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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Jenna writes a Sunday newsletter about small-town Southern home cooking.
Each week she shares one dish from a small town that most cookbooks skip over.
To her, the best comfort food comes from home kitchens, not from restaurants.
And her readers? Mostly busy parents who want honest, home-style meals for their families.
⛳️ Problem:
Six months in, the number of readers who open her emails slipped from 52 out of 100 down to 38.
Two friends told her to make the newsletter broader, and cover all American cooking instead.
A bigger topic, they said, would grow her list much faster.
By Friday, she already has three drafts of a new, broader newsletter ready to go.
Her struggle:
Her numbers dipped, and now she wants to throw out the niche she picked.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Genius-Idiot Rollercoaster
Think of a kid learning to ride a bike for the very first time.
One minute she's gliding along, sure she's a natural.
The next minute she wobbles, tips over, and feels like she'll never get it.
Neither feeling is telling her the truth.
She isn't a genius, and she isn't hopeless — she's just learning.
The only real mistake would be to give up after the fall.
Building a newsletter feels the exact same way.
Some weeks your numbers jump and you feel like a genius.
Some weeks they dip, and a little voice says, "See? You're just not good at this."
Two writers named Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush gave this up-and-down ride a name.
They call it the genius-idiot rollercoaster, and they teach it to every beginner.
Together they've built writing courses that have sold over $10 million.
Get this — Bush lived it himself.
He wrote online for nine quiet months, with barely any readers, before one post finally took off.
Both the high weeks and the low weeks lie to you — the winners just keep showing up.
🚗 So Jenna tried it her way.
That's exactly where Jenna was, with her Southern home-cooking newsletter.
Her opens were sliding, and she was ready to quit her niche.
Then she remembered: a dip is part of the ride, not a reason to quit.
Plot twist: the panic was lying to her.
Instead of trusting the panic, she sat down and looked at the real numbers.
Yes, her opens had dropped from 52 out of 100 down to 38.
But she found that two of her emails had landed in the rarely-checked "promotions" folder by mistake.
And the number of readers writing back to her had actually doubled in those same weeks.
Turns out — the dip was real, but it wasn't the whole story.
So instead of going broad, she emailed her 100 most active readers one simple question.
She asked them which kind of cooking they wanted her to cover next.
Sixty-one of them wrote back within two days, and most of them asked for Cajun food.
So she didn't quit her niche. She went even deeper into it.
Four issues later, her opens had climbed back up to 49 out of 100.
Done. She stayed, and it worked.
🧸 A slow week isn't a reason to quit. It's part of the ride — keep showing up.
The prompt below acts as your calm, no-drama coach when a dip hits.
You just tell it how you feel this week and what actually happened.
🏄♀️ 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 it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an 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:
This week I feel like (pick one): GENIUS or IDIOT
{e.g. IDIOT}
What actually happened this week (the events that triggered the feeling — just the facts, no story yet):
{e.g. open rate dipped from 52% to 38% over six weeks, two issues hit promotions tabs, reply volume actually doubled}
My niche and what I've built so far (so the coach knows what's at stake):
{e.g. a Sunday newsletter on small-town Southern home cooking, 6 months in, 4,000 subscribers}
For Audience: {e.g. busy parents who want real home-style comfort food, not the restaurant version}
For Outcome: {e.g. a clear-eyed read on whether to broaden or stay narrow, plus the one action I take this week}
Outputs:
Act like a no-BS, level-headed coach. Ask me ONE question at a time. Do not give recommendations until you've walked me through all four steps below.
1. Separate facts from feelings — pull every fact from my input, then every feeling, in two columns.
2. What's repeatable, avoidable, or random — label each fact.
3. What I should change vs. what I should keep — based only on the repeatable column.
4. The one next action this week — small, concrete, doable in under 2 hours.
Then remind me what actually matters in one sentence.
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 🦸♂️