Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Nate’s two evenings of editing
Nate is a software engineer with a podcast for people learning to code after 30.
He spends both of his two free evenings a week editing the audio himself, cutting out the ums and fixing the volume.
So Sunday night comes, and the next episode, the one job only he can do, is still not recorded.
🧩 His struggle:
He never puts a price on his own hours, so an editor at eighty dollars an episode looks too expensive.
At lunch, a coworker tells him the true story of a founder
who also did every small job himself,
and within a year tripled his company’s revenue.
He figured out the fix while he could barely get out of bed.
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📉 The founder who priced his week from bed
Dan Martell built and sold three software companies, and now coaches software founders.
His coaching company has coached more than 3,000 of them.
He wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time, and the book opens with a founder named Stuart.
Stuart was thirty-four.
He had studied finance and worked on Wall Street.
In 2015 he started a company that made apps to help small businesses sell online.
Four years later he had ten employees, a dozen apps, and holy moly, more than 640,000 people using them every day.
He did almost everything by himself.
He kept the company’s accounts himself, because he had studied accounting.
He checked every line of code his developers wrote, because he knew how to code.
He even booked his own flights and set up his own meetings.
In late 2019 he led a rebuild of every app, working fourteen-hour days, seven days a week.
They finished by Christmas, so he took his wife and her sister to Disneyland.
Ten minutes into the park, he felt dizzy.
His chest went tight.
He could not breathe.
He found a bench and told them, “I’m fine. Go on. I’ll catch up.”
Back home, the tests showed his heart was fine.
The problem was anxiety.
Soon the panic attacks came twice a week.
By March 2020 he was in bed most days, and could not even get through a video call.
Lying there, he found Dan’s videos, and watched all of them over two weeks.
Then he did what the videos said.
He wrote down every task in his week, and put a dollar value next to each one.
Stuart: “I’ve always been mindful of my time. But when I wrote it down, I realized, Oh! I shouldn’t be doing this.”
An hour of Stuart’s time was worth about $100 to his company.
The work filling most of his day, checking code and managing small tasks, was worth about $10 an hour.
Dan put it bluntly: “Essentially, he was costing his company $90 an hour most of his workday.”
For years, Stuart had been spending his $100 hours on $10 work.
So he hired two people.
He spent a month filming himself doing every task, so they could copy him.
Two months later he had thirty hours a week back.
His days went from eleven hours to six.
Within a year, his company’s revenue had tripled.
His own income had doubled.
And the panic attacks were gone.
Stuart had been losing that $90 an hour for years.
He just never noticed, because nobody ever sent him a bill for it.
The moment he wrote a price next to each task, the loss became real, and he fixed it.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Buy Back Your Time
Stuart worked out that his hour was worth $100 and saw he was doing $10 work all day.
So he hired two people to do that work instead.
Within a year, his company’s revenue had tripled.
Dan’s hack is called Buy Back Your Time, and it is the title of his book.
Work out what one hour of your time is worth.
Not earning from the newsletter yet?
Use what your day job pays you per hour.
Then look at every task in your week.
If somebody else would do a task for much less than that, stop doing it yourself.
Stuart didn’t hand off work because he was lazy.
He saw that an hour spent on cheap work was an hour of expensive work thrown away.
So when Tuesday night goes to editing the podcast audio again, you stop.
You hand that work to your AI sidekick, which costs almost nothing, and you record the next episode instead.
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🛠️ Nate’s turn
Back to Nate, who spends both of his free evenings editing podcast audio instead of recording.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it how he spent every hour of last week.
His AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Your hour is worth about $58, and editing is the cheapest work in your week.
Hand the editing to an AI tool that costs almost nothing, and spend both evenings recording the episodes only you can make.
He sets up the tool that night.
On Tuesday evening, he records a new episode instead of cleaning up the last one.
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🌅 Two months later
Nate hasn’t edited an episode himself since.
He records on both of his free evenings now.
A new episode goes out every week.
Listeners write in with questions, and he answers them on the show.
There might be a job in your week that somebody else could do for much less than your hour is worth.
Write a price next to every task in your week, and hand off the tasks worth less than your hour.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘bringing you cheat codes for 25x faster business success’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below works out what your hour is worth and what to hand off first.
🧰 What you’ll need
What your side project earned in the last twelve months, and the hours you put in
- Not earning from it yet? Use what your day job pays you per hour.
- e.g. the podcast earns nothing yet, and my day job pays me about $58 an hourHow you spent last week, roughly by hours, and what only you can do
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. 6h editing the podcast, 2h email, 1h booking guests, 1h social, and only I can do the recording and the interviewsWhat you have refused to pay for
- e.g. an audio editor, because eighty dollars an episode felt like money I don’t have
🚀 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 learning to code after thirty.
- 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.
- Put a dollar value on every task before recommending anything. If a task cannot be valued, say so and treat it as unvalued rather than assuming it is important.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What the business earned in the last twelve months and the hours I actually worked on it, or, if it earns nothing yet, what my day job pays me per hour:
{e.g. the podcast earns nothing yet, and my day job pays me about $58 an hour}
What I spent last week doing, roughly by hours, and what only I can do:
{e.g. 6h editing the podcast, 2h email, 1h booking guests, 1h social, and only I can do the recording and the interviews}
What I have refused to pay for:
{e.g. an audio editor, because eighty dollars an episode felt like money I don't have}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My rate — what an hour of mine is currently worth, with the arithmetic shown plainly.
2. The week, valued — each task from last week with a value per hour, and the gap against my rate.
3. The cost of doing it myself — what last week actually cost me in the difference, as one number.
4. First to go — the task to hand off first, what it would cost, and what that buys back.
5. The objection — the honest case against hiring at my revenue, and whether the numbers answer it.
Then tell me the task I will defend keeping, and whether I am defending it for a good reason.