Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Sam writes a weekly newsletter about making real pizza at home.
It started with a backyard pizza oven.
Making pizza became his weekend ritual.
He's sure a great pie is a Friday-night skill, not a chef's secret.
And his readers? They feel it too — delivery is sad, but homemade feels too hard.
⛳️ Problem:
Sam opens every issue talking about himself.
His oven, his dough journey, his ten years of trial and error.
By paragraph two, readers have drifted off.
It's a story about Sam. Ouch.
A year in, opens are sliding and almost nobody makes the recipe.
His problem: how to make readers care from the very first line.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Make the reader the hero
Picture a movie where the wise old wizard saves the day, not the kid.
You'd tune out fast, right?
Turns out your readers feel the same when you star in your own story.
That's what Donald Miller figured out.
He wrote Building a StoryBrand and grew it into a multi-million-dollar company.
His take: most messaging flops because you cast yourself as the hero.
But readers don't care about your story.
They care about theirs.
The fix? Make the reader the hero.
You're the guide who helps them win.
And get this — Miller ran it on his own company first.
He cut every line until the customer was clearly the hero, not him.
The message got simple.
Revenue grew fast for years.
🚗 The steps
🦸 Step 1 — Name what the reader wants.
Think of a friend asking you for directions.
You don't start with your life story.
You ask where they're trying to go.
Same here — start with what the reader wants, in their words.
Sam writes down his reader's real goal.
A crispy, blistered pizza on a Friday, way better than delivery.
That's the hero's goal.
The issue opens right there.
🧭 Step 2 — Position yourself as the guide.
Every hero has a guide who's already walked the road.
Yoda doesn't fight the war.
He shows Luke how.
Your job is the same — been there, learned it, here to help.
Sam cuts his ten-year origin story down to one line.
"I burned a hundred pizzas so you won't."
Empathy and proof, in eight words.
🗺️ Step 3 — Hand them the simple plan.
A good coach doesn't dump the whole playbook on you.
They give you three plays you can run tonight.
Give your hero that — a clear next step, not the full memoir.
Sam ends with the plan, not his backstory.
"Tonight: hot oven, thin dough, less sauce."
The reader knows exactly what to do next.
The prompt below rewrites your message with the reader as the hero.
You just tell it what your reader wants and what you help them do.
🧸 Reader as hero + you as guide = a message people actually act on.
🏄♀️ 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 as is, your AI sidekick will use the example values and will give 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 my reader actually wants (their desire, in their words — the win they're chasing):
{e.g. a crispy, blistered homemade pizza on a Friday that beats delivery}
The bio/story I keep leading with (the about-me stuff I open with that's really about me):
{e.g. my pizza oven, my ten-year dough journey, all my trial and error}
The simple plan I can hand them (the 3 moves that get them their win):
{e.g. hot oven, thin dough, less sauce}
For Audience: {e.g. home cooks who are tired of bad delivery and crave a real pizza they made themselves}
For Outcome: {e.g. a rewritten opening + a clear plan that makes the reader, not me, the hero}
Outputs:
1. The hero's goal — one line naming what my reader wants, in their words, that I can open with.
2. My guide line — a single empathy-plus-proof sentence (max ~12 words) that replaces my long origin story.
3. The simple plan — the 3 clear steps I hand the reader toward their win. Plain verbs.
4. The rewritten opening — the first 3-4 lines of my next issue, reframed so the reader is the hero and I'm the guide.
Then point out the ONE place I'm still making it about me, and how to flip it.
One reader's goal named up front.
One bio shrunk to a single guide line.
One clear plan the reader can act on tonight.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'finding high-potent AI lazy automations so you work less and enjoy life' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️