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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Reese runs a small newsletter about thrift-flipping.
A thrift store is a shop that sells used clothes very cheaply.
She buys a good jacket there for a few dollars, cleans it up, and sells it online for a lot more.
She buys low and sells higher, and that profit is called a "flip."
She loves hunting for these cheap, hidden deals.
What she hates is sitting down later to write about them.
⛳️ Problem:
Every Sunday, Reese sits down to write that week's issue, and she wants it to be perfect.
So she writes a few lines, decides they aren't good enough, deletes them, and starts again.
Most weeks, hours go by and she still sends nothing.
Her struggle:
She wants every issue to be perfect, so she never feels ready to hit send.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Documentarian
Back in 1998, a young man named Gary Vaynerchuk took over his family's wine shop in New Jersey.
The shop sold a few million dollars of wine a year. It was steady, but nothing special.
He had no big ad budget, no famous name, and no team to help him.
What he had was a real love of wine, and a lot to say about it.
So in 2006, he put a cheap video camera in the back of the shop.
Almost every day, he poured a few wines,
tasted them on camera,
and talked about them like a normal person.
There was no script and no fancy set.
He swirled the glass, made a joke, and just said what each wine really tasted like.
He wasn't trying to make it perfect — he was simply showing people what he already did every day.
Get this — people loved it.
They couldn't stop watching this regular guy talk about wine.
The show ran for five years, all the way to a thousand episodes.
Little by little, it grew the family shop from a few million dollars a year to about $60 million.
Later, he used that same audience to start a marketing company, VaynerMedia, that made $100 million.
He put the whole lesson in three words: document, don't create.
That just means: don't hide and try to make something perfect.
Just record the real thing while you do it.
🚗 So Reese tried it her way.
Remember Reese and her thrift-flipping newsletter?
Every Sunday she deleted her drafts and sent nothing at all.
So she decided to stop chasing the perfect issue, and just document her week instead.
Spoiler: this time she actually hit send.
The next Saturday, instead of sitting at her laptop, she brought her phone to the thrift store.
She turned the camera on as she walked in, and filmed herself looking through the racks of clothes.
She found a nice wool coat for four dollars, held it up, and showed her readers the inside of it.
She told them why it was still good quality, and how she could clean it up and sell it for much more.
Funny thing is — she kept the mistakes in the video too.
One coat had a stain she only spotted once the camera was rolling.
One jacket looked great on the rack, but up close the zipper was broken.
That evening, she didn't write anything new.
She just took the words she had already said out loud, tidied them up, and sent them out.
It took about ten minutes, and it became the most-opened email she had ever sent.
Ta-da — her best-read issue yet, straight from her real day.
🧸 Don't wait for perfect. Just show your readers your journey — messy parts and all.
The prompt below turns your real workday into a finished newsletter issue.
You just tell it what you actually did this week.
🏄♀️ 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:
What I actually did this week on my topic (dump the raw notes — the tasks, the wins, the parts that went wrong, even rough fragments):
{e.g. found a faded $3 denim jacket at the thrift store, tried to fix the torn seam and got it wrong, the dye I used ran the first time, redid it and it finally looked new}
My topic (what my newsletter is about):
{e.g. thrift-flipping — finding cheap secondhand clothes and making them look new}
For Audience: {e.g. people who want to dress well while spending almost nothing}
For Outcome: {e.g. a finished newsletter issue that documents my real process this week, flaws and all}
Outputs:
1. The story — my week's work told as an honest, step-by-step journey, including the parts that flopped.
2. The messy middle — the 2-3 mistakes or redos that make it real and teachable.
3. The takeaway — the one plain lesson a reader can use on their own next time.
4. The issue — a full newsletter draft I can send tonight, no extra polish needed.
Then name the ONE part I was tempted to hide because it felt embarrassing — and put it back in.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'finding high-potent AI lazy automations so you work less and enjoy life' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️