Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♂️ Ethan’s Monday and Friday
Ethan is a product manager who writes a newsletter on the side.
On Monday he was sure his newsletter idea was going to work.
By Friday, after one issue got no replies, he was sure it never would.
So he starts looking for a new topic, and eleven weeks of work is about to be thrown away.
His struggle:
He treats one quiet week as proof the idea is wrong, so he’s about to quit too early.
That night, while scrolling, he comes across the real story of a man
who also had almost no readers for months,
and later helped build writing businesses that crossed $10 million in sales.
Guess how long the quiet part lasted.
✍️ Nine months, three hundred readers
Dickie Bush hit publish on another post almost nobody read.
He was working a full-time finance job at the time, and the year was 2020.
He did that over and over for nine months.
Then, in September, he looked at his subscriber list.
About three hundred people were on it.
Half of those three hundred he’d signed up himself.
Nine months of work.
A hundred and fifty strangers.
Ouch.
If you wanted evidence that something wasn’t working, that’s what it looks like.
He kept publishing anyway.
Then he and a writer called Nicolas Cole turned what he’d learned into a course called Ship 30 for 30.
It teaches people to write online for thirty days straight.
More than ten thousand writers have been through it.
Get this — together with two other writing businesses they built, Ship 30 for 30 has crossed $10 million in sales.
Now notice what did not happen.
Dickie did not suddenly get better in month ten.
The same writing that looked like failure for nine months was what people later paid for.
The writing stayed the same.
What changed was how many people were reading it.
He kept going on the days the numbers said he was an idiot, because he believed the idea was right.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Genius-Idiot Rollercoaster
Dickie published for nine months to three hundred people, half of whom he signed up himself.
This move is called The Genius-Idiot Rollercoaster.
The swing between feeling like a genius and feeling like an idiot is normal.
He didn’t have better days than us.
He just kept working on the days that felt like failure.
So one bad day stops being a reason to quit.
The bad weeks stop costing you the project.
🛠️ Ethan’s turn
Now, back to Ethan, who was about to change topics after one quiet week.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and gives it his real numbers.
His AI sidekick puts it plainly:
At sixty-two subscribers, one quiet week says nothing, so keep going.
He stops looking for a new topic.
On Sunday, the next issue goes out, on the same topic as all the others.
🌅 Nine months later
Ethan hasn’t changed topics once.
Some weeks he still feels the way he did that Friday.
Four hundred people read his newsletter now, and replies come in most weeks.
Your quiet week doesn’t mean the idea is wrong.
On the days you’re sure you’re not good enough, do the work anyway.
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 separates your bad-day feelings from what your numbers actually show, and gives you something to
read on the bad days.
🧰 What you’ll need
How long you’ve been publishing, how often, and the actual numbers
- However small.
- e.g. eleven weeks, one issue most Sundays, missed two, 62 subscribers, about 20 opens, four replies everWhat you tell yourself on a good day, and on a bad day
- e.g. good: this is finally clicking, I should go all in. Bad: nobody cares, I picked the wrong topicWhy you believed this idea would work in the first place
- e.g. every first-time product manager I know is drowning and nobody writes plainly for them
🚀 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 first-time product managers.
- 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.
- Be honest and kind. Do not cheer me up with numbers that are not there, and do not agree that I am failing.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
How long I have been publishing, how often, and the actual numbers, however small:
{e.g. eleven weeks, one issue most Sundays, missed two, 62 subscribers, about 20 opens, four replies ever}
What I tell myself on a good day, and what I tell myself on a bad day:
{e.g. good: this is finally clicking, I should go all in. Bad: nobody cares, I picked the wrong topic}
Why I believed this idea would work in the first place:
{e.g. every first-time product manager I know is drowning and nobody writes plainly for them}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. Weather or evidence — sort my good-day and bad-day statements into feelings versus things a number actually supports.
2. What the numbers can and cannot say at this size — be blunt about where they say nothing yet.
3. My original reason — restate why I believed this works, in my own words, so I can check whether anything real has changed.
4. My bad-day note — five lines I can reread when I feel like giving up, using only true things.
5. The real stop condition — the specific evidence that would honestly mean I should change direction, decided now while I am calm.
Then name the ONE decision I have been about to make on a bad day that should wait for a calm one.