a newsletter for new dads who work from home.
His first issue is still unwritten, because he doesn’t think anyone has a reason to read him yet.
He’s not an expert, he has no audience, and he has no past work to show.
A year has gone by, and issue one is still a blank page.
🧩 His struggle:
He waits to become an expert before he writes, so he never gets the practice that would make him one.
At a baby music class on Saturday, another dad tells him the true story of a woman
who also had no experience in the business she wanted to start,
and later sold her company for $66 million.
And she started with almost nothing.
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🏠 The receptionist with a thousand dollars
Barbara Corcoran borrowed $1,000 from a boyfriend and started an apartment-rental business with it.
She grew up the second of ten children, in a working-class family in New Jersey.
At school, she was called the dumb kid.
Years later, she found out she had dyslexia.
She finished high school as a D student,
and by 23 she had already worked twenty different jobs.
She was working as a receptionist at a real estate company, and had never sold an apartment in her life.
Her only preparation was a $1,000 loan, and she had no idea what she was doing.
Turns out Barbara knew less about the business than anybody else selling apartments.
But she had already started selling apartments.
So she learned in public, on live deals, with real money and real customers watching.
She made her mistakes on real deals, with real customers.
In the mid-1970s, she started a newsletter called The Corcoran Report, full of data on New York apartment prices.
Seven years in, her business partner, the boyfriend who lent her the $1,000, told her he was going to marry her secretary.
She split off and started her own firm.
That company became The Corcoran Group.
In 2001 she sold it for $66 million.
Her own line for it: “You don’t have to get it right.
You just have to get it going.”
She later said she hired people who were eager to learn, over people with better résumés.
A hungry beginner beats a bored expert who has stopped trying.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Get-It-Going Rule
Barbara started with a $1,000 loan and no idea what she was doing,
and sold her company for $66 million.
What she did has a name: The Get-It-Going Rule.
She didn’t get ready first.
She started in front of people, and got good while everyone could see it.
So you start in front of people before you feel ready.
You start this week instead of next year.
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🛠️ Miles’s turn
Let’s check in on Miles, and the newsletter for new dads he still hasn’t started because he doesn’t feel like an expert.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and tells it what he has already done: a whole year of working from home with a new baby.
His AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
A year of working from home with a baby is enough to write issue one, so write it this week.
That Sunday, he writes issue one about his first month at home with his son.
He sends it to the twelve dads in his group chat.
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🌅 Ten issues later
Miles has sent an issue every Sunday since.
He still doesn’t call himself an expert.
Ninety dads read his newsletter anyway,
and some of them write back with their own questions.
You don’t need to be an expert before you start.
Put your first piece of work in front of people this week, before you feel ready.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘helping you build profitable businesses 25x faster’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes whatever you feel unqualified to start and gives you the smallest
version you could genuinely publish this week.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you want to start, and why you feel unqualified
- e.g. a newsletter for new dads who work from home, and I have only been a dad for a yearWhat you’ve actually done that touches this
- However small. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. worked from home through my son’s first year, and helped four friends from work set up the same routine sinceWhat you keep telling yourself you need first, and how much time you really have this week
- e.g. a proper website and a hundred subscribers, and two evenings
🚀 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 new dads who work from home, with a baby or a toddler in the house.
- 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 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, and why I feel unqualified:
{e.g. a newsletter for new dads who work from home, and I have only been a dad for a year}
What I have actually done that touches this:
{e.g. worked from home through my son's first year, and helped four friends from work set up the same routine since}
What I keep telling myself I need first, and how much time I really have this week:
{e.g. a proper website and a hundred subscribers, and two evenings}
======================== 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.