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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🙋♀️ Maya’s unsent issue
Maya is a project manager who writes a newsletter on the side.
Her first issue has been finished for six weeks, and she still hasn’t sent it.
Every Sunday she opens it, changes three sentences, and closes it again.
Her struggle:
There’s no day it has to go out, so it never goes out.
That Sunday, a friend sends her the true story of a man who wasn’t ready either,
but filmed himself tasting wine in the back of his family’s shop anyway,
and grew it into a $60 million business.
Believe it or not, it all started with one camera.
🍷 The camera in the back of the shop
Gary Vaynerchuk set up a camera in the back of his family’s wine shop and started recording himself tasting wine.
No script.
No crew.
No studio.
The shop was in Springfield, New Jersey, the year was 2006, and the show was called Wine Library TV.
Most people call him Gary Vee now.
He was born in Belarus, and his family came to America as refugees when he was three.
He’d been working in that shop since he was fourteen, bagging ice for two dollars an hour.
Back then it was called Shopper’s Discount Liquors, and it was his father’s.
After college, in 1998, he took over the store.
He renamed it Wine Library,
and made it one of the first stores in the country to sell wine online.
By 2006, he was sure online video was going to be a big thing.
The first episode went up on February 21, 2006.
The early episodes are rough.
The lighting is bad, he rambles, and he cuts himself off.
He wears New York Jets jerseys on camera, and he spits the wine into an NFL bucket.
Watch one today and you wouldn’t predict any of what came next.
He put them out anyway, and then he did it again the next day.
Get this — he did that every single day for five years.
That first July, around episode 58, he stopped trying to sound formal,
and just talked like himself.
A thousand episodes in all.
The last one went out in August 2011.
At its peak, as many as eighty thousand people watched every day,
and it got him onto TV talk shows, including Ellen DeGeneres’s and Conan O’Brien’s.
He was not waiting to be good on camera.
The next morning came whether he was ready or not, and he filmed anyway.
And...
He grew his family wine shop from $4 million a year to $60 million a year.
Not a typo.
He did not get good and then start.
He started, and got good on the way.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ On Time Beats Perfect
Gary filmed a new episode every morning, whether he felt ready or not.
This tactic is called On Time Beats Perfect.
You pick a fixed time, and whatever exists when it comes is what goes out.
He wasn’t braver than us.
He filmed because it was morning, not because he felt ready.
Being ready was never the question.
So the question stops being “is this good enough yet” and becomes “ready or not, let’s go today”.
You stop making one more fix that nobody asked for.
And the issue actually goes out.
🛠️ Maya’s turn
Remember Maya, and the finished issue she hasn’t sent in six weeks?
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what she’s been putting off.
Her AI sidekick says:
Pick Sunday at 7 p.m., and send an issue at that time every week.
At 7:02 that Sunday, the issue goes out.
It isn’t perfect.
It’s on time.
🌅 Twelve Sundays later
Maya hasn’t missed a single Sunday.
A hundred and forty people read her newsletter now,
and eleven of them have replied to say it helped.
The one that sat unsent for six weeks turned out to be issue one of twelve.
Your finished issue doesn’t need one more fix.
It needs a fixed day to go out.
Hit send, ready or not.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below picks a fixed day to publish, so being ready stops mattering.
You just tell it what you have been putting off.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you’ve been getting ready to publish
- How long it’s been, and what already exists, however rough.
- e.g. the first issue of my newsletter for new team leads, six weeks now, one finished issue and a page of notesWhat you keep telling yourself you need to fix first
- e.g. it needs a proper welcome email and a better nameWhen you could publish every week, without rearranging your life
- e.g. Sunday evening, after the kids are down
🚀 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 drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, 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 new team leads who were never taught how to manage people.
- 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 see my calendar directly, find a repeating slot I will actually keep. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
What I have been getting ready to publish, how long it has been, and what already exists, however rough:
{e.g. the first issue of my newsletter for new team leads, six weeks now, one finished issue and a page of notes}
What I keep telling myself I need to fix before it can go out:
{e.g. it needs a proper welcome email and a better name}
When I could realistically publish, every week, without rearranging my life:
{e.g. Sunday evening, after the kids are down}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My publish slot — the exact day and time, and what I tell people so it is public.
2. What goes out first — built only from what already exists, nothing new invented.
3. The fixes I am dropping — which of my "must fix first" items genuinely do not matter yet, and why.
4. My on-time rule — one sentence I can reread when I want to postpone.
5. The next four — what fills the following four slots, so the schedule is not scary.
Then name the ONE thing I have been waiting to make perfect, and what I will send instead this week.