Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Wes’s unsent first issue
Wes is a data analyst who writes a newsletter on the side, explaining money numbers in plain words.
The first issue of his newsletter has been finished and sitting on his laptop for three weeks.
He hasn’t sent it, because he keeps thinking he isn’t expert enough yet.
He tells himself he needs one more certificate and a few more years of experience
before he has earned the right to write about money.
🧩 His struggle:
He’s waiting for somebody to tell him he’s ready, so nobody ever reads a word he writes.
On Saturday, he’s watching a video his younger brother sent him,
about the true story of a nineteen-year-old in England
who also had no training in fashion or in running a company,
and still built a clothing brand valued at over $1.3 billion.
Nobody ever told him he was ready.
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👕 The pizza delivery driver with a sewing machine
Ben Francis taught himself to make gym clothes in his parents’ garage in Bromsgrove, near Birmingham in England.
His tools were a sewing machine and a screen printer.
He was nineteen, it was 2012, and he was delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut in the evenings to pay for it.
He had no fashion background.
He had no business background.
He had nothing anybody would have called a qualification.
So he made shirts and mailed them free to the fitness YouTubers he watched.
Some of them wore the shirts on camera.
Their viewers saw every bad stitch and every shirt that didn’t fit.
He fixed each mistake in the next batch, where everyone could see.
That garage project is Gymshark.
In 2020 an investment deal valued it at over $1.3 billion, and Ben still owned most of it.
He had even stepped down as CEO in 2017, because he didn’t feel ready to run a company that size.
He only took the job back in 2021.
He felt unqualified because he kept measuring himself against brands like Nike and Adidas.
Next to them, a nineteen-year-old with a sewing machine looked like nothing.
Nike and Adidas had started small and clumsy too.
But nobody had filmed their first bad years, so all he could see was the finished companies.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Permission Myth
Ben taught himself on a sewing machine at nineteen, and built a $1.3 billion clothing brand.
This hack is called The Permission Myth.
He didn’t wait to be qualified.
There was nobody to wait for, because nobody hands out permission to start a business.
Turns out the same is true of a newsletter.
There’s no editor, no board, no exam that clears you to publish.
If you’re waiting for someone to say you’re allowed, you’ll wait forever.
Nobody is going to say it.
So you send issue one of your newsletter this week, instead of waiting for somebody to tell you that you’re allowed.
What you already know is enough to write it.
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🛠️ Wes’s turn
So what about Wes, and the first issue he finished three weeks ago but still hasn’t sent?
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what he thinks he’s missing.
He has never worked in finance.
His AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Nobody hands out permission to write a newsletter, so send the issue you already finished this week.
He reads the issue over one more time.
On Sunday morning, he sends it to the twenty-six people on his list, most of them friends from work.
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🌅 Three months later
Wes has sent an issue every Sunday since.
He still has never worked in finance.
Two hundred people read his newsletter now,
and some of them write back with money questions of their own.
Nobody is coming to tell you that you’re ready.
Send the issue you already finished, and fix its mistakes in the next issue, in public.
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 takes the qualification you think you are missing and shows you what you already have instead.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you want to publish, and the qualification you think you’re missing
- e.g. a newsletter that explains money numbers in plain words, and I have never worked in financeWho you’re afraid will see through you, and what you’ve actually done
- In years and specifics. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. people who already work in finance, and I have been a data analyst for eight years and explain our sales numbers to managers every quarterThe question your future readers keep asking you in real life
- e.g. what does the interest rate on my credit card actually cost me in a year
🚀 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 with ordinary jobs who want money numbers, like interest rates and paychecks, explained in plain words.
- 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 reassure me. Do not tell me I am ready. Show me the specific evidence, or say plainly that a gap is real and what the smallest honest version looks like anyway.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I want to publish, and the qualification I think I am missing:
{e.g. a newsletter that explains money numbers in plain words, and I have never worked in finance}
Who I am afraid will see through me, and what I have actually done, in years and specifics:
{e.g. people who already work in finance, and I have been a data analyst for eight years and explain our sales numbers to managers every quarter}
The question my future readers keep asking me in real life:
{e.g. what does the interest rate on my credit card actually cost me in a year}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. What I already have — my real experience restated as things a reader would pay attention to, in plain words.
2. The gap, honestly — what I genuinely do not know yet, named without softening.
3. Why the gap does not block issue one — or, if it does, exactly what issue one has to be instead.
4. The sentence that says where I am — one honest line about my own position, that is neither apology nor bluff.
5. Issue one — the specific piece I can write this week using only what I already know.
Then tell me the date to send it, and the one person to tell first.