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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🥤 The two white cups on a folding table
In 1975, Coca-Cola was the number one soft drink in America.
Pepsi was a distant second.
Pepsi had a problem.
When people were asked which cola they liked, they said Coke.
But Pepsi had quietly run its own taste tests.
Each person got two cups with no labels, one Coke and one Pepsi, and did not know which was which.
They sipped both and pointed to the one that tasted better.
Many of the people who had said "Coke" pointed to the Pepsi cup.
In other words, people loved the Coke name more than the Coke taste.
The trouble was, nobody outside Pepsi had seen those tests.
Pepsi could have run ads saying "Pepsi tastes better."
Nobody would believe an ad like that, because every drink company says the same thing.
So Pepsi did something different.
It took the same test out of the lab and into shopping malls in Dallas, Texas, on folding tables.
On each table sat two white cups, with no labels.
A shopper walks up.
A person in a Pepsi shirt asks her to sip from both cups and pick the one she likes more.
She picks one.
Only then does the Pepsi person turn the cups around and show her which cola was in each.
Get this — a lot of people who walked up sure they liked Coke had picked the Pepsi cup.
Pepsi filmed their surprised faces and turned them into TV commercials.
Pepsi called it the Pepsi Challenge, and by the early 1980s it was running in malls across the country.
Coca-Cola got worried enough to run its own private taste tests on more than 190,000 people.
Then, in April 1985, Coke did something it had never done in almost a hundred years.
It changed its recipe.
People hated the new one so much that Coke brought the old recipe back within three months.
Pepsi never told anyone "we taste better."
It put two cups in front of people and let them find out for themselves.
⛳️ The problem
Pepsi did not argue with anybody in the mall, it put two cups on a table and let each person decide for themselves.
Back at our desk, we have just finished our online course, and we are proud of it.
So we put a long sales page on the website, full of reasons to buy, and send every visitor straight to it.
Hundreds of strangers land on the page, read a few lines, and leave.
We have no idea who they were, or why they said no, because we never asked them a single question.
So we rewrite the sales page again, and again, and it changes nothing.
Pepsi did not write a better ad, it gave people a two-sip test and let the test do the convincing.
There is a short quiz that tells you who those strangers are, and whether they need the course, before you mention a price.
A burnt-out founder put it on his website, and 171 strangers used it in the first month.
Here is what he put on the page.
📊 The man who was too tired to keep selling
Daniel Priestley runs a training company.
It teaches business owners how to become the best-known person in their field.
In 2013 his team ran three big events, one each in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.
Each was a full day in a theater that held 600 people.
At the end of each event, they invited people to book a one-on-one meeting with the team.
About 200 people from each event said yes.
So for two weeks straight, Daniel and his small team sat in meeting rooms from 8 in the morning until 6:30 at night.
One person at a time, all day.
Those six weeks brought in close to 1.5 million Australian dollars.
It was the best run of sales Daniel had ever had.
It also wore him and his team out.
And every one of those sales had needed a theater, a stage, and a room full of meetings.
Daniel needed a way to find the same kind of people without all of that.
His colleague Steven Oddy had an idea.
He built a short online quiz for business owners.
You answer some questions about your own business.
At the end you get a score, plus a short report on what you do well and what you should fix first.
They called it a scorecard.
In the first month, 171 business owners filled it in.
Each one's answers told Daniel's team dozens of things about them: how big the business was, what frustrated them, what they wanted.
Within months, more than 500 people a month were filling it in.
Many of them booked a meeting on their own, with no theater and no stage.
When they showed up, most brought a printout of their own report, and asked how to raise their score.
Daniel now knew more about a stranger before the meeting than he used to learn during one.
His team turned the quiz into a product other businesses could use, and called it ScoreApp.
In 2023, Daniel wrote that ScoreApp had passed $3 million a year in revenue,
with more than 4,000 businesses paying to run their own scorecards.
Daniel stopped selling to strangers.
He gave them a quiz first, and let the quiz tell both of them whether they needed his services.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Scorecard Front Door
Pepsi did not tell shoppers "we taste better."
It handed them two cups and let them find out.
Daniel did not pitch strangers in a theater anymore.
He gave them a short quiz and let the quiz do the talking.
This tactic is called The Scorecard Front Door.
Before you sell anything, give people a short test about themselves: a few questions, a score, and what to fix first.
They learn something true about themselves, even if they never buy.
You learn who they are and what they need, before you ever say the word "buy."
So when a stranger lands on your course's website, you do not show them the sales page first.
You show them a five-minute scorecard instead.
Ours might ask three things.
Have you sent a first issue yet?
How many people read it?
Have you ever asked one of them what they'd pay for?
The readers who need help book a call themselves, and you already know what to say to each one.
Put the cups on the table.
That's it, my fellow anti-status-quo-ers!
Yours 'helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below builds the short scorecard that goes where your sales page currently is.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use your own files if it can see them, and the example values if it cannot.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my course outline, my lesson drafts, or my sales page, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- 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 assume board members and finance leads at nonprofits under $2M in revenue.
- Anything I leave as an example, treat as real. Anything I delete, fill in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption.
- The result must be genuinely useful to somebody who never buys anything. If a question only exists to qualify a lead, cut it. No question may be a disguised pitch.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I sell, and the problem it fixes:
{e.g. a course on setting up financial controls for small charities, because trustees cannot tell from the accounts whether the charity is solvent}
How I can tell in a conversation whether somebody has that problem badly, and what people get wrong about their own situation:
{e.g. I ask who signs off payments and how long the last audit took, and they think slow reporting is an accounting problem, not a controls problem}
Where I currently send people:
{e.g. a sales page with three packages on it}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The questions — six to ten, each one something I would genuinely ask, phrased so answering is easy.
2. The scoring — what the answers mean, and the two or three result bands with what each says about them.
3. The useful result — what each band gets told, written to be worth their time even if they never buy.
4. Who it sends away — the band that does not need me, and what I tell them instead.
5. What I learn — the answers that change what I would say next, and the message that follows each band.
Then tell me the one question whose answer would tell me the most, and whether I remembered to ask it.