Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Piper writes a weekly newsletter about easy cocktails and mocktails at home.
She started it for people who want a great drink, minus the whole bar cart.
She's sure a good drink is three ingredients and a little confidence.
That's what Piper's readers want — fancy drinks, zero fuss.
⛳️ Problem:
Piper's newsletter looks like every other drinks newsletter out there.
Same trendy recipes, same neon photos, same influencer tone.
So she copies what's working for the big accounts — and sinks deeper into the crowd. That one hurts.
Her struggle:
She copies the big accounts, so she blends into an inbox full of identical drink emails.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Zag Move
Picture a street where every shop sells the same red umbrella.
You walk past all of them without a glance.
Then one shop hangs a bright yellow one — and your eyes go straight to it.
Wild, right? That's exactly what Emily Weiss understood.
She turned her beauty blog into Glossier, a company valued around $1.8 billion.
And she did it by doing the opposite of the big beauty brands.
While the big brands sold through department-store counters and glossy celebrity ads, she went the other way.
She built an audience first, on her blog, then launched products her readers helped design.
Get this — one of her hit cleansers came straight out of a comment thread asking what people actually wanted.
Copying the leaders makes you one more red umbrella in the pile.
Do the deliberate opposite, and you become the yellow one everybody notices.
Spoiler: the yellow one wins.
🚗 So Piper tried it her way.
Back to Piper and her cocktails-and-mocktails newsletter.
She'd been copying the big drink accounts, and blending right in.
So she looked for the opposite of what they all did.
Every other account chased trendy, photogenic, complicated cocktails.
So she zagged: only drinks with three ingredients or fewer, shot on a plain kitchen counter.
No neon, no bar cart, no influencer gloss — just "fancy drinks anyone can actually make tonight."
That was the opposite of the whole crowd, and it finally stood out.
Her first "3-ingredient" issue got forwarded around, and new readers said "finally, one I can use."
Bingo.
She didn't win by making a better version of the same thing.
She won the moment she stopped copying and did the deliberate opposite.
🧸 Copying the crowd makes you invisible. Do the deliberate opposite, and you're the one they see.
The prompt below finds the deliberate opposite of what everyone in your niche does.
You just tell it your topic and what the crowd all does the same way.
🏄♀️ 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:
My topic (what my newsletter or channel is about):
{e.g. easy cocktails and mocktails to make at home}
What everyone in my niche does the same way (the tone, look, and format the whole crowd copies):
{e.g. trendy complicated recipes, neon photos, influencer-y hype}
Who I'm really for (the reader the crowd is ignoring or overwhelming):
{e.g. normal people who want one good drink without a full bar cart}
For Outcome: {e.g. a clear "zag" — the deliberate opposite that makes me stand out}
Outputs:
1. The crowd's playbook — the sameness in my niche, named plainly, so I can see what to break from.
2. Five possible zags — five deliberate opposites I could take (format, tone, length, look, promise), each one against the grain.
3. My sharpest zag — the single strongest opposite, with one line on why it stands out and who it pulls in.
4. My zag in one line — a positioning sentence I can put at the top of my newsletter so the difference is instant.
Then name the ONE "everybody does it" habit I should drop, because it's exactly what's making me invisible.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️