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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♂️ Nate’s slightly better podcast
Nate is a software engineer who runs a podcast for people learning to code after thirty.
His podcast is a slightly better version of the biggest podcast in his niche.
Same format, same kind of guests, same length, just a little tighter.
Every week, listeners pick the bigger show, because it started five years before his.
His struggle:
He’s copying the leader, so the best he can ever be is second.
Then his sister, who loves makeup, tells him the true story of a woman
who also had to compete with much bigger names,
and built a brand worth $1.8 billion.
Doing the opposite of the giants sounds risky, right?
💄 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.
Then they told customers what to buy.
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.
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
Emily sold beauty products with no counter and no famous face.
What Emily did has a name: The Zag Move.
She didn’t try to beat the big companies at what they were already good at.
She looked at what the whole field did the same way, and did the opposite on purpose.
So you stop competing where the leaders have already won.
You find what everyone else does the same way,
and do the opposite.
🛠️ Nate’s turn
Remember Nate, and his podcast that’s a slightly better copy of the biggest show in his niche?
That night, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and tells it what the big shows in his niche all do the same way.
The reply from his AI sidekick is short:
Every big show in your niche interviews famous engineers, so interview people who got their first coding job after thirty.
He cancels the guest he’d booked for next week.
Then he messages a friend who started coding at thirty-four,
and got her first job last spring.
🌅 Four months later
Nate’s show doesn’t sound like anyone else’s now.
Every guest started coding after thirty,
and listeners write in to ask if they can be the next one.
You don’t have to be better than the biggest name in your niche.
Find what the big names all do the same way, and do the opposite.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘bringing you cheat codes for 25x faster business success’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ 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.
🧰 What you’ll need
Your topic, and the three or four biggest shows or people in it
- e.g. learning to code after thirty, and two former big-tech engineers and a coding-bootcamp founder who all publish weeklyWhat they all do the same way
- Their format, length, tone, and who they talk to.
- e.g. hour-long interviews with famous engineers, addressed to people in their twenties trying to get hired at big techWhat you know that is different from what they all do, and what you are not willing to do
- e.g. most of my listeners do not want big tech, they want their first coding job at any company, and I will not discuss my salary
🚀 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 episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, 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 people learning to code after thirty, at night, around a full-time job.
- 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.
- If you can browse, go and look at the shows and people I name before answering. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
My topic, and the three or four biggest shows or people in it:
{e.g. learning to code after thirty, and two former big-tech engineers and a coding-bootcamp founder who all publish weekly}
What they all do the same way — format, length, tone, who they address:
{e.g. hour-long interviews with famous engineers, addressed to people in their twenties trying to get hired at big tech}
What I know that is different from what they all do, and what I am not willing to do:
{e.g. most of my listeners do not want big tech, they want their first coding job at any company, and I will not discuss my salary}
======================== 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.