Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Sam’s course nobody has seen
Sam is an operations manager who writes a newsletter on simple systems for small-business owners.
He’s four months into building an online course for his readers,
and nobody outside his house has seen a minute of it.
He could show a rough version, but showing an unfinished course feels like lying to people.
🧩 His struggle:
He builds the whole course before anyone sees it, so he could spend months on something nobody wants.
He’s reading a newsletter a friend sent him, and it tells the real story of a founder
whose product also wasn’t finished yet,
and who still had 70,000 people sign up for it overnight.
Seventy thousand strangers, and not one of them had tried it.
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📦 The product that was a video first
Drew Houston was building Dropbox, a program that didn’t exist yet.
He made a three-minute video of it anyway.
Dropbox was hard to explain, and even harder to show.
It keeps the same files on all your computers, so a file you add on one shows up on the others.
Say that out loud and it sounds like nothing.
Worse, to show it working you need two computers, an internet connection, and someone patient enough to watch files appear.
The product also wasn’t finished.
So he made the video instead.
The video recorded his screen and showed what using Dropbox would feel like.
He dropped a file into one computer, and it appeared on another.
He posted the video to Hacker News, a tech-industry forum.
Get this — the waiting list for Dropbox went from 5,000 people to 75,000 overnight.
Not one of those people had used the product, because there wasn’t much of a product to use.
Turns out those 70,000 new sign-ups told Drew that people wanted Dropbox.
He didn’t need a working product to find out whether anyone wanted Dropbox — he just needed people to see how it worked.
Dropbox got built.
Drew is now worth over $2 billion.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Preview
Drew made a video of Dropbox before Dropbox was built, and 70,000 new people signed up overnight.
What Drew did has a name: The Preview.
You show people the finished thing before you build it, and let their response decide whether you build it at all.
Drew wasn’t faking the demonstration.
He really did build Dropbox afterwards.
What was missing was proof that people wanted what he was building,
and people watching the video and signing up gave him that proof.
So you show people what your newsletter, course, or product will do before you build it,
and find out whether anybody wants it while it’s still cheap to change your mind.
Seventy thousand people joined the waiting list in one night, before Drew finished building Dropbox.
Building got cheap; finding out if anybody wants it didn’t.
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🛠️ Sam’s turn
Now, back to Sam, who has spent four months building a course nobody outside his house has seen.
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what the course will teach.
His AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
Record ten minutes of you fixing one reader’s messy system, and send it to your readers.
Build the rest of the course only if they ask for it.
He records it on Saturday, fixing one reader’s messy booking spreadsheet on screen.
On Sunday, it goes out to his readers, with one question at the bottom: do you want the full course?
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🌅 Six weeks later
Forty-two readers replied yes to that one video.
Sam now builds the course one lesson at a time,
and their replies tell him what the next lesson should be.
You might be building something in private right now that nobody has seen.
Show people what your product will do before you build it.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘helping you build profitable businesses 25x faster’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below designs the preview of the thing you have not built, and the exact signal that means build it.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you’re planning to build, and how long it would take to build properly
- e.g. a paid course on setting up simple systems for a small business, three months of evenings, realistically fiveThe one moment that shows it’s useful, and what you could show in ten minutes without building any of it
- The moment somebody would think “that’s useful.”
- e.g. a messy booking spreadsheet rebuilt side by side into a simple weekly system, which I could show on one real example in a short videoWhere the people who would care already spend their time
- e.g. two Facebook groups for small-business owners, and my own newsletter
🚀 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 notes, 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 small-business owners who want simple systems for running their business.
- 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 preview must be honest. It shows what the finished thing will do, and it never claims the thing already exists.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I am planning to build, and how long it would take me to build properly:
{e.g. a paid course on setting up simple systems for a small business, three months of evenings, realistically five}
The single moment where somebody would think that is useful, and what I could show in ten minutes without building any of it:
{e.g. a messy booking spreadsheet rebuilt side by side into a simple weekly system, which I could show on one real example in a short video}
Where the people who would care already are:
{e.g. two Facebook groups for small-business owners, and my own newsletter}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The moment — the single thing to show, chosen because it carries the whole promise on its own.
2. The preview — exactly what to make this week, in the cheapest honest form, described shot by shot or line by line.
3. What I say — the words that go with it, making clear this does not exist yet and asking for the one signal I need.
4. The signal — the specific number or response that means build it, decided BEFORE I show anybody, so I cannot move the line afterwards.
5. What a no looks like — the response that means do not build it, and what I do instead.
Then tell me the day to publish the preview, and where.