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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Cara writes a weekly newsletter about real Mexican home cooking.
She started it to rescue taco night from the processed seasoning packet.
She believes authentic Mexican food is weeknight-simple once someone shows you.
Her readers feel it too — tired of bland tacos, hungry for the real thing.
⛳️ Problem:
Cara makes a bit from sponsor shoutouts and one-off cooking workshops.
Each one means another pitch, another live session, another draining week.
She keeps hearing "just make a product" but has no idea where to start.
A year in, she's busy every week and the income never builds on itself.
Her problem: how to turn her cooking skill into income that compounds.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The ladders of wealth creation
Nathan Barry is the founder of ConvertKit, an email platform for creators.
He argues most of us get stuck on the lowest rung: trading time for money.
Barry names four rungs, but one of them — a services business — means hiring a team.
For a company of one, three rungs matter: trading time, productizing, then products.
Each rung up earns while you sleep a little more.
Barry's argument: climb one rung at a time, and let your audience carry you up.
Barry climbed his own ladders.
He freelanced design by the hour, then sold ebooks for $250,000 in a year.
Then he built ConvertKit, now around $40 million a year.
🚗 The steps
🪜 Step 1 — Spot the rung you're stuck on.
Trace your income back to its source.
If every dollar costs you an hour, you're on the bottom rung.
Cara looks at her last three months.
Every dollar came from a live workshop or a sponsor call.
The day she stops, the money stops. Bottom rung.
📦 Step 2 — Productize what you already repeat.
Take the service you keep delivering live and fix it into a package.
Same skill, set shape, one price.
Cara turns her scattered workshops into one "Taco Night Bootcamp."
Set curriculum, set price, same four sessions every time.
Now she's selling a thing, not just her hours.
🚀 Step 3 — Climb to a product you make once.
Record or write the package once, then sell it again and again.
That's the rung that earns while you sleep.
Cara films the bootcamp once.
It becomes a $39 self-paced course on her site.
It sells on a Tuesday while she's at the farmers market.
The prompt below maps your rungs and the next one to climb.
You just tell it how you earn today and the skill behind it.
🧸 One skill + three rungs climbed = income that finally compounds.
🏄♀️ The prompt
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 as is, your AI sidekick will use the example values and will give 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.
Inputs:
How I earn from my work today (every income source, and whether each one costs me hours):
{e.g. sponsor shoutouts (a pitch each time), live cooking workshops (an evening each), a small Patreon with monthly live Q&As}
The skill I keep delivering over and over (the thing people pay me for, that I repeat each time):
{e.g. teaching beginners to cook real Mexican food from scratch — same lessons every workshop}
My audience (rough size + how they found me):
{e.g. ~3,000 newsletter readers, mostly from Pinterest and word of mouth}
For Outcome: {e.g. a map of which rung I'm on and the exact next product to build}
Outputs:
1. My current rung — name which one (time-for-money / services / productized service / products) most of my income comes from today.
2. The productized version — how to take the service I repeat live and turn it into one fixed package with a set price.
3. The first real product — the one thing I could make once and sell many times, built from what I already teach. Name it, price it, describe it in 3 lines.
4. The climb plan — the order to move up the rungs over the next 90 days without dropping the income I have now.
Then name the ONE time-for-money task I should stop saying yes to so I have room to build the product.
One rung named honestly.
One service turned into a package.
One product that sells while you sleep.
That's it, my fellow trailblazers!
Yours 'helping you build your own AI sidekick, that works and makes money while you sleep' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️