Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Ruby’s sales page that strangers leave
Ruby is a content strategist who just finished building a course on writing for LinkedIn.
She puts a long sales page on her website, full of reasons to buy, and sends every visitor straight to it.
Hundreds of strangers land on the page, read a few lines, and leave.
🧩 Her struggle:
She asks strangers to buy before she knows anything about them, so every no teaches her nothing.
On Sunday, she’s reading a newsletter that tells the true story of a founder
who also needed a better way to sell to strangers,
and later built an app that passed $3 million a year.
His best stretch of sales wore his whole team out.
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📊 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.
They met one person at a time, all day.
Those two 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.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Scorecard Front Door
Daniel did not pitch strangers in a theater anymore.
He gave them a short quiz, and within months more than 500 people a month were filling it in.
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.
A scorecard for a newsletter course 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.
Your AI sidekick can write the questions and build the quiz in an afternoon.
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🛠️ Ruby’s turn
So what about Ruby, whose sales page sends hundreds of strangers away without a word?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what her course fixes.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Stop sending strangers straight to your sales page, and give them a five-minute quiz about their own LinkedIn posts first.
She builds the quiz that weekend.
On Monday, she puts it on her website where the sales page used to be.
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🌅 Three months later
More than three hundred people have taken Ruby’s quiz.
Twelve of them booked a call with her on their own.
She knew each person’s answers before the call started, so she knew what to say.
Your sales page might be asking strangers to buy before you know anything about them.
Give strangers a short quiz first, and let the quiz tell both of you whether they need what you sell.
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 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below builds the short scorecard that goes where your sales page currently is.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you sell, and the problem it fixes
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. a course on writing for LinkedIn, because people post every week and cannot tell why nobody commentsHow you can tell in a conversation that somebody has that problem badly, and what people get wrong about their own situation
- e.g. I ask what their last post got, and they think a quiet week is the algorithm’s fault, not a writing problemWhere you send people now
- e.g. a sales page with three packages on it
🚀 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 course outline, my lesson drafts, or my sales page, 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 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.
- 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 writing for LinkedIn, because people post every week and cannot tell why nobody comments}
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 what their last post got, and they think a quiet week is the algorithm's fault, not a writing 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.