Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Ruby’s coaching program with no clients
Ruby is a content strategist, and on the side, she’s launching a coaching program on writing for LinkedIn.
She has built a website, a signup form, an email sequence, and three ads,
all set up to bring clients in without her.
She switches it all on, and not one client signs up.
🧩 Her struggle:
She waits for the website and the ads to bring people in, so she never goes out and finds a single client herself.
That weekend, she’s reading a newsletter with the true story of two founders
whose website also had almost nobody booking at first,
and who built a company now worth more than $80 billion.
It started with two guys and a rented camera.
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🏠 The founders who photographed the apartments
Brian Chesky co-founded Airbnb, the site where people rent spare rooms in strangers’ homes.
When Airbnb was starting, the listings looked bad.
Hosts photographed their own apartments badly, and a badly photographed room doesn’t get booked.
So in the early days, Brian and his co-founder Joe Gebbia rented a camera
and went door to door in New York themselves.
They photographed the apartments and replaced the bad photos with good ones.
Two guys with a camera, photographing one apartment at a time, in one city — that could never work in every city in the world, right?
But the photos did two things.
The listings started booking.
And while they were there taking pictures, they watched hosts struggle to price their own listings.
Get this — Airbnb is now worth more than $80 billion.
Taking every photo themselves could never work in every city.
But seeing good photos get listings booked is what convinced them to later hire professional photographers everywhere.
A week after their own New York photos went up, Airbnb’s weekly revenue doubled, from $200 to $400.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Do Things That Don’t Scale
Brian rented a camera and photographed the apartments,
and the listings started booking.
Paul Graham’s strategy is called Do Things That Don’t Scale.
He co-founded Y Combinator, which puts money into brand-new startups and coaches them.
He laid it out in a 2013 essay.
He says startups don’t take off by themselves: “Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off.”
He names the most common thing founders have to do by hand:
“The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually.
You can’t wait for users to come to you.
You have to go out and get them.”
So you stop waiting for your newsletter, course, or coaching program to start growing on its own.
A handful of people you found yourself, one at a time, beats however many you’re hoping will just show up on their own.
AI makes it easy to send a thousand automatic messages.
That’s why one real message from you stands out.
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🛠️ Ruby’s turn
Remember Ruby, whose coaching program has a website, three ads, and not one client?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it where the people she wants to coach spend their time.
The reply from her AI sidekick is short:
Turn off your ads, and message twenty people yourself this week, one at a time.
She switches off the ads that night.
Then she writes to five people from a LinkedIn writing group, one message each.
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🌅 Six weeks later
Ruby has talked with thirty people who want to write better posts on LinkedIn.
Most of them are stuck on the same thing, the first line of a post.
Her website now describes that problem in their own words.
Your first few clients probably won’t arrive by themselves.
Find your first clients yourself, one at a time, before you build anything that runs without you.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘helping you build a smart AI sidekick so you can work less and enjoy life more’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below turns your waiting-for-growth plan into a list of people to go and get by hand this week.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you’ve built, and how many people are actually on it
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a coaching program for people who want to write better on LinkedIn, and 61 on the list, about 20 of them friendsHow you’ve been trying to grow it, and what you could do by hand, even if it feels embarrassing
- e.g. posting the link on LinkedIn and hoping, and I could message people one at a time or offer to look at a post for freeWhere your people already gather, online or in person
- e.g. two subreddits, a Slack group for marketers, and a monthly meetup in my city
🚀 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 client notes, my calendar, or my session notes, 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 mid-career professionals who want to write better posts on LinkedIn.
- 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.
- Every action must be something I do personally, to a named person or a specific place. No ads, no automations, no "post consistently".
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I have built and put out, and how many people are actually on it:
{e.g. a coaching program for people who want to write better on LinkedIn, and 61 on the list, about 20 of them friends}
How I have been trying to grow it, and what I would find embarrassing but could genuinely do:
{e.g. posting the link on LinkedIn and hoping, and I could message people one at a time or offer to look at a post for free}
Where my exact people physically or digitally gather:
{e.g. two subreddits, a Slack group for marketers, and a monthly meetup in my city}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What I am waiting on — every part of my plan that assumes people will arrive by themselves.
2. The manual version — for each, what doing it by hand looks like, specifically, with real places and real people.
3. This week's twenty — twenty individual people or places I could personally reach in the next seven days.
4. What I say — the actual message, written to one person, that would not make me cringe to send.
5. What I will learn — the thing I can only find out by doing it manually, that no dashboard would tell me.
Then tell me the first five to contact on Monday, and in what order.