Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 5-7 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Kate’s search for something to sell
Kate is an HR manager with a podcast for people changing careers in their 40s.
Every Sunday night, she brainstorms products to sell,
and every idea would take months to build.
Then a listener asks for the questions she uses to prepare each interview.
🧩 Her struggle:
She only looks for new ideas, so she misses the product a listener already asked for.
At lunch, she reads a newsletter with the true story of two men at a small web design company
who also never meant to sell a tool they made for themselves,
and it earned them millions of dollars a year.
Their clients were the first to ask for it.
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🏕️ The tool they built so they’d stop embarrassing themselves
In the early 2000s, Jason Fried ran a small company in Chicago called 37signals.
They were three people, building websites for other companies.
Building a website for a client means keeping track of a lot of things.
The files the client sends.
The list of tasks still to do.
And dozens of messages going back and forth about every small change.
Jason’s team ran all of that over email.
Email works fine for the first few days of a project.
Then the messages pile up, files get buried, and nobody can find anything.
The more projects they took on, the worse the mess got.
Email, chat, spreadsheets, phone calls, documents, all scattered everywhere.
Jason says they were “embarrassing ourselves” in front of clients.
So a programmer on the team, David Heinemeier Hansson, built a fix.
It was a simple web page, one per project.
The client, the to-do list, the messages, and the files, all in one place.
They called it Basecamp, and they used it to run their own client projects.
Then the clients noticed.
They kept asking, “What is this? We could totally use this for our own projects!”
So on February 4, 2004, Jason and David opened Basecamp up to anyone.
One project was free, and bigger plans cost $19, $39 or $59 a month.
Turns out that about a year later, Basecamp was making more money than building websites for clients.
So they stopped building websites for other people.
Five years after launch, more than three million people had a Basecamp account.
Jason and David wrote that it was making millions of dollars a year in profit.
They never took money from investors.
Jason says Basecamp is still profitable more than twenty years later.
And building Basecamp left David with something else he could share.
To build Basecamp quickly, David had first built himself a set of shortcuts.
They were ready-made pieces of code he could reuse, instead of writing everything from scratch.
When Basecamp was done, he took those shortcuts out and packaged them up.
Then he gave them away for free, to any programmer who wanted them.
It is called Ruby on Rails, and programmers all over the world still use it to build websites today.
Jason and David never planned to sell software.
They built Basecamp only to clean up their own messy projects.
It became a product the day their clients saw it and asked if they could use it too.
They were not trying to build a product.
They were trying to do their job better, and the product came out of that.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Sell your by-products
Jason and David built a tool to clean up their own mess,
and it became Basecamp, which is still profitable more than twenty years later.
This strategy is called Sell your by-products.
The name comes from Jason and David’s book Rework.
Their point is simple.
Whenever you make one thing, you end up making other things along the way, without meaning to.
A sawmill cuts wood, and ends up with piles of sawdust.
A web design firm builds websites, and ends up with a tool for managing projects.
Those leftovers are the by-products.
Most people throw them away.
Jason and David say: sell them.
Jason and David didn’t go looking for a new product.
They already had one, and their clients showed them what it was good for.
So the next time someone asks for a sheet or a tool you made for your own work, that is your product.
Tidy it up, put a price on it, and sell it.
It already works, because you have been using it every week.
Your AI sidekick can turn the tool you built for yourself into one a stranger can follow, in an hour.
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🛠️ Kate’s turn
Back to Kate, the HR manager who has spent months of Sunday nights looking for something to sell to her podcast listeners.
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it everything she has made to run her show.
Her AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Your interview question sheet is your product, because a listener already asked you for it.
Kate opens the sheet and adds a short note under each question, explaining why she asks it.
By Sunday, it’s on her website, with a price on it.
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🌅 Two months later
Kate hasn’t brainstormed a new product since.
She mentions the question sheet at the end of every episode.
Listeners use it to prepare their own coffee chats with people in the job they want,
and eleven of them have written back to say it helped.
You probably have a sheet like hers, made for your own work, sitting in a folder.
When people ask for the tool you built for yourself, put a price on it and sell it to them.
That’s it, my fellow renegades!
Yours ‘helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below goes through what you have already made and finds the byproduct worth selling.
🧰 What you’ll need
What your work is, and the things you built for your own use
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. I’m an HR manager with a podcast for people changing careers in their 40s. I built an interview question sheet, a guest booking checklist and an episode notes templateWhat you made once and keep reusing, and what people ask you to send them
- e.g. a guest prep email that three other podcasters now copy, and listeners ask for the interview questions constantlyWhat you think is too obvious to be worth anything
- e.g. all of it, honestly — it is just how I work
🚀 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 changing careers in their 40s.
- 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.
- You may not propose anything I would have to build from scratch. Every candidate must already exist in some form, even a rough one.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What my actual work is, and things I built for my own use:
{e.g. I'm an HR manager with a podcast for people changing careers in their 40s. I built an interview question sheet, a guest booking checklist and an episode notes template}
Things I made once for somebody and reused since, and what people ask me to send them:
{e.g. a guest prep email that three other podcasters now copy, and listeners ask for the interview questions constantly}
What I assume is too obvious to be worth anything:
{e.g. all of it, honestly — it is just how I work}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The byproducts — everything I have already made that exists independently of the job it was made for.
2. Who else needs it — for each one, the specific person outside my own work who has the same problem.
3. The strongest candidate — which one to package first, and what makes it the one.
4. What packaging means — the smallest work to turn my private version into something somebody could buy.
5. The price — what it is worth, based on what it saves the buyer rather than what it cost me.
Then tell me which item I dismissed as obvious that people keep asking me for.