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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🏃 The boy who jumped the wrong way
Dick Fosbury went over the bar backwards, head first, shoulders across before his feet.
To anyone watching it looked like a person falling into a mattress.
Every jumper in the world at the time went over face down, swinging one leg and then the other across the bar.
That was the technique, and it had barely changed in fifty years.
Dick was a teenager in Oregon and he was mediocre at it.
He didn't invent the flop because he was clever.
He invented it because he was losing, and going over face down was never going to make him good enough.
His coaches told him to stop.
When he reached the Olympics they told him plainly that he'd never get anywhere doing it.
Ouch.
Wait for it — at Mexico City in 1968 he cleared 2.24 meters, an Olympic record, and won gold.
He was the only person at those Games jumping that way.
Four years later, at the next Olympics, twenty-eight of the forty high jumpers in the field were doing it too.
Twenty-eight of forty.
He never beat the world at the old technique.
He was never going to.
He went over the bar the other way instead.
⛳️ The problem
Dick stopped copying a technique everyone had spent fifty years perfecting.
But most weeks, we make a slightly better version of what the biggest account in our niche already posts.
We're gonna lose that race, because they started first.
💄 The blog that became the brand
Emily Weiss got up before work to write a blog about what was actually on women's bathroom shelves.
She was a fashion assistant at Vogue at the time, and the year was 2010.
The blog was called Into The Gloss, and it wasn't a magazine about beauty products.
It was long interviews with women about what they really used, and why.
The big beauty companies then all did the same four things.
They sold through department-store counters.
They ran expensive campaigns with famous faces.
They decided what was coming next.
And they announced it downward, to customers.
Emily spent four years listening to what women said when nobody was selling to them.
So in 2014 she launched a beauty company that did the opposite of all of it.
Glossier sold online, with no department-store counter.
It put real customers in the ads instead of famous faces.
And it let the blog's readers say what to make next, then made exactly that.
Get this — it grew without a single traditional ad campaign or retail partner.
By 2018 it was doing $100 million a year, and in July 2021 an $80 million funding round valued it at $1.8 billion.
She did not out-spend the beauty giants.
She did the things the beauty giants had never thought to do.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Zag Move
Dick went over the bar backwards while everyone else went face down.
Emily sold beauty products with no counter and no famous face.
Neither of them tried to win the game everybody else was already good at.
They both found the one thing the whole field did the same way, and did the opposite of it on purpose.
So you stop competing where the leaders have already won.
You get a lane nobody has spent fifty years perfecting.
Go over backwards.
That's it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours 'bringing you cheat codes for 12x faster business success' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below lists what everybody in your niche does the same way, then finds the one
you can reverse — and tells you what it would cost you.
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.
- If you can browse, go and look at the accounts I name before answering. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My topic:
{e.g. career advice for data engineers}
The three or four biggest people in it:
{e.g. two ex-FAANG staff engineers and a recruiter, all posting daily on LinkedIn}
What they all do the same way — format, length, tone, who they address:
{e.g. long carousels, screenshots of offer letters, addressed to people trying to get hired at big tech}
What I know that does not fit that mold:
{e.g. most of my readers do not want FAANG, they want to stop being on call}
What I am not willing to do:
{e.g. post my salary, or make videos of my face}
For Audience: {e.g. data engineers six to ten years in, at ordinary companies, quietly tired}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The sameness list — everything the leaders do identically, separated into rules of the game and choices they merely all made.
2. The reversible one — which single choice I could invert, and what my version literally looks like on the page.
3. The first three pieces — titles and opening lines for the first three things I publish the new way.
4. Who leaves and who arrives — which readers I lose by doing this, and which ones show up who had nobody.
5. The wrong-looking part — what will feel like a mistake for the first two months, so I do not quit at week three.
Then name the ONE thing I have been copying because I assumed it was a rule.